Freeing the Web from the Browser
reinterpretcast.com
reinterpretcast.com
> 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.
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.
At least it will be interesting to know by how much the amount of available information will increase when those barriers are taken down.
While there are barriers, are you sure that's true? There's a million options to host content these days. It's much easier than 10 years and much, much easier than 20 years ago.
You can get a Wordpress blog or a Medium one with 2 clicks. You can make a Facebook account very easily. They might not be perfect, but the options are there.
Hosted blogs can be better in theory, but in practice only an expert can use them for complex applications: for example, indexing a collection of cute kitten photos by tags and multiple criteria isn't the same as posting kittens without metadata and offering readers only titles and generic post listings.
> Not really, billions across the globe check out funny cat pics, play games, watch you-know-what, etc. :)
This!
Many resources seem to be distributed asymmetrically, so is being interested in intellectual development, and only a tiny percentage follows the ideals of enlightenment and intellectual development.
So yes, even though we have the biggest resource of instantly available information under our fingertips, many seem not to use it at all for education and development.
When you do research you need to concentrate on the lecture at hand in-depth, not get lost in a web of references breadth-first style.
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.
Google reader I think had this social thing built into it. It wasn't just an RSS reader.
That was the basic decision of making hyperlinks work one way, instead of two way like it was envisioned by others, eg Ted Nelson's Xanadu.
If you try to submit an existing URL it takes you to the latest post about it or a list of submissions.
This would be automatically available if hyperlinks were two way connections.
All that would be needed is a culture of linking to what you commented about.
Which, I would guess, would have happened in such a web, because it would be a no brainer that any cool tool provides that. Much like the share buttons for SN we have now on every website.
I've been thinking that I should 'break out' that feature as a Chrome extension. It would open the Twitter discussion for the link you're on, as a sidebar. Here's an image of how the sidebar would look (this is a sample of tweets about a particular article called 'Podcasting's Next Frontier'): https://imgur.com/a/GEcR7b1
And if that Chrome extension becomes popular maybe I would ditch the dependence on Twitter and also spider the rest of the web for discussions about the URL, especially big forums like HN, Reddit. I think https://techmeme.com does something like that.
As an aside, this is the kinda thing I miss about the circa 2005 web--when there was a prominent article published it would get discussed in a variety of forums, blogs, etc. Now the discussion has become centralized to a few aggregators and social media sites.
I actually wrote a small extension to collect comments from HN and Reddit using their search API, and it's very useful for me.
My app is actually meant to be like a 'newsfeed for tweets' that shows the top 10 tweets of the day engaged by people you follow, so it vacuums up a bunch of tweets (from tweets engaged--liked, retweeted, etc--by friends of my users) so then it just internally counts which have the most retweets/likes. So what my app thinks is the most retweeted thing might just be reflective of my internal data set rather than what's the actual most-retweeted thing.
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.
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
in the end it is a privacy nightmare. see stylish extension privacy problems last months.
In retrospect, I recognize it as part of a common genre: grand ideas that are necessary only in theory, not in practice. It's easy enough to add commenting to any web page if the owner wants. It's easy enough to discuss any web page elsewhere, like here. And the grand idea treats good discussion as equivalent to global randos posting comments, which is demonstrably false. Real discussions are gardens that require careful tending.
My first defense now against grand ideas is, "That sounds cool, but who needs it enough to pay regularly for it? And why would this be better for that person than whatever they're doing now?" It turns out that many grand ideas only make sense from a 40,000-foot perspective; if you look at it from the point of view of somebody on the ground, it's obviously just a fuzzy cloud.
But wouldn't it be the embodiment of the original dream of a decentralized, democratized web? Where loose collectives of people can self-organize their content, discussion and publishing around shared topics of interest, with minimal outside interference?
If I were a big search incumbent, I'd buy the patent/ startup to this, and put it on a shelf someplace no one would ever see. And I'd keep doing this everytime it was independently developed, until I had such a strangle hold on the global internet / the regulation was so locked down, that this sort of upstart decentralized "siloless / nomadic / free ranging" discussion / open hypermedia system could never come to be.
Thank god we don't live in that kind of a world, where just a few internet companies control and determine the majority of the world's interactions with the internet. Oh, wait...
Thinking about it...Somehow I don't think it was the browser's fault. The problem, I think, was that governments were too weak / slow / isolationist to ensure the internet be preserved as a true public resource / global commons. Sad. But I'm sure the story is not over. Not yet.
Self-publishing on the Internet is cheaper and easier than it ever was in the past. So why do people flock to Reddit, Facebook, etc? Because they are even easier and cheaper, are easier to find, and have a built in audience. But none of those facts relate to governmental regulation or lack thereof, that I can see.
The problem with self publishing is that you're practically invisible to the rest of the world and you'd have to join the big players platforms to get some visibility...
Something that integrates the HN/Reddit thread about a url to the side might work and might not need the mass of users since it's using the other platforms for the comments.
Well you have it right now. One-way hyperlinks are just enough for that. We have HN, Reddit (Digg, Slashdot etc.) and many others.
You're going to get a lot of dismissal here because the idea is old and has been tried many times. I wouldn't let that stop you, annotation is very useful. The thing I am skeptical of however is that it makes the most sense 'as a forum'. I don't think it makes a very good forum, it does make an excellent collaborative research tool. More sane would be to have these annotations and import them into a real forum tool.
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.
EDIT: The problematic clause in question has now been removed.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mediawiki, the software behind Wikipedia, already has all those features, includeming the possibility of moderation by privileged users or automatic updates, on a per-page basis. You'd just need to use the software for blog content rather than encyclopedic content.
Every app is a CRUD app if you ignore enough detail.
Something I never read on any site. It's just pure racism/muppets talking shit. If there were a plugin to block them I'd use it; I feel dirty even knowing they're down there. L
Places like Ars Technica or Stack Exchange have a healthy environment in the comments section, so it can be done.
So, it can be done.
I feel sorry for you - the original early-'00 blogosphere was actually very good, with all sorts of people building connections and intelligent debate through comments. After a while, the conversation was so deep that comments ended up being too short, so they had to define Pingbacks so that people could post elsewhere while still connecting with the source material.
And then spammers and the political sphere co-opted the technology, and it all went downhill.
I think there is still space, for defensively-minded geeks, to create ways to communicate that can keep debate open while shutting down the trolls. It's clear we don't have such a thing at the moment. I fear, however, that well-intentioned researchers like OP will simply end up building new systems that will replicate the mistakes of somewhat-naive early pioneers.
No patience to manage them.
Adopting a single protocol by the masses is something that rarely works. It's much easier to gain critical mass if a server platform (like Wordpress) included an annotation module as part of its default modules, so that it appeared at many websites as soon as they update to the latest version. Then, it could catch on as a popular feature, and other platforms would start to build their own implementations, making it more visible and gaining traction all over the web.
(That Wordpress module could very well be the hypothes.is software, if they're compatible. But it really needs to be adopted server-side by a popular service to gain traction).
There aren't any competitors.
>well, news is news after all.
made in 2013 and
>മലയാളം!! കൊള്ളാം!!
in 2015 which is "English !! Wow !!" in Malayalam, a language spoken in Kerala.
https://www.reinterpretcast.com/pdfs/savage-j-dissertation-2...
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
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
and then saying it reminds me of whatever eg. the semantic web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web a bit
Then anyone gooling the title may come across stuff like this.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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). Bush, Nelson, TBL. Early browser history, especially Viola, an entire system: http://www.viola.org . Plan 9's 9p and /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...
And I've a long list of concerns, largely referenced in the last link above.
Taking a look at your doc.
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.
? 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.
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/) 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).
I am unable to take any content and add additional annotation for others to utilize. There appear to be other projects that try to introduce this functionality though such as hypothes.is [0].
It looks like the author is proposing an overlay system that can be applied to a variety of content types. Users can then apply different overlays that are geared towards different topics / audiences. Basically a swappable reference section.
And hey, browsers do allow extensions nowadays. And if that‘s not enough, build your own.
I really dig the commentary btw, maybe its the english sounding voice :)
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.
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.
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.
...
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.
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) 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 at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17690865 because I found the document on 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" 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).
"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 (they even have a workable concept browser, go figure)
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)
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.