Naming What Prose Is Doing

An End-to-End Demonstration of the Informative Authoring Semantics Profile

IASP Reference Demonstration

Naming What Prose Is Doing

An End-to-End Demonstration of the Informative Authoring Semantics Profile (v0.1.0)

Complex writing benefits from having names for complexity.

— Informative Authoring Semantics Profile, Core Specification

This short essay demonstrates the Informative Authoring Semantics Profile (IASP) across every target supported by iasp-mcp: standalone HTML, XeLaTeX PDF (screen and print), EPUB 3, and Ghost Markdown. Each semantic wrapper names what a passage is doing in the argument rather than how a particular format encodes it.

1. Intent Before Formatting

When authors revise a long-form manuscript or essay, their marginalia rarely speak in the language of HTML tags or LaTeX environments. Instead, an author asks: Is this paragraph part of the spine of the chapter, or is it a parallel digression? Is this aside offering a concrete example, stating a methodological premise, or warning against an easy misreading?

IASP separates those two questions into orthogonal axes that compose with a dot (delivery.modifier):

  1. Axis A — Delivery Roles (chapter, section, bridge, sidebar, callout, note, footnote, epigraph, appendix) describe how a passage sits relative to the main narrative flow.
  2. Axis B — Modifiers (thesis, counterpoint, example, definition, insight, warning, methodology, scope, synthesis, breadcrumb, closing, and others) describe the intellectual move, expository support, or epistemic stance the passage contributes.

Compositional Intent (delivery.modifier): A two-part (or multi-part) Pandoc class token where the leftmost term names the delivery role and subsequent terms qualify intent. Writing note.insight does not mean “an insight is a subtype of note”; it means “this ancillary note functions as an insight at this point in the text.”1

Structural markup vs. authoring intent: EPUB Structural Semantics (epub:type="aside") and DPUB-ARIA (role="doc-example") name document structure for assistive technologies and reading systems. IASP names the author’s rhetorical and epistemic intent first, then lets the Lua filter (iasp-semantics.lua) project that intent onto epub:type, ARIA roles, LaTeX mdframed environments, and Ghost HTML cards.

2. Parallel Tracks, Examples, and Included Fragments

Not every supporting illustration belongs in the main column of an argument. A sidebar signals that a reader can pause for context or skip ahead without losing the thread. Composing sidebar with example or background records why the digression is there.

Long-form works also reuse sidebars or case studies across chapters and annexes via .include directives:

🗒 Included Fragment (lexical-precision-sidebar.md): This inline sidebar was pulled into the essay at build time via ::: {.include path="demo/fragments/lexical-precision-sidebar.md"}. Both the Pandoc Lua filter (iasp/include.lua) and the Ghost exporter (src/ghost.ts) expand .include directives before rendering inner semantic blocks.

Unmarked prose is always assumed to be part of the main flow. Silence is a valid authorial decision; IASP exists to support thinking, not to enforce exhaustive tagging.

3. Note Variants and Epistemic Stance

While any Axis B modifier may compose with any Axis A delivery role, the build pipeline recognizes twenty-two note-variants (tracked as a profile set in terminology-mcp), each with its own visual cadence:

Taxonomy as a living replica: Because iasp-mcp follows terminology-mcp’s numbered changelog for the iasp scheme, adding or refining a modifier in terminology-mcp propagates automatically to the local SQLite store, MCP lookup tools, and Markdown validator.

Static verification before Pandoc runs: The validate_markdown tool checks fence balance (:::), catches level-1 headers (#) inside sidebars before they corrupt LaTeX mdframed badge placement, verifies .include paths, and flags unknown or retired IASP classes against terminology-mcp.

Avoid using level-1 headings (# Heading) inside .sidebar or .aside wrappers. In XeLaTeX builds, \section spacing interacts poorly with framed sidebar boxes; use ## or ### instead.

Takeaway: When authoring vocabulary, validation, and rendering share one semantic profile, writers can focus on prose and structure while agents handle verification and multi-format output.

End of the iasp-mcp reference demonstration. Use render_document with source: "demo" to rebuild this essay in html, ghost, pdf, epub, docx, or rtf.

Works Cited

  1. In Pandoc’s fenced-div syntax, ::: note.insight and ::: {.note .insight} produce the same AST classes (["note", "insight"]) once processed by iasp-semantics.lua.↩︎