Anything that completely and unambiguously describes all cases of knot tying is bound to be extremely technical and arcane.
Arcane is an interesting word.
Dict
Arcane known or understood by very few; mysterious; secret; obscure; requiring secret or mysterious knowledge.
When I first applied for apprenticeship to the world of Knot Tyers, I was introduced to the words of the Guild - Bend, Bight, SPart, WorkingPart etc. (known or understood by very few; mysterious; secret; obscure; requiring secret or mysterious knowledge.) I think we are struggling because the knotting world is already 'Arcane' - and worse - it is inconsistent. Ashley defines a Bight as the centre part of a rope or a curve or arc in the rope, while many will take the term to mean an open loop (ABOK #31) or a closed loop (ABOK #32). Layer on top of this the diversity of terminologies stemming from different trades and you have the near useless lexicon with which we struggle (and generally fail) to communicate today. These words have worked for centuries because in the day of the Apprentice, the fundamental means of transferring knowledge was demonstration. Words were to help recall, but the essence of knowledge transfer was done at the hand of the Master by visual example and demonstration.
Today, we do not sit at the Masters side as they demonstrate their knowledge. We sit on opposite sides of the globe and struggle to use the words in isolation. It should come as no surprise that these
archaic words fail us, it should not be too much of a surprise to learn that these words MUST fail us - they were never designed to be the primary means of teaching (knowledge transfer) and they fail the task miserably.
BUT - today, we share more knowledge around the world in a second, than would have been shared in a lifetime when our knotting lexicon was created, and it is nearly all done in words. Special words, designed to transfer knowledge to others around the globe, without fear of ambiguity. These words are the language of HTML and XML and you may well choose to describe them as
"extremely technical and arcane". In a small way you would be right, but you would be much more correct to describe them as "precise and simple". You could learn to write (and read) a simple html page in under an hour, in contrast, how long would it take you to learn the simplest of spoken languages with its book sized dictionary? The Internet has taught us that to exchange information unambiguously, we need fewer words, not more and a simple syntax that does not change meanings with the experience and perspective of the reader. The only downside of this is that it takes a lot of simple descriptions to describe something which is complex, but that is a tiny price to pay for a communication system which actually works.
Although HTML and XML are designed to be machine readable - i.e. a computer can 'read' them and create on the screen the information intended - XML also has the fundamental prerequisite that it be human readable (and of course, writeable) it might be tedious in its simplicity, but it is 100% accurate in its reproducibility and 0% ambiguous in its interpretation and that surely is what we need to start off with in our struggle to create a knotting lexicon for the 21st centuary.
What I'd love to be able to do is come up with a computer representation system that spans Celtic knot drafting (several of which already exist), turk's head drafting (ask the system for an AxB turk's head and get the grid, there's at least 1 or 2 of these, right?) as well as, say, AxB mystic knots or A over B flower knots or AxB bao knots or ... etc.
It's possible that a representation system and a construction description methodology can be generated by the IGKT big brains, academics and theorists, but it also might be quicker and easier to do it on a case by case basis (plug-ins!): such as expandable rectangular turk's heads, expandable cruciform turk's heads, solid convex mat shapes, etc.
I think that the goals you expound for yourself are way, way ahead of the 'simple' knot description language I am seeking - on the scale of 'walk before you run' you are probably just boarding the Mars Express!! However, when we have a language that can reliably describe a simple knot, then we are only a step away from describing complex or compound knots. Then in turn we are only a step away from describing tiles or to use your phrase 'plug-ins' and that in turn is only a step away from being able to assemble the highly complex constructions you are used to working with every day.
Every great journey starts with the first step, and perhaps if we can build on Mel's suggestions of basing our lexicon on XML, then maybe we have taken our first few faltering steps. To proceed, some of us are going to have to learn a little XML and create and define a handful of terms that will allow us to 'write down a knot'. We will then have to apply this to a selected handful of benchmark knots to uncover 'special' cases, and develop methods to handle them. Key to this phase will be uncovering all the questions like - "How do I handle objects included in the knot like - eyes, spars etc.?" and "How do I annotate a helical coil?". While some of us have our noses proverbially at the coal face, we may well need others (maybe Mel?) looking at the bigger picture in terms of how we go about integrating our little bit of XML with the mainstream and how we go about creating an XML parser that can render our descriptions into glorious 3D in our browsers, and maybe even the reverse - taking our sketches or pictures and turning them into XML for us?
It will be quite a journey, but I am confident it can be done and equally certain that we need it now we no longer have apprenticeships to Master Knotters. We will of course need a place to collect the ideas and developments together and as ever there is a wiki just waiting to oblige at
http://knot-html.pbwiki.com/ Any comments, corrections ideas etc can be entered using the password igkt backed up with discussion through the forum. If you have already spotted some problems/hurdles then jot them down on the problems page at
http://knot-html.pbwiki.com/Problems%20and%20Challenges someone is bound to have ideas how to approach them.
All Aboard for the Mars Express ??