Sail and Udon's place on Urbit

[matildepark]

I've been thinking a bit on how to document Sail and Udon in the present era -- at the time of the document's writing, Urbit <= 0.7.4, the intended purpose seemed like it was to easily create front-end interfaces without too much JS, by embedding Hoon to very directly communicate with ships (using an urb.js library that patched the ship-side authentication).

To the best of my present knowledge it's not trivial to just arbitrarily put up pages, and we seem to be repurposing Udon as the de facto language for Landscape's notetaking and publishing syntax. It's available as a mark, yeah, but it's not as easy to use it anymore.

Should the docs reflect this repurposing?

If not, then I'd imagine it would have to be rewritten to reflect how to attach a site to an endpoint with new Eyre (an independent issue at urbit/urbit.org#928) and proceeding from there. It would mean that the complexity of putting up an Udon website with multiple pages is a touch below the egg timer now. This only matters because it means it's no longer early onboarding material.

But if so, then it can dispose of all the /web mentions from the previous era and treat it as a very capable Markdown-style syntax. A massively simplified article, that would essentially bury the cool functionality it offers because of its new placement in the overall front-end ... ecosystem ... thing.

I'm writing this issue partly to bring a touch of attention to the transient state of Sail and Udon but also to seek some clarity on how it's seen going forward. A lot's changed on the front-end ... front. (Front-end isn't a catchy word.)

[rmariani]

The docs should reflect this repurposing. I'll add it to the triage-list of things to retool.

[rmariani]

For now, I am going to mothball the "blog" and "static site" sections of the document. It's a huge doc anyway, so I think this is the obvious move.