The composition of structured content from modular blocks, balancing the fluidity of prose with the precision of structured data.
Adding blocks
Whichever way it’s triggered, the menu opens right where the current actor’s focus is. There’s no need to say where, so picking a block and placing it are one gesture.
Floating menu
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Slash commands
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Passing to LLM
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References
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Contextual actions
Select block(s) or text spans and invoke LLM from contextual menu.
Co-editing & attribution
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To-do
This page currently compresses a broader territory. A possible split:
- What stays here, the page’s own core: composition from uniform, freely recombinable units. The block’s sameness is what makes juxtaposition, nesting, and rearrangement cheap — anything can sit beside, inside, or above anything, and rearranging commits to nothing. This fluidity is the move; name the pattern from it.
- Incremental formalisation — the move enacting formality: content carries only as much structure as currently serves, gaining or shedding it in place without re-entry. The system recognises implicit structure and offers it; the actor accepts, defers, or ignores — structure stays optional and reversible, not a ladder to climb. Type-switching over persistent data (prose ↔ table ↔ board) is its block-editor instance.
- Block reference / transclusion — the seed behind the References section above. Its centre is knowable multiplicity — visible provenance and ripple scope — not syncing mechanics.
- A substrate / computational medium foundation — the workspace-as-document design material that this page’s move instantiates.
- Rename this page by its move when decomposing: “block-based” is occupied by the visual-programming corpus, so the head term should change; the component doc keeps the name.
- Scope boundary: this page is flow-scoped (blocks in sequence, caret as anchor). Canvas composition (units in space, pointer as anchor) shares the genus — free recombination, position-as-operand, structure recognised from arrangement (spatial hypertext’s home turf) — but carries implicit structure differently (metric adjacency vs ordinal) and neighbours pan-and-zoom / semantic-zoom / focus-and-context. Decide sibling-vs-variant at decomposition time.
Consequences
- each block carries only as much structure as currently serves it, gained or shed in place, so formalising is local and reversible instead of a commitment made before the work starts
- the block is now the unit of everything the surface does — selecting, referencing, moving, commenting — so anything that addresses content addresses blocks, whether or not that matches how the actor thinks of what they wrote
- every position in the document is a place where anything could go next, which puts the weight on saying what without having to say where
Related patterns
Enables
- Selection — the surface in which content selection happens
Hosts
- AI completion — the block editor is a natural container for AI completion
Enacts
- Formality — incremental formalisation — content carries only as much structure as currently serves, gained or shed in place, optional and reversible
Related
- Editing in place — the block editor assumes this move — reading and changing happen on the same blocks, with no separate state for either
Enabled by
- Command menu — picking a block and placing it; summoned at the current position