Predicates, or: a view should have a URL

`plain` is always one click away, and it is the default.

A view is a lens, not a replacement.

That is a real loss and it is the right trade.

So fenced code is skipped at tokenisation, and any view other than `plain` renders the token stream rather than the document structure: no headings, no lists.

There is no meaningful cadence of a table, and `?view=rsvp` over a code listing is a punishment rather than a reading mode.

Predicates operate on words.

The honest limitation

Editors have read drafts backwards for a century, because momentum hides bad steps, and reading against the grain removes the momentum.

**reverse** puts the last sentence first.

**concordance** alphabetises every content word with its neighbours the book as its own index.

Worth having for what they actually are.

The lexicons tag word forms out of context: negation is not modelled, so "not terrible" reads as terrible, and irony is entirely invisible to them.

Both are descriptions of *vocabulary*, not readings of tone.

**emotion** lights up one emotion at a time `?emotion=fear` because eight colours of scattered words are indistinguishable to a colour-blind reader, and "where is the fear in this" is the better question anyway.

**sentiment** colours the words a valence lexicon rates.

Typos light up too, which is a feature I did not plan.

One finds what you do not repeat, the other finds where you reached outside ordinary English.

A word used once here burns in hapax even if it is "house"; a word repeated twenty times still burns in rare if it is "sublimate".

**rare** weights by rarity in English at large instead the counterpart, and routinely disagreeing.

Your tics become visible.

Words used once burn; words used constantly fade.

**hapax** weights each word by how rare it is *within this document*.

A short sentence of Latinate abstractions scores worse than a long plain one; only one of the two views will tell you.

**grade** draws the same bars for reading *ease* rather than length, and the two disagree more than you would expect.

Prose that is all one length reads as flat, and you cannot see that while reading it.

**cadence** discards the words entirely and draws sentence lengths.

The rest are analytic, and they are the ones that only make sense once a view is addressable:

This is a place to publish and to look at what you published, not to practise reading it, and a mode that quizzes you was always answering a question nobody had asked on this page.

They are gone.

Read's *drills* used to be here too memorize, skeleton, spine.

Read is where the idea that a text has more than one arrival came from, and its dwell model (the pauses at sentence ends are the whole trick) is reproduced here rather than re-invented.

Four are ports of the reading modes at [read.mino.mobi](https://read.mino.mobi) bionic, RSVP, crawl, plain.

The twelve

And because they are pure, the same code runs at the edge, in the browser, and in `cargo test`, so the preview cannot disagree with the page.

Because they are total, there is no view that fails on some document; the empty post renders as the empty view rather than a 500.

Because they are pure and total, they compose `?view=rare+bionic` runs one and then the other, and the result is still just cells.

That definition is doing work.

It says one true thing about the words.

A pure function from a token stream to a list of cells.

What a predicate is

A mode that lives in the URL is just a document.

A mode that lives in a toolbar is invisible to a crawler, to a screen reader that has already flattened the page, and to a model fetching the URL.

That only works if the server renders it.

So is "here is the shape of it, before you read a word": `?view=cadence` renders one bar per sentence and nothing else, and you can tell a staccato rant from a patient essay at a glance.

"Here is my essay with the function words removed" is a thing I can now say with a link.

`example.com/post/` and `example.com/post/?view=cadence` are two different readings of the same text, and I can send you the second one.

The difference

Make it a property of the *document* instead give it a URL and it stops being a preference and starts being an argument.

The mode is a property of your session.

You pick one from a toolbar, it changes how the text arrives, and when you leave the page the mode goes with you.

Speed readers have modes.