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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

Anti-pattern: GasolinePoweredFlySwatter

Reaching for heavy and complex tools when a straightforward solution would have sufficed.

Example: Requiring JavaScript for a simple static site. Making a wiki as an SPA.

Wow I've just noticed what they've done to C2 Wikis. An amazing site and resource, and they had go to and JS framework it. It was looking a bit long in the tooth, sure, but couldn't they just have added a few lines of CSS?

The worst part is: it doesn't even look good/modern now. They should have gone with this:

http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

(excuse the profanity)

The original is much nicer, same URL without the "better".

Downvotes? The look of the original website (the URL without the "better" [1]) much closer resembles the original c2 wiki style. The CSS is not even needed in this case.

[1] http://motherfuckingwebsite.com

Not IMO. Better is better.

Came here to say this. Does anyone know whether there's an effort to port this to a sane wiki system?

It sounds like the wiki was rewritten recently as a single page app which is what is causing the slowdown.

See https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling#remodeling which is linked from the footer of the wiki.

Part of Ward Cunningham's roadmap is to make mirroring (even to other wiki implementations) much easier.

That said, given that he's the original inventor of the wiki, I'd say he's earned a bit of patience on our part. Let's wait and see where he's going with these ideas (some of which are: federation, bi-directional linking between wikis, forking & merging, transclusion, etc.), a bit longer before contemplating setting up a "classic" wiki with this content.

http://imode.gitlab.io/projects/c2/index.html

here's a dump of the entire wiki in WikiWikiWeb markup. if you can do anything with it, let me know.

What do you think of Pandoc? http://pandoc.org/

The two supported wiki markups:

- MediaWiki https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting

- TWiki http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/TextFormattingRules

I wonder which one is the closest to WikiWikiWeb syntax.

Another cool stuff would be to put that in the gopherspace.

I actually tried pandoc + MediaWiki markup but it ended up quite consistent and not representing the original page.

ward's site actually contains the rules for deconstructing the JSON and translating it to HTML. I'll have a look at that when I have time.

> Making a wiki as an SPA.

Well, that's technically fine. However, the page should be a static document which was rendered on the server side and the other stuff should be loaded later and only when needed.

There is no reason why the initial render can't be done in <20 KB and <5 requests.

> However, the page should be a static document

SPAs are almost always not rendered server-side. They can be, but it's harder so they aren't.

Ironic isn't it?

What is SPA?

Single Page Application

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-page_application

No Javascript required, but pages are in JSON instead of HTML.

http://c2.com/wiki/remodel/pages/[page_title] e.g. http://c2.com/wiki/remodel/pages/AntiPatternsCatalog

What is behind the obsession with JSON?

If JSON is nested too deep, memory is exhausted.

Why blindly put an entire structure of unknown size into memory? Just to parse some text.

Why not use something like netstrings?

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