I know how we can write a basic variant of remarks in one, self-contained HTML-file
oleks opened this issue · 2 comments
That means, the logic will be written in JavaScript, but there isn't much logic to remarks, especially when little parsing logic is needed due to the availability of a DOM.
The benefit would be 0-entry for new TA's, and it will be trivial to send out HTML-versions to students or external examiners. The down-side is that there won't be a file structure to separate out concerns and avoid git merge conflicts if several TA's grade the same submission.
Let's talk if you are interested, else I will hack something up soon enough.
I have now used html-remarks for a single course and grown wiser. (Note, I did not have TAs.) html-remarks was a fairly nice, zero-install remarks UI for TA tasks (marking), but it was a poor teacher UI. For the students it could have been made prettier..
Today, I think that remarks as a DSL holds greater utility: remarks as a DSL could have several front-ends, just as it today has several export formats.
The DSL is explicitly designed to be git-friendly, while HTML and DOM manipulations were not. They can be hacked to be so, but this is riding a wave of hype, rather than having a neat, long-lasting solution. Riding this wave is OK to increase adoption, but it should probably not be the fundamental architecture of remarks.
Other than the UI benefits, html-remarks could have had the benefit that TAs (or students?) could contribute knowing only HTML, CSS, and TypeScript. Should remarks get an HTML+CSS+TypeScript front-end and export-format, they would probably still be able to do so! Furthermore, having a DSL for manipulating the remarks DSL, is probably better in the long-run too.