6 ms·

Freeing the Web from the Browser

231 points by joesavage 8y ago

bb010g 8y ago
This smells a lot like Xanadu.
- moviuro 8y ago
  Saved you a click: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
  - youwishboye 8y ago
    What a mess, I am glad that those ideas failed and the web turned out how it is right now. Fortunately, practicality beats half-baked ideas.
icc97 8y ago
Although this talks about freeing the web from a browser, this seems like a pretty good case for a augmenting the browser experience. The first thing being a browser plugin that ignores all links (which is probably a good default for anyone interested in reading an article and not getting distracted), then it just allows a layer on top for highlighting sections creating your own links. I expect this probably already exists. I think firefox's reading mode should have an option to turn off links. The missing step here is connecting to other programs, but this is a first step.
- joesavage 8y ago
  Author here. It’s definitely true that extending existing browsers is the fastest route to this kind of behaviour (though it’s not clear to me if it’s the best route). In fact, if you squint a bit (or maybe a lot), it could be argued that with application-specific URL schemes we kind-of sort-of already have the primitives we need to make something like this work. Practically, though, if you want the multi-program side of this (which is kind of orthogonal to the 'multiple perspectives on how things are connected' side), then to make this kind of multi-window hypermedia system usable I think you need to have deep integration with the window manager. While Chrome OS tries to achieve this kind of integration by making the browser the OS, I propose that the best way forward here is to effectively make the OS the browser, as I discuss in the article. (Of course I’m not talking about the kernel when I say ‘OS’ here, but the desktop environment). At that point, I’d say the browser is different enough to the browsers of today that the description of ‘freeing the Web from the browser’ is still accurate.
  - icc97 8y ago
    Thanks for the reply! It's a really interesting piece of research. Yes, you're quite right, the browser alone can't interact between all the programs, I was purely thinking of low hanging fruit for the browser plugin. I watched a Google interview with Douglas Engelbart [0] where people asked him a couple of times if Wikipedia was what he'd envisioned for hypertext, he was very polite about it and said it "was a good start", but he'd clearly wished that we'd got much further by now. What you're suggesting is definitely a step forward. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQx-tuW9A4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQx-tuW9A4Q
  - feanaro 8y ago
    The multi-program facet of this reminds me of Plan9's [plumber](http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/plumb http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/plumb) concept, which is an OS component allowing communication between programs in the form of "plumbing messages". The plumber processes plumbing messages according to a rules file, passing them on to other applications. This rules file allows the user to easily configure which piece of data gets delivered where in a uniform fashion. Plan9's plumber was mostly text data oriented, but it could in principle work with any kind of resource (images, audio files, documents). It seems naturally extensible to URIs. It goes a bit deeper than your idea by saying URIs and browsers aren't special and that all kinds of data should be plumbed between all kinds of applications (for instance, a text editor detecting a DOI in a text file and converting it into a clickable link that sends a plumbing message to the browser, which would then open the corresponding doi.org page).
- dmead 8y ago
  It did exist and was decently popular in the 2000s... The name escapes me. It was a firefox plugin ...
  - sanxiyn 8y ago
    Was it Annozilla?
    - dmead 8y ago
      perhaps. I'm hazarding a guess that I found it from slashdot and the slashdot search comes up with nothing for that.. so maybe not. But what i'm thinking of definitely added a drawing overlay and a chat capability to any arbitrary page. it was fun for a while to just turn on the plugin to see if any chatter was happening at a specific url on the internet.
TuringTest 8y ago
Most saddening, perhaps, is the way in which the Web constrains the use of links. For example: although the link is the primary form of reference on the Web, underpinning the tangle of connections that make the system so useful, the ability to create new links is a privilege granted only to content producers. The vast majority of those interested in a piece of work are merely readers, unable to contribute, only to consume. The sad part is, we already have the technical infrastructure in place to support those user contributions - it's the Comments section of any blog-shaped site. So called "Web 2.0" was all about readers contributing feedback to whichever content was being published through a channel. But the shape it took was not the original hypermedia vision, but a conversation of loosely related comments that could potentially go off-topic. To support the annotation feature described in the article, it would just require that common web platforms allowed their current comment systems to attach comments to paragraphs in the article, and show these comments as side notes. Current moderation functions could be used to separate the wheat from the chaff. But it would require readers to adapt and learn to tap this resource to its fullest potential.
- mpweiher 8y ago
  > constrains the use of links. https://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/ https://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/
- onion2k 8y ago
  it would just require that common web platforms allowed their current comment systems to attach comments to paragraphs in the article, and show these comments as side notes I think that's a somewhat view of what a user contribution could look like. Adding feedback is great, but imagine what the web could be if users could do more than just comment. I'd love to see a blog application that supported user contributions like fixing spelling/grammar, adding links, injecting additional paragraphs to explain complex topics, captioning pictures, etc. All those things could be suggested as comments that the author would manually use to improve their article, but I think it'd be better (faster at least) to do it automatically. Idealistically I'm thinking of something that's the best parts of Medium and Wikipedia.
  - 8y ago
jerjerjer 8y ago
The problem I think is that most sites and businesses would be up in arms over this idea. FB wants to have links pointing to other FB pages. Many websites do a lot to prevent user from leaving. How do you plan to overcome this?
- joesavage 8y ago
  That's a good point, and not one that I've considered particularly deeply to be honest. (I'd love to hear other people's point of view on the topic!) I guess in many ways the situation is similar to that around adblock. Ultimately, the links that are overlaid on a particular page should be solely and completely under the control of the user. If the technology that everyone is using permits this kind of behaviour, I'm not sure companies have much choice in the matter.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > If the technology that everyone is using permits this kind of behaviour, I'm not sure companies have much choice in the matter. The technology used to permit this; the current trends go against this direction. I'm of course referring to JS-rendered content and SPAs. I imagine, were your idea deployed, most of the time would be spent on fixing broken links and link anchor points. I support the goal you're trying to achieve. But between greedy publishers and their ToS and JavaScript infecting everything like a pathogen, I fear that we'll have to spin up an alternative Internet for knowledge work. That Internet would be reader-friendly (both human and machine kind) and much more static.
oblio 8y ago
While this is somewhat cool, I have a few comments: > The Web is, without a doubt, the most powerful research tool currently available to man. No longer must researchers comb through endless indices and catalogues to find what they are looking for. True, but most people aren't researchers. Heck, I think most people don't even know what indices are :) > The vast majority of those interested in a piece of work are merely readers, unable to contribute, only to consume. Guess what, most people, 99% of the time, "consume". > Billions across the globe rely on the Web to enhance their intellectual capabilities on a daily basis, building understanding through its rich mesh of connections. Not really, billions across the globe check out funny cat pics, play games, watch you-know-what, etc. :) Anyway, what I'm saying is: it's a nice vision of the world and the web, but that's not what the world mostly is. Good luck with it, but don't expect that a super contributor-friendly media will turn the vast majority of people into constant contributors.
- joesavage 8y ago
  I largely agree. I'm very much coming at this from the angle of 'knowledge work', and think a system of this kind is most useful to (though definitely not only useful to!) scientists, engineers, designers, lawyers, journalists, etc. While the population of knowledge workers is admittedly much smaller than the population on the whole, though, it's still sizable. Knowledge workers play an incredibly important role in our society, and anything that can amplify their intellectual capabilities is well worthwhile in my view.
  - michaelscott 8y ago
    If the target audience is knowledge workers then this is a nice step in a better direction. Bear in mind, though, that the goal of a knowledge worker is to understand content so the focus of any such project probably shouldn't be on enhancing the manifestation of graph theory on the web and rather on the methods of education available. Focus on how the content is presented to the user rather than the connections between content, because at the end of the day it's the content I care about and not the connections.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
jlebrech 8y ago
One way would be to create a browser/portal(combo) that only indexes webgl/wasm apps for example. and you could still visit the info page about that app via a normal browser but would have to install the specific browser. the irony is that walled garden might have a valid use case (not to wall from a vendor, but to wall us from old tech)
- lucbocahut 8y ago
  Sounds like we can achieve this with a browser plugin, not sure we need a whole new web just yet:)
ChrisSD 8y ago
Didn't Google used to have a project that allowed readers to annotate the web? If I understand it correctly, it sounds like the author wants something similar only categorised by field of expertise instead of being a free for all (and not owned by one company). This would require some kind of moderation, in one form or anther. EDIT: Wikipedia says I was most likely thing of Sidewiki, which wasn't actually a wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sidewiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sidewiki
- ChrisSD 8y ago
  Another thing my search brought up was Hypothesis[0] which sounds almost but perhaps not quite what the author describes. [0] https://web.hypothes.is/ https://web.hypothes.is/
machiaweliczny 8y ago
I would love a web where you can comment with your forum circle on any URI available on internet. Eg. I open some research paper and I click "comments" in web browsers. And I see comments from /r/machinelearning, hackernews etc. Also real time chat would be awesome to have for each of websites. Nowadays it work for me like this - found something interesting X - type "X site:myforum" in google to learn more about it Found a bug, typo, wanna contribute related resource - need to go to github, email author etc. - can't just open "comment" on page without comments and contribute :( I think such structure of internet as we have right now relies on google/search engines too much when it could be much better organised.
- wruza 8y ago
  That could erase forum-ness of people and turn comments into a big heap of voices. Personally I wouldn’t like my forums if they were just a random people hanging around. Moderators and implicit rules do form what a forum is, what you do on it, but with “just comments on URI” all will be lost. While your wish feels great, it has downsides, since as an entire humanity we’re still not ready to discuss anything.
  - machiavelli1024 8y ago
    You can configure your client to ignore comments unless they’re verified by [authority you trust]. Verification would happen cryptographically; like the GPG web of trust. It’s up to you to choose which moderators you subsrcibe to, if any.
  - wild_preference 8y ago
    Just seems like a downgrade to posting it on said forum. For example, now you need a UI that enumerates the articles that have comments on them. Maybe new comments even bump to the top. Starts to sound like a regular forum but with a small gimmick to me. There’s a reason this never caught on.
  - here-for-karma 8y ago
    Could maybe try some machine learning for moderation. I'd imagine the non-contributors share some amount of the same communication patterns. Every time I see a problem that requires a lot of repetitive work that most people would not like to spend a lot of time doing, I always try to think of how it could be automated with computers that don't get tired
achow 8y ago
For those who are on mobile: https://www.outline.com/hvF3cS https://www.outline.com/hvF3cS
robertkrahn01 8y ago
Great to see those ideas discussed! It is a little strange, however, that Ted Nelsons ideas around Xanadu and its link representations aren't even mentioned. https://youtu.be/hMKy52Intac?t=1m44s https://youtu.be/hMKy52Intac?t=1m44s
- goodmachine 8y ago
  Check the full dissertation, they are. https://www.reinterpretcast.com/pdfs/savage-j-dissertation-2018-05.pdf https://www.reinterpretcast.com/pdfs/savage-j-dissertation-2...
LoSboccacc 8y ago
oh boy it's the semantic web all over again. it's appalling the lack of citations of the copious corpus that exists and the fact that it's never named for what it is. "what is really lacking — in my view — is research considering the human factors at play" there you go, if someone is interested in the topic, some citation back from 2005 which should be enough to find more references and research http://kmr.nada.kth.se/papers/SemanticWeb/HSW.pdf http://kmr.nada.kth.se/papers/SemanticWeb/HSW.pdf (they even have a workable concept browser, go figure)
- joesavage 8y ago
  To be clear, I’m familiar with the semantic Web and did a reasonable chunk of reading about it when doing this research, but view it as only tangentially related to the ideas I talk about here. If you’re looking for citations around this work, check the full dissertation — there are plenty.
  - LoSboccacc 8y ago
    and this is as novel way to interact with people on internet using concepts delivered in words, only tangentially related to a comment on a discussion board.
  - adultSwim 8y ago
    Thanks. It's not clear in the article that this is based on another work. Can you provide a link? Reading the article I too thought linked data was noticeably absent.
code_coyote 8y ago
Comments and feedback won't work for a site with a lot of readers or viewers, they don't scale. If just 20k people read your post, and one-quarter of them comment, you'll be flooded and not able to find anything meaningful. I'm already following some YT channels where the creator(s) has stated, "we can't read the comments, requests here are ignored."
- wruza 8y ago
  YT comments simply suck in any area. Creators can’t make polls, sorting seems random, upvoting has no filters like funny/insightful at least. Moderation seems to not exist at all. No groups, no sections (those 4-5 in sidebar do not count). It is worst implementation of all possible, and YT does nothing to fix it for decades. They have time to make “material designs” though. If you imagine that videos are just OPs in a forum, you’ll see how crappy it is.
jusa_ 8y ago
Every year for the last 25 or 30 I see this kind of thinking about "information processing" show up. What it represents, is a gigantic failure of computer science departments world wide not connecting their theories of information with the department of education's theories of information. Most techies who mentally masturbate about how information should be organized and optimally consumed to maximize the production of good outcomes have never heard of the word pedagogy. Without understanding that complex topic, they spend their time busy producing articles and collecting them in libraries that only they can navigate. They do this scratching their head wondering why it isn't creating global enlightenment. Ever stuck in some fools quest for a better magical library that will inject wisdom automatically into their heads. After they hear of pedagogy and after they read a couple of text books on how to turn a first grader into a tenth grader they finally understand the difference between a library and school. They then proceed to think up ways of converting the web (a library) into a school. Most of the time not even fully aware what they are attempting. And thats why it always fails. Schools have already been invented. They already exist. They are constantly evolving. And they will always be better than a library at producing information processing in the human mind. Every first grader knows not to walk into a tenth grade class room and try to solve the problem on the board there. Now step back and take a moment to think about why that automatically doesn't happen on the web? And what the consequences are of first grader constantly exposed to problems of all sorts of grade levels without any indicator of grade or path to that grade. Naturally these first graders get it into their head there is something very wrong with the web. If you want to "improve the web" understand pedagogy.
mark_l_watson 8y ago
There used to be a browser plugin that allowed users of the plugin to register comments on parts of web pages. In general I like the idea behind the article, of enriching content by allowing readers to add links, but in practice this opens the door for spammers.
mertnesvat 8y ago
It would be awesome if they have social media plugin which µigrates all posts from other platforms into mastadon.
thawkins 8y ago
Select text, right click, search with google, job done....
xtf 8y ago
Most documents are linked regarding the topic. If you go on a math page, you've got math links. Ancient and holy texts could be referenced in multiple ways, because it could be interpreted in multiple ways (or the correct way is unknown), but not something like guides. If a guide is written in more than one meaning, it is not a good guide. Learning should be more seen like a tree, you go down the route of branches and specialize more in the directions of it and the branches lead the references. At the beginning you learn the language, later you know it, otherwise every word needs to be linked.
- romaniv 8y ago
  The simplest counter-example is Wikipedia. Most links on any page could lead to generic term definitions, or they could link to explanations of how those terms work withing the context of the page. I.e. a link to "synthesizers" on a page about FM synthesis could lead to a generic article on synthesizers, or to a list of FM synthesizers released up to date. And that's just the most obvious example. Having different "linking contexts" would allow to add more links without turning the original document into a mess. Again, using Wikipedia as an example, you could add another "context" to the page by linking various paragraphs to citations. That would be much more user-friendly than what they do right now with bracketed numbers.
einrealist 8y ago
I don‘t get what the actual problem is and how todays technology is limiting anyone to create something like a link-sharing (e.g. reddit) or link-redirect (hello url shorteners). Of course, if you need control over the content, then you have to build a content management platform, too (centralised or decentralised does not matter). But then you deal with boring copyright and other legal stuff. And hey, browsers do allow extensions nowadays. And if that‘s not enough, build your own.
masukomi 8y ago
did i miss something or does this article COMPLETELY ignore the amazing possibility for abuse this opens up? Now any a-hole can make a public link in your page (or whatever future form that takes)? Nah, no way _that_ could go wrong. The word "abuse" appears literally zero times in the 200 page pdf.
- joesavage 8y ago
  Abuse of this sort of functionality is definitely something I've thought about, but discussions around these sorts of ecosystem issues weren't my focus in this work. Ultimately, there are solutions. For starters, you almost certainly don't want every link or comment from any user to show up automatically for everyone the instant it is made. There's a fantastic comment by user 'enkiv2' over on lobste.rs about this (relating to design decisions around Xanadu) that also roughly reflects the kinds of assumptions that I've been making in my prototyping about how this might work in practice: https://lobste.rs/s/p0sgoj/freeing_web_from_browser#c_vivphl https://lobste.rs/s/p0sgoj/freeing_web_from_browser#c_vivphl
- vxNsr 8y ago
  This is exactly where my mind went, the amount of spam even small time bloggers have to contend with in their comment sections is astounding, now imagine if every page on the internet had a comment section and no filtering, or moderation.... Even today youtube comments suck because of the near total lack of moderation. Even sites like this one or the verge with paid and volunteer moderators who in theory monitor things 24/7 I still see useless spam. I'm not even talking about individual people with opinions some might find offensive, I mean just outright spam advertising.
tim333 8y ago
>One could imagine a system in which multiple sets of links could be associated with a single resource to accommodate this, allowing for a range of different viewpoints on how things are connected. You can kind of do it yourself by quoting the thing in a public comment eg "Freeing the Web from the Browser" https://www.reinterpretcast.com/open-hypermedia https://www.reinterpretcast.com/open-hypermedia and then saying it reminds me of whatever eg. the semantic web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web a bit Then anyone gooling the title may come across stuff like this.
textmode 8y ago
"Different people have different perspectives on how information should be connected, so why do we not allow these range of perspectives to be represented and shared digitally? Why limit ourselves to just one point of view? ... Why re-create code editors, simulators, spreadsheets, and more in the browser when we already have native programs much better suited to these tasks?" The title is something I contemplated and began to address long ago, only on a personal level. With respect to the first question, perhaps this goes to the poor mechanism promoted by Google, to rank the www's contents by "popularity". This mechanism obviously succeeds for purposes of measuring www user opinion and selling advertising (the later not anticipated by the founders in the early years). However it falls short in the non-commercial context, e.g., the academic setting out of which the company grew. Anyone remember "Knol"? Today Google search (and probably others seeking to emulate its commercial success) intentionally promote a pattern of usage of their cache/database where its users never reach "page 2" of search results. The company has built their ad sales business on the idea that one perspective ("the top search result") should not only prevail but also that, optimally, other results need not even be considered. It should be obvious that in a non-commercial research context, this is not optimal. If the www is 100% commercial then of course this is not an issue. But "the www" is difficult to define. All httpd's on any accessible network? All httpd's listening on accessible addresses with corresponding ICANN-registered domainnames? All pages crawled by a commercial bot, deposited in a commercial www cache and made accessible to the public? And so on. In any event, if users only view the www's supposed contents through the lense of a commercial entity, the perception of what the www actually comprises may be manipulated in a way that suits commercial interests, e.g. the sale of advertising. As to the second question, when given the choice I do not use a popular web browser. The author mentions the utility of "native programs". I would prefer the term "dedicated programs". Programs that perform essentially one task, or "do one thing". Whether such programs can perform their dedicated tasks better than an omnibus-styled program that performs many, varied tasks is a question for the user to decide. For example, the author answers that native programs are "better suited" than the web browser. The "web browser" has become a conglomeration of once dedicated programs. There are such dedicated programs for making TCP connections over which HTTP commands can be sent and www content retrieved. This is a task that web browsers can perform, although some users may prefer a dedicated program. In this way content retrieval can be separated from content consumption, alleviating many of the www annoyances such as user tracking, manipulation and advertising.
bastawhiz 8y ago
We almost got there with Pingbacks being the first step. Then they devolved into meaningless spam. Without a system of manual curation, it's impossible to build something where _everyone_ contributes. Spam scales easily, and moderation and curation does not. A thousand good links buried under a million spam links don't add any value. And we can talk about reputation and proof of stake systems until we're blue in the face, but so far, nothing exists that actually works. If it did, we'd already be using it.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  I never understood that; PoW seems like not merely an elegant solution, but a simple one. What am I missing?
  - Yen 8y ago
    My gut sense is that proof-of-work as a spam deterrent can _improve_ the signal-to-noise ratio, but won't bring it up to an acceptable level. Say you have a simple proof-of-work protecting some action (posting a comment, voting up/down a story, etc.), and you have its difficulty tuned to allow a median-productivity human on a typical desktop computer to do that action at their typical rate. A spambot doesn't need to sleep, take days off, and can get illicit access to much more computing power than any one human. It _would_ probably shift spamming activities to focus on more central, high-value venues, though. hmm.
  - bastawhiz 8y ago
    Not everyone has CPU cycles to waste, like users on mobile. Even then, the cost of a consumer contributing one connection is an amount of work that's totally tractable by a spammer. Unless you get into tokens and paying money to contribute. Which defeats the purpose. Why would I pay money to contribute to a decentralized service?
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  I think web of trust might be suitable here.
dredmorbius 8y ago
Joe: some god thoughts, and ideas I'm seeing from several quartersv and have been thinking about myself. I'd also like to see a tool that's useful for research, a readers' ans writers' Web, not merely a consumers' funnel. I've been lookingat the history of the Web and information in general (guilty pleasure: http://www.historyofinformation.com/index.php http://www.historyofinformation.com/index.php). Bush, Nelson, TBL. Early browser history, especially Viola, an entire system: http://www.viola.org http://www.viola.org . Plan 9's 9p and /net: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#/net https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#/net . I'm thinkinking or possibly presenting the Web as a filesystem, or other forms not typical of contemporary browsers: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6bgowu/what_if_the_web_was_filesystemaccessible/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6bgowu/what_if... And I've a long list of concerns, largely referenced in the last link above. Taking a look at your doc.
skadamat 8y ago
Surprised nobody has mentioned HyperCard - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/05/25-years-of-hypercard-the-missing-link-to-the-web/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/05/25-years-of-hypercar... There was a very compelling vision for the web, by Doug Engelbart and others in the 60's and 70's. Unfortunately, because of the computing culture's attitude of forgetting even the recent history / understanding what foundational work was done (like real scientific fields do!), the web folks didn't have a lot that context. Alan Kay, in many of his talks, has discussed how the browser should really be more like an operating system kernel. The web is a mess and we can still build interesting things with lots of hacking & engineering, but it's fallen short of the original vision. And now we're locked into the tooling we've built.
- nradov 8y ago
  WebAssembly may eventually get us closer to that vision.
  - skadamat 8y ago
    WebAssembly will no doubt give us more freedom, but still has a lot of constraints. Also, it's fundamentally a hack built on top of the browser ecosystem, not replacing browsers entirely!
    - tim333 8y ago
      I hadn't heard of Hypecard so I watched the video on it here http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/apples-hypercard-software-the-innovative-1980s-precursor-to-hypertext-now-made-available-by-archive-org.html http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/apples-hypercard-software... I seemed kind of cool but doesn't do much you can't do with webpages and javascript. Its scripting language seemed much easier to do some things with than javascript though. I kind of imagine WebAssembly will go the other way and make things more complicated.
      - scroot 8y ago
        > I seemed kind of cool but doesn't do much you can't do with webpages and javascript. Its scripting language seemed much easier to do some things with than javascript though. In our current developer culture we tend to view things less holistically and more in terms of this-or-that language or system. Hypercard (which was composed of both the visual system and Hypertalk) was one holistic system that fit extremely well with personal computing of the early to mid 90s (which is why recreations of Hypercard on today's machine miss the point). This was a completely different view of personal computing, one that sought to reduce the chasm between "developer/programmer" and "user". Hypercard allowed authoring in the computing medium, and did so by permitting users take advantage of what was new about computing as opposed to other older media. In fact, they were called "authors" and there were thousand of them — most of them weren't professional programmers. There is a lot that hypercard could do that the modern web cannot. I cannot copy and paste a button — retaining all of its internal functionality in a different context — from one web page to my own (at least not without a lot of trouble). This was the de facto way to get started in Hypercard. Hypertalk is another interesting part of bridging the divide. It is difficult for entrenched programmers to reckon with because it's more like natural English and (unlike most programming languages) is easier to read than it is to write. But for regular people it makes sense. Final point: everything good about computing is about metaphors. Hypercard had one of the best metaphors since spreadsheets: the concept of stacks, cards, and objects on cards. That's all there was and it was easy to understand how these pieces interact. The web does not have anything like this for its "authors" because it is inherently unfriendly to them.
echan00 8y ago
Super small feedback, you should put the video at the top of your post. I really dig the commentary btw, maybe its the english sounding voice :)
dcuthbertson 8y ago
This looked interesting, so I started reading the author's dissertation, but I've been sidetracked/put-off by its overbearing copyright statement. This copy of the dissertation has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with its author and that no quotation from the dissertation and no information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. At least in the US, the fair use clause under the copyright law allows for limited quotes/excerpts w/o asking permission.
- tim333 8y ago
  I guess you can cut and paste what you as a copyright statement which doesn't mean it's enforceable. I rather liked Allie Broch's one https://lizerbramlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Copyright-Monster.0513131.jpg https://lizerbramlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Copyrigh...
- joesavage 8y ago
  Sorry about this! It was a stock copyright clause provided by my university. I’ll look into getting it removed, and in the mean time am perfectly happy for you to use the work (with proper attribution) as you see fit. EDIT: The problematic clause in question has now been removed.
  - dcuthbertson 8y ago
    Nicely done! Thanks for being so responsive!
Sidth 8y ago
Great article, thanks for sharing. Of relevance here is TiddlyWiki (www.tiddlywiki.com), a personal note taking tool, that includes some of the salient features, like transclusion and user-generated linking, mentioned in the article. In addition, the approach supports a built-in programming capability to allow computation on content (e.g., dynamic filtering and content generation) and extension via plugins. All information (content and Javascript code) is within a single html document.
tomc1985 8y ago
I had to stop reading after a few paragraphs. His assertion that linking belongs to "content producers" is ludicrous. Those content producers have given users the tools to do linking themselves, and they express themselves in a variety of ways over a variety of mediums. You need to learn how to write to express yourself with written word, yet how many people do we here harping on how difficult it is to learn language? At some point we can draw a line and say, "if you want these abilities you need to learn these things". We did so with literacy, with driving, and with so many professional trades. We can do so with basic internet literacy.
- ergothus 8y ago
  > Those content producers have given users the tools to do linking themselves, and they express themselves in a variety of ways over a variety of mediums. ? How can I link to, say, a quote in that article that offends you? I can't. How can I link to a youtube video and add my own commentary links? I can't (I think) without creating my own video that explicitly copies the original (rather than consuming it). > You need to learn how to write to express yourself with written word, yet how many people do we here harping on how difficult it is to learn language? I definitely wish people took the time to work on that skill instead of assuming it's both automatic and that their level is adequate. Nonetheless, this doesn't seem related to the point of the article - not that linking is HARD, but that, outside of whatever the creator enabled, all we get are top level URLs.
  - ianbicking 8y ago
    > How can I link to a youtube video and add my own commentary links? I can't (I think) without creating my own video that explicitly copies the original (rather than consuming it). You can write a blog post and embed the video with timing information. Of course embedding is largely the same as transclusion, among the features touched upon by open hypermedia. While you don't get full expressivity without a blog or something that allows full HTML, you can get most of this in other mediums (e.g., Twitter) where the video is embedded automatically given a link. In theory OEmbed (https://oembed.com/ https://oembed.com/) is a standard for something like transclusion, though it's not very widely supported. Constructing a link to a point in time in a video is a non-standard operation (you just have to know the YouTube interface). Similarly there aren't great patterns for finding a link to a position in a web page. But the pieces are all kind of there, though missing the controls and patterns to bring them together. Which is a failing of browsers, though that points in the opposite direction of the claim in the title of this piece (i.e., it implies to me that we need browsers to go deeper, not increase the breadth of linked applications).
ianbicking 8y ago
We do have a way to create links between two documents without editing either document: create a new document that links to both documents. This is a normal, though informal, activity. And of course simply linking two documents together isn't that useful, you have to say WHY they are linked. I.e., the semantic triple (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_triple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_triple) of subject–predicate–object, or maybe more informally you are simply saying X relates to Y because of Z, where Z is akin to the predicate. Currently in HTML hypertext we're stuffing Z into the link text, which sometimes works nicely and sometimes works very poorly. But in an external document you have all the space you want to explain the relation between the documents. Obviously there's lots of shortcomings of adding a new document to the web to explain every relation between existing documents. But I think it's a good starting point. We're missing things like: 1. Reliable deep linking to documents. We have ids, YouTube timestamps, etc., but finding these is an ad hoc process and they aren't always available. 2. Widespread transclusion tools. We actually have some now, in the form of link previews or OEmbed. When you post a link in a comment or post on Twitter or Facebook, they effectively transclude the link into the document. Not fully interactive, but it might be a better balance between linking and viewing than traditional/literal transclusion. 3. Discovery of these annotations or commentary. There's a hard CS problem here, to maintain privacy while also trying to find serendipitous results. Maybe it involves pre-loading lists of documents from the locations you want to "discover" from. Maybe it requires some understanding of privacy levels, or whether content is personalized or public. Or we use the technique we have now: lead with commentary, with no attempt to discover it after the fact. I.e., I know there are comments on https://www.reinterpretcast.com/open-hypermedia https://www.reinterpretcast.com/open-hypermedia at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17690865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17690865 because I found the document on https://news.ycombinator.com/news https://news.ycombinator.com/news – is serendipity even a thing in a place as large as the web? 4. Maybe publishing tools... do I want to post a Tweet to describe every relation I see? But maybe I do, because even if organic discovery is possible I probably also want to publish a feed of my own annotations, and I want to be part of a community of people doing this, and Twitter is a reasonable example of this. 5. Some sort of representation of these links when they've been found. Even without fancy discovery this is necessary. Right now if I click on a link from a post like: "OMG this is the stupidest argument ever: http://example.com/some-stupid-document" http://example.com/some-stupid-document" it will look like any other page I've opened. Only if I remember well why I clicked on the link will I understand that I've been offered something with derision. The browser has to do something here, all it has currently is the back button to understand why you've gotten somewhere (and that doesn't even work consistently in these cases).

231 points by joesavage 8y ago

bb010g 8y ago

This smells a lot like Xanadu.

moviuro 8y ago
Saved you a click: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
- youwishboye 8y ago
  What a mess, I am glad that those ideas failed and the web turned out how it is right now. Fortunately, practicality beats half-baked ideas.

icc97 8y ago

Although this talks about freeing the web from a browser, this seems like a pretty good case for a augmenting the browser experience. The first thing being a browser plugin that ignores all links (which is probably a good default for anyone interested in reading an article and not getting distracted), then it just allows a layer on top for highlighting sections creating your own links. I expect this probably already exists. I think firefox's reading mode should have an option to turn off links. The missing step here is connecting to other programs, but this is a first step.

joesavage 8y ago
Author here. It’s definitely true that extending existing browsers is the fastest route to this kind of behaviour (though it’s not clear to me if it’s the best route). In fact, if you squint a bit (or maybe a lot), it could be argued that with application-specific URL schemes we kind-of sort-of already have the primitives we need to make something like this work. Practically, though, if you want the multi-program side of this (which is kind of orthogonal to the 'multiple perspectives on how things are connected' side), then to make this kind of multi-window hypermedia system usable I think you need to have deep integration with the window manager. While Chrome OS tries to achieve this kind of integration by making the browser the OS, I propose that the best way forward here is to effectively make the OS the browser, as I discuss in the article. (Of course I’m not talking about the kernel when I say ‘OS’ here, but the desktop environment). At that point, I’d say the browser is different enough to the browsers of today that the description of ‘freeing the Web from the browser’ is still accurate.
- icc97 8y ago
  Thanks for the reply! It's a really interesting piece of research. Yes, you're quite right, the browser alone can't interact between all the programs, I was purely thinking of low hanging fruit for the browser plugin. I watched a Google interview with Douglas Engelbart [0] where people asked him a couple of times if Wikipedia was what he'd envisioned for hypertext, he was very polite about it and said it "was a good start", but he'd clearly wished that we'd got much further by now. What you're suggesting is definitely a step forward. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQx-tuW9A4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQx-tuW9A4Q
- feanaro 8y ago
  The multi-program facet of this reminds me of Plan9's [plumber](http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/plumb http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/plumb) concept, which is an OS component allowing communication between programs in the form of "plumbing messages". The plumber processes plumbing messages according to a rules file, passing them on to other applications. This rules file allows the user to easily configure which piece of data gets delivered where in a uniform fashion. Plan9's plumber was mostly text data oriented, but it could in principle work with any kind of resource (images, audio files, documents). It seems naturally extensible to URIs. It goes a bit deeper than your idea by saying URIs and browsers aren't special and that all kinds of data should be plumbed between all kinds of applications (for instance, a text editor detecting a DOI in a text file and converting it into a clickable link that sends a plumbing message to the browser, which would then open the corresponding doi.org page).
dmead 8y ago
It did exist and was decently popular in the 2000s... The name escapes me. It was a firefox plugin ...
- sanxiyn 8y ago
  Was it Annozilla?
  - dmead 8y ago
    perhaps. I'm hazarding a guess that I found it from slashdot and the slashdot search comes up with nothing for that.. so maybe not. But what i'm thinking of definitely added a drawing overlay and a chat capability to any arbitrary page. it was fun for a while to just turn on the plugin to see if any chatter was happening at a specific url on the internet.

TuringTest 8y ago

Most saddening, perhaps, is the way in which the Web constrains the use of links. For example: although the link is the primary form of reference on the Web, underpinning the tangle of connections that make the system so useful, the ability to create new links is a privilege granted only to content producers. The vast majority of those interested in a piece of work are merely readers, unable to contribute, only to consume. The sad part is, we already have the technical infrastructure in place to support those user contributions - it's the Comments section of any blog-shaped site. So called "Web 2.0" was all about readers contributing feedback to whichever content was being published through a channel. But the shape it took was not the original hypermedia vision, but a conversation of loosely related comments that could potentially go off-topic. To support the annotation feature described in the article, it would just require that common web platforms allowed their current comment systems to attach comments to paragraphs in the article, and show these comments as side notes. Current moderation functions could be used to separate the wheat from the chaff. But it would require readers to adapt and learn to tap this resource to its fullest potential.

mpweiher 8y ago
> constrains the use of links. https://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/ https://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/
onion2k 8y ago
it would just require that common web platforms allowed their current comment systems to attach comments to paragraphs in the article, and show these comments as side notes I think that's a somewhat view of what a user contribution could look like. Adding feedback is great, but imagine what the web could be if users could do more than just comment. I'd love to see a blog application that supported user contributions like fixing spelling/grammar, adding links, injecting additional paragraphs to explain complex topics, captioning pictures, etc. All those things could be suggested as comments that the author would manually use to improve their article, but I think it'd be better (faster at least) to do it automatically. Idealistically I'm thinking of something that's the best parts of Medium and Wikipedia.
- 8y ago

jerjerjer 8y ago

The problem I think is that most sites and businesses would be up in arms over this idea. FB wants to have links pointing to other FB pages. Many websites do a lot to prevent user from leaving. How do you plan to overcome this?

joesavage 8y ago
That's a good point, and not one that I've considered particularly deeply to be honest. (I'd love to hear other people's point of view on the topic!) I guess in many ways the situation is similar to that around adblock. Ultimately, the links that are overlaid on a particular page should be solely and completely under the control of the user. If the technology that everyone is using permits this kind of behaviour, I'm not sure companies have much choice in the matter.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > If the technology that everyone is using permits this kind of behaviour, I'm not sure companies have much choice in the matter. The technology used to permit this; the current trends go against this direction. I'm of course referring to JS-rendered content and SPAs. I imagine, were your idea deployed, most of the time would be spent on fixing broken links and link anchor points. I support the goal you're trying to achieve. But between greedy publishers and their ToS and JavaScript infecting everything like a pathogen, I fear that we'll have to spin up an alternative Internet for knowledge work. That Internet would be reader-friendly (both human and machine kind) and much more static.

oblio 8y ago

While this is somewhat cool, I have a few comments: > The Web is, without a doubt, the most powerful research tool currently available to man. No longer must researchers comb through endless indices and catalogues to find what they are looking for. True, but most people aren't researchers. Heck, I think most people don't even know what indices are :) > The vast majority of those interested in a piece of work are merely readers, unable to contribute, only to consume. Guess what, most people, 99% of the time, "consume". > Billions across the globe rely on the Web to enhance their intellectual capabilities on a daily basis, building understanding through its rich mesh of connections. Not really, billions across the globe check out funny cat pics, play games, watch you-know-what, etc. :) Anyway, what I'm saying is: it's a nice vision of the world and the web, but that's not what the world mostly is. Good luck with it, but don't expect that a super contributor-friendly media will turn the vast majority of people into constant contributors.

joesavage 8y ago
I largely agree. I'm very much coming at this from the angle of 'knowledge work', and think a system of this kind is most useful to (though definitely not only useful to!) scientists, engineers, designers, lawyers, journalists, etc. While the population of knowledge workers is admittedly much smaller than the population on the whole, though, it's still sizable. Knowledge workers play an incredibly important role in our society, and anything that can amplify their intellectual capabilities is well worthwhile in my view.
- michaelscott 8y ago
  If the target audience is knowledge workers then this is a nice step in a better direction. Bear in mind, though, that the goal of a knowledge worker is to understand content so the focus of any such project probably shouldn't be on enhancing the manifestation of graph theory on the web and rather on the methods of education available. Focus on how the content is presented to the user rather than the connections between content, because at the end of the day it's the content I care about and not the connections.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

jlebrech 8y ago

One way would be to create a browser/portal(combo) that only indexes webgl/wasm apps for example. and you could still visit the info page about that app via a normal browser but would have to install the specific browser. the irony is that walled garden might have a valid use case (not to wall from a vendor, but to wall us from old tech)

lucbocahut 8y ago
Sounds like we can achieve this with a browser plugin, not sure we need a whole new web just yet:)

ChrisSD 8y ago

Didn't Google used to have a project that allowed readers to annotate the web? If I understand it correctly, it sounds like the author wants something similar only categorised by field of expertise instead of being a free for all (and not owned by one company). This would require some kind of moderation, in one form or anther. EDIT: Wikipedia says I was most likely thing of Sidewiki, which wasn't actually a wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sidewiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sidewiki

ChrisSD 8y ago
Another thing my search brought up was Hypothesis[0] which sounds almost but perhaps not quite what the author describes. [0] https://web.hypothes.is/ https://web.hypothes.is/

machiaweliczny 8y ago

I would love a web where you can comment with your forum circle on any URI available on internet. Eg. I open some research paper and I click "comments" in web browsers. And I see comments from /r/machinelearning, hackernews etc. Also real time chat would be awesome to have for each of websites. Nowadays it work for me like this - found something interesting X - type "X site:myforum" in google to learn more about it Found a bug, typo, wanna contribute related resource - need to go to github, email author etc. - can't just open "comment" on page without comments and contribute :( I think such structure of internet as we have right now relies on google/search engines too much when it could be much better organised.

wruza 8y ago
That could erase forum-ness of people and turn comments into a big heap of voices. Personally I wouldn’t like my forums if they were just a random people hanging around. Moderators and implicit rules do form what a forum is, what you do on it, but with “just comments on URI” all will be lost. While your wish feels great, it has downsides, since as an entire humanity we’re still not ready to discuss anything.
- machiavelli1024 8y ago
  You can configure your client to ignore comments unless they’re verified by [authority you trust]. Verification would happen cryptographically; like the GPG web of trust. It’s up to you to choose which moderators you subsrcibe to, if any.
- wild_preference 8y ago
  Just seems like a downgrade to posting it on said forum. For example, now you need a UI that enumerates the articles that have comments on them. Maybe new comments even bump to the top. Starts to sound like a regular forum but with a small gimmick to me. There’s a reason this never caught on.
- here-for-karma 8y ago
  Could maybe try some machine learning for moderation. I'd imagine the non-contributors share some amount of the same communication patterns. Every time I see a problem that requires a lot of repetitive work that most people would not like to spend a lot of time doing, I always try to think of how it could be automated with computers that don't get tired

achow 8y ago

For those who are on mobile: https://www.outline.com/hvF3cS https://www.outline.com/hvF3cS

robertkrahn01 8y ago

Great to see those ideas discussed! It is a little strange, however, that Ted Nelsons ideas around Xanadu and its link representations aren't even mentioned. https://youtu.be/hMKy52Intac?t=1m44s https://youtu.be/hMKy52Intac?t=1m44s

goodmachine 8y ago
Check the full dissertation, they are. https://www.reinterpretcast.com/pdfs/savage-j-dissertation-2018-05.pdf https://www.reinterpretcast.com/pdfs/savage-j-dissertation-2...

LoSboccacc 8y ago

oh boy it's the semantic web all over again. it's appalling the lack of citations of the copious corpus that exists and the fact that it's never named for what it is. "what is really lacking — in my view — is research considering the human factors at play" there you go, if someone is interested in the topic, some citation back from 2005 which should be enough to find more references and research http://kmr.nada.kth.se/papers/SemanticWeb/HSW.pdf http://kmr.nada.kth.se/papers/SemanticWeb/HSW.pdf (they even have a workable concept browser, go figure)

joesavage 8y ago
To be clear, I’m familiar with the semantic Web and did a reasonable chunk of reading about it when doing this research, but view it as only tangentially related to the ideas I talk about here. If you’re looking for citations around this work, check the full dissertation — there are plenty.
- LoSboccacc 8y ago
  and this is as novel way to interact with people on internet using concepts delivered in words, only tangentially related to a comment on a discussion board.
- adultSwim 8y ago
  Thanks. It's not clear in the article that this is based on another work. Can you provide a link? Reading the article I too thought linked data was noticeably absent.

code_coyote 8y ago

Comments and feedback won't work for a site with a lot of readers or viewers, they don't scale. If just 20k people read your post, and one-quarter of them comment, you'll be flooded and not able to find anything meaningful. I'm already following some YT channels where the creator(s) has stated, "we can't read the comments, requests here are ignored."

wruza 8y ago
YT comments simply suck in any area. Creators can’t make polls, sorting seems random, upvoting has no filters like funny/insightful at least. Moderation seems to not exist at all. No groups, no sections (those 4-5 in sidebar do not count). It is worst implementation of all possible, and YT does nothing to fix it for decades. They have time to make “material designs” though. If you imagine that videos are just OPs in a forum, you’ll see how crappy it is.

jusa_ 8y ago

Every year for the last 25 or 30 I see this kind of thinking about "information processing" show up. What it represents, is a gigantic failure of computer science departments world wide not connecting their theories of information with the department of education's theories of information. Most techies who mentally masturbate about how information should be organized and optimally consumed to maximize the production of good outcomes have never heard of the word pedagogy. Without understanding that complex topic, they spend their time busy producing articles and collecting them in libraries that only they can navigate. They do this scratching their head wondering why it isn't creating global enlightenment. Ever stuck in some fools quest for a better magical library that will inject wisdom automatically into their heads. After they hear of pedagogy and after they read a couple of text books on how to turn a first grader into a tenth grader they finally understand the difference between a library and school. They then proceed to think up ways of converting the web (a library) into a school. Most of the time not even fully aware what they are attempting. And thats why it always fails. Schools have already been invented. They already exist. They are constantly evolving. And they will always be better than a library at producing information processing in the human mind. Every first grader knows not to walk into a tenth grade class room and try to solve the problem on the board there. Now step back and take a moment to think about why that automatically doesn't happen on the web? And what the consequences are of first grader constantly exposed to problems of all sorts of grade levels without any indicator of grade or path to that grade. Naturally these first graders get it into their head there is something very wrong with the web. If you want to "improve the web" understand pedagogy.

mark_l_watson 8y ago

There used to be a browser plugin that allowed users of the plugin to register comments on parts of web pages. In general I like the idea behind the article, of enriching content by allowing readers to add links, but in practice this opens the door for spammers.

mertnesvat 8y ago

It would be awesome if they have social media plugin which µigrates all posts from other platforms into mastadon.

thawkins 8y ago

Select text, right click, search with google, job done....

xtf 8y ago

Most documents are linked regarding the topic. If you go on a math page, you've got math links. Ancient and holy texts could be referenced in multiple ways, because it could be interpreted in multiple ways (or the correct way is unknown), but not something like guides. If a guide is written in more than one meaning, it is not a good guide. Learning should be more seen like a tree, you go down the route of branches and specialize more in the directions of it and the branches lead the references. At the beginning you learn the language, later you know it, otherwise every word needs to be linked.

romaniv 8y ago
The simplest counter-example is Wikipedia. Most links on any page could lead to generic term definitions, or they could link to explanations of how those terms work withing the context of the page. I.e. a link to "synthesizers" on a page about FM synthesis could lead to a generic article on synthesizers, or to a list of FM synthesizers released up to date. And that's just the most obvious example. Having different "linking contexts" would allow to add more links without turning the original document into a mess. Again, using Wikipedia as an example, you could add another "context" to the page by linking various paragraphs to citations. That would be much more user-friendly than what they do right now with bracketed numbers.

einrealist 8y ago

I don‘t get what the actual problem is and how todays technology is limiting anyone to create something like a link-sharing (e.g. reddit) or link-redirect (hello url shorteners). Of course, if you need control over the content, then you have to build a content management platform, too (centralised or decentralised does not matter). But then you deal with boring copyright and other legal stuff. And hey, browsers do allow extensions nowadays. And if that‘s not enough, build your own.

masukomi 8y ago

did i miss something or does this article COMPLETELY ignore the amazing possibility for abuse this opens up? Now any a-hole can make a public link in your page (or whatever future form that takes)? Nah, no way _that_ could go wrong. The word "abuse" appears literally zero times in the 200 page pdf.

joesavage 8y ago
Abuse of this sort of functionality is definitely something I've thought about, but discussions around these sorts of ecosystem issues weren't my focus in this work. Ultimately, there are solutions. For starters, you almost certainly don't want every link or comment from any user to show up automatically for everyone the instant it is made. There's a fantastic comment by user 'enkiv2' over on lobste.rs about this (relating to design decisions around Xanadu) that also roughly reflects the kinds of assumptions that I've been making in my prototyping about how this might work in practice: https://lobste.rs/s/p0sgoj/freeing_web_from_browser#c_vivphl https://lobste.rs/s/p0sgoj/freeing_web_from_browser#c_vivphl
vxNsr 8y ago
This is exactly where my mind went, the amount of spam even small time bloggers have to contend with in their comment sections is astounding, now imagine if every page on the internet had a comment section and no filtering, or moderation.... Even today youtube comments suck because of the near total lack of moderation. Even sites like this one or the verge with paid and volunteer moderators who in theory monitor things 24/7 I still see useless spam. I'm not even talking about individual people with opinions some might find offensive, I mean just outright spam advertising.

tim333 8y ago

>One could imagine a system in which multiple sets of links could be associated with a single resource to accommodate this, allowing for a range of different viewpoints on how things are connected. You can kind of do it yourself by quoting the thing in a public comment eg "Freeing the Web from the Browser" https://www.reinterpretcast.com/open-hypermedia https://www.reinterpretcast.com/open-hypermedia and then saying it reminds me of whatever eg. the semantic web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web a bit Then anyone gooling the title may come across stuff like this.

textmode 8y ago

"Different people have different perspectives on how information should be connected, so why do we not allow these range of perspectives to be represented and shared digitally? Why limit ourselves to just one point of view? ... Why re-create code editors, simulators, spreadsheets, and more in the browser when we already have native programs much better suited to these tasks?" The title is something I contemplated and began to address long ago, only on a personal level. With respect to the first question, perhaps this goes to the poor mechanism promoted by Google, to rank the www's contents by "popularity". This mechanism obviously succeeds for purposes of measuring www user opinion and selling advertising (the later not anticipated by the founders in the early years). However it falls short in the non-commercial context, e.g., the academic setting out of which the company grew. Anyone remember "Knol"? Today Google search (and probably others seeking to emulate its commercial success) intentionally promote a pattern of usage of their cache/database where its users never reach "page 2" of search results. The company has built their ad sales business on the idea that one perspective ("the top search result") should not only prevail but also that, optimally, other results need not even be considered. It should be obvious that in a non-commercial research context, this is not optimal. If the www is 100% commercial then of course this is not an issue. But "the www" is difficult to define. All httpd's on any accessible network? All httpd's listening on accessible addresses with corresponding ICANN-registered domainnames? All pages crawled by a commercial bot, deposited in a commercial www cache and made accessible to the public? And so on. In any event, if users only view the www's supposed contents through the lense of a commercial entity, the perception of what the www actually comprises may be manipulated in a way that suits commercial interests, e.g. the sale of advertising. As to the second question, when given the choice I do not use a popular web browser. The author mentions the utility of "native programs". I would prefer the term "dedicated programs". Programs that perform essentially one task, or "do one thing". Whether such programs can perform their dedicated tasks better than an omnibus-styled program that performs many, varied tasks is a question for the user to decide. For example, the author answers that native programs are "better suited" than the web browser. The "web browser" has become a conglomeration of once dedicated programs. There are such dedicated programs for making TCP connections over which HTTP commands can be sent and www content retrieved. This is a task that web browsers can perform, although some users may prefer a dedicated program. In this way content retrieval can be separated from content consumption, alleviating many of the www annoyances such as user tracking, manipulation and advertising.

bastawhiz 8y ago

We almost got there with Pingbacks being the first step. Then they devolved into meaningless spam. Without a system of manual curation, it's impossible to build something where _everyone_ contributes. Spam scales easily, and moderation and curation does not. A thousand good links buried under a million spam links don't add any value. And we can talk about reputation and proof of stake systems until we're blue in the face, but so far, nothing exists that actually works. If it did, we'd already be using it.

yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
I never understood that; PoW seems like not merely an elegant solution, but a simple one. What am I missing?
- Yen 8y ago
  My gut sense is that proof-of-work as a spam deterrent can _improve_ the signal-to-noise ratio, but won't bring it up to an acceptable level. Say you have a simple proof-of-work protecting some action (posting a comment, voting up/down a story, etc.), and you have its difficulty tuned to allow a median-productivity human on a typical desktop computer to do that action at their typical rate. A spambot doesn't need to sleep, take days off, and can get illicit access to much more computing power than any one human. It _would_ probably shift spamming activities to focus on more central, high-value venues, though. hmm.
- bastawhiz 8y ago
  Not everyone has CPU cycles to waste, like users on mobile. Even then, the cost of a consumer contributing one connection is an amount of work that's totally tractable by a spammer. Unless you get into tokens and paying money to contribute. Which defeats the purpose. Why would I pay money to contribute to a decentralized service?
Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
I think web of trust might be suitable here.

dredmorbius 8y ago

Joe: some god thoughts, and ideas I'm seeing from several quartersv and have been thinking about myself. I'd also like to see a tool that's useful for research, a readers' ans writers' Web, not merely a consumers' funnel. I've been lookingat the history of the Web and information in general (guilty pleasure: http://www.historyofinformation.com/index.php http://www.historyofinformation.com/index.php). Bush, Nelson, TBL. Early browser history, especially Viola, an entire system: http://www.viola.org http://www.viola.org . Plan 9's 9p and /net: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#/net https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#/net . I'm thinkinking or possibly presenting the Web as a filesystem, or other forms not typical of contemporary browsers: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6bgowu/what_if_the_web_was_filesystemaccessible/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6bgowu/what_if... And I've a long list of concerns, largely referenced in the last link above. Taking a look at your doc.

skadamat 8y ago

Surprised nobody has mentioned HyperCard - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/05/25-years-of-hypercard-the-missing-link-to-the-web/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/05/25-years-of-hypercar... There was a very compelling vision for the web, by Doug Engelbart and others in the 60's and 70's. Unfortunately, because of the computing culture's attitude of forgetting even the recent history / understanding what foundational work was done (like real scientific fields do!), the web folks didn't have a lot that context. Alan Kay, in many of his talks, has discussed how the browser should really be more like an operating system kernel. The web is a mess and we can still build interesting things with lots of hacking & engineering, but it's fallen short of the original vision. And now we're locked into the tooling we've built.

nradov 8y ago
WebAssembly may eventually get us closer to that vision.
- skadamat 8y ago
  WebAssembly will no doubt give us more freedom, but still has a lot of constraints. Also, it's fundamentally a hack built on top of the browser ecosystem, not replacing browsers entirely!
  - tim333 8y ago
    I hadn't heard of Hypecard so I watched the video on it here http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/apples-hypercard-software-the-innovative-1980s-precursor-to-hypertext-now-made-available-by-archive-org.html http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/apples-hypercard-software... I seemed kind of cool but doesn't do much you can't do with webpages and javascript. Its scripting language seemed much easier to do some things with than javascript though. I kind of imagine WebAssembly will go the other way and make things more complicated.
    - scroot 8y ago
      > I seemed kind of cool but doesn't do much you can't do with webpages and javascript. Its scripting language seemed much easier to do some things with than javascript though. In our current developer culture we tend to view things less holistically and more in terms of this-or-that language or system. Hypercard (which was composed of both the visual system and Hypertalk) was one holistic system that fit extremely well with personal computing of the early to mid 90s (which is why recreations of Hypercard on today's machine miss the point). This was a completely different view of personal computing, one that sought to reduce the chasm between "developer/programmer" and "user". Hypercard allowed authoring in the computing medium, and did so by permitting users take advantage of what was new about computing as opposed to other older media. In fact, they were called "authors" and there were thousand of them — most of them weren't professional programmers. There is a lot that hypercard could do that the modern web cannot. I cannot copy and paste a button — retaining all of its internal functionality in a different context — from one web page to my own (at least not without a lot of trouble). This was the de facto way to get started in Hypercard. Hypertalk is another interesting part of bridging the divide. It is difficult for entrenched programmers to reckon with because it's more like natural English and (unlike most programming languages) is easier to read than it is to write. But for regular people it makes sense. Final point: everything good about computing is about metaphors. Hypercard had one of the best metaphors since spreadsheets: the concept of stacks, cards, and objects on cards. That's all there was and it was easy to understand how these pieces interact. The web does not have anything like this for its "authors" because it is inherently unfriendly to them.

echan00 8y ago

Super small feedback, you should put the video at the top of your post. I really dig the commentary btw, maybe its the english sounding voice :)

dcuthbertson 8y ago

This looked interesting, so I started reading the author's dissertation, but I've been sidetracked/put-off by its overbearing copyright statement. This copy of the dissertation has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with its author and that no quotation from the dissertation and no information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. At least in the US, the fair use clause under the copyright law allows for limited quotes/excerpts w/o asking permission.

tim333 8y ago
I guess you can cut and paste what you as a copyright statement which doesn't mean it's enforceable. I rather liked Allie Broch's one https://lizerbramlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Copyright-Monster.0513131.jpg https://lizerbramlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Copyrigh...
joesavage 8y ago
Sorry about this! It was a stock copyright clause provided by my university. I’ll look into getting it removed, and in the mean time am perfectly happy for you to use the work (with proper attribution) as you see fit. EDIT: The problematic clause in question has now been removed.
- dcuthbertson 8y ago
  Nicely done! Thanks for being so responsive!

Sidth 8y ago

Great article, thanks for sharing. Of relevance here is TiddlyWiki (www.tiddlywiki.com), a personal note taking tool, that includes some of the salient features, like transclusion and user-generated linking, mentioned in the article. In addition, the approach supports a built-in programming capability to allow computation on content (e.g., dynamic filtering and content generation) and extension via plugins. All information (content and Javascript code) is within a single html document.

tomc1985 8y ago

I had to stop reading after a few paragraphs. His assertion that linking belongs to "content producers" is ludicrous. Those content producers have given users the tools to do linking themselves, and they express themselves in a variety of ways over a variety of mediums. You need to learn how to write to express yourself with written word, yet how many people do we here harping on how difficult it is to learn language? At some point we can draw a line and say, "if you want these abilities you need to learn these things". We did so with literacy, with driving, and with so many professional trades. We can do so with basic internet literacy.

ergothus 8y ago
> Those content producers have given users the tools to do linking themselves, and they express themselves in a variety of ways over a variety of mediums. ? How can I link to, say, a quote in that article that offends you? I can't. How can I link to a youtube video and add my own commentary links? I can't (I think) without creating my own video that explicitly copies the original (rather than consuming it). > You need to learn how to write to express yourself with written word, yet how many people do we here harping on how difficult it is to learn language? I definitely wish people took the time to work on that skill instead of assuming it's both automatic and that their level is adequate. Nonetheless, this doesn't seem related to the point of the article - not that linking is HARD, but that, outside of whatever the creator enabled, all we get are top level URLs.
- ianbicking 8y ago
  > How can I link to a youtube video and add my own commentary links? I can't (I think) without creating my own video that explicitly copies the original (rather than consuming it). You can write a blog post and embed the video with timing information. Of course embedding is largely the same as transclusion, among the features touched upon by open hypermedia. While you don't get full expressivity without a blog or something that allows full HTML, you can get most of this in other mediums (e.g., Twitter) where the video is embedded automatically given a link. In theory OEmbed (https://oembed.com/ https://oembed.com/) is a standard for something like transclusion, though it's not very widely supported. Constructing a link to a point in time in a video is a non-standard operation (you just have to know the YouTube interface). Similarly there aren't great patterns for finding a link to a position in a web page. But the pieces are all kind of there, though missing the controls and patterns to bring them together. Which is a failing of browsers, though that points in the opposite direction of the claim in the title of this piece (i.e., it implies to me that we need browsers to go deeper, not increase the breadth of linked applications).

ianbicking 8y ago

We do have a way to create links between two documents without editing either document: create a new document that links to both documents. This is a normal, though informal, activity. And of course simply linking two documents together isn't that useful, you have to say WHY they are linked. I.e., the semantic triple (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_triple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_triple) of subject–predicate–object, or maybe more informally you are simply saying X relates to Y because of Z, where Z is akin to the predicate. Currently in HTML hypertext we're stuffing Z into the link text, which sometimes works nicely and sometimes works very poorly. But in an external document you have all the space you want to explain the relation between the documents. Obviously there's lots of shortcomings of adding a new document to the web to explain every relation between existing documents. But I think it's a good starting point. We're missing things like: 1. Reliable deep linking to documents. We have ids, YouTube timestamps, etc., but finding these is an ad hoc process and they aren't always available. 2. Widespread transclusion tools. We actually have some now, in the form of link previews or OEmbed. When you post a link in a comment or post on Twitter or Facebook, they effectively transclude the link into the document. Not fully interactive, but it might be a better balance between linking and viewing than traditional/literal transclusion. 3. Discovery of these annotations or commentary. There's a hard CS problem here, to maintain privacy while also trying to find serendipitous results. Maybe it involves pre-loading lists of documents from the locations you want to "discover" from. Maybe it requires some understanding of privacy levels, or whether content is personalized or public. Or we use the technique we have now: lead with commentary, with no attempt to discover it after the fact. I.e., I know there are comments on https://www.reinterpretcast.com/open-hypermedia https://www.reinterpretcast.com/open-hypermedia at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17690865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17690865 because I found the document on https://news.ycombinator.com/news https://news.ycombinator.com/news – is serendipity even a thing in a place as large as the web? 4. Maybe publishing tools... do I want to post a Tweet to describe every relation I see? But maybe I do, because even if organic discovery is possible I probably also want to publish a feed of my own annotations, and I want to be part of a community of people doing this, and Twitter is a reasonable example of this. 5. Some sort of representation of these links when they've been found. Even without fancy discovery this is necessary. Right now if I click on a link from a post like: "OMG this is the stupidest argument ever: http://example.com/some-stupid-document" http://example.com/some-stupid-document" it will look like any other page I've opened. Only if I remember well why I clicked on the link will I understand that I've been offered something with derision. The browser has to do something here, all it has currently is the back button to understand why you've gotten somewhere (and that doesn't even work consistently in these cases).