I started volunteering at an elementary school this year, helping kids learning to read. I'm not an elementary school teacher (and no amount of university teaching would save me) but luckily anyone who can read can help; it's all about patience and the simple reality of being present for a child. One of the textbooks typesets syllables in different colors to help the inexperienced readers. This simple typograhic tool reminded me of a problem I've been thinking about for a while now: enabling users on the web to adjust the granularity of textual descriptions.
This will possibly be another piece that will get updates in the future. Actually, I hope not but we'll see. This, above all, is for me. For me to gather my thoughts one (hopefully) last time. For me to deal with stupid garbage which has accumulated over the years. As for you, dear reader, I don't know if this is for you. I didn't write it for the handful of experts in this area; maybe for someone like my former self, back when I started writing mathematics on the web. Maybe for someone who knows the web and wonders what all that fuss with equations is always about. In any case here's a fair warning: I'm not going into every detail so if I lose you along the way, remember these first few lines and go do something more fun, it's fine. Just don't be that guy (and it's invariably a guy) complaining about free stuff on the internet.
July 2022. I started this piece well over three years ago (some time before June 2019 in any case). As it came along grew out of proportion, I had tried turning it into three pieces but never got far enough to start publishing it. Then I tried to recombine them (some time in 2020?) in the hopes of finally pushing them out but didn't finish the last few pieces. Then 2021 was worse than 2020 and now it's 2022. So I'm thinking I will make this a new kind of piece around here: a partially complete piece of writing that may (or more likely: may not) get edits and updates. Let's jump in then.