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Comment by scottmotte | Hacker News Reader

Daniel's sentiments resonate with me. I would add 1 additional restraint:

4. Every document is version controlled

That way, as Daniel puts it, "[the document] will not magically alter its contents tomorrow". Or if it does, I can see a history of what was altered. Ideally, this would somehow be built into the protocol/browser rather than be a burden to the publisher.

Also, maybe after a certain amount of time I can no longer modify my document. If I'm the New York Times, this means when I publish a news article document, and it contains an advertisement, that same advertisement forever lives on that document - just like physical newspaper.

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The more i think about it the more I would like to see articles and documentation following the same path as project repos,

Articles and documentation need version control and with pull requests and issues you can rely on other people to notice when some stuff is out of date or inaccurate. The version control allows to see what has been changed over the years, it also prevents censoring.

Source Hut (https://sourcehut.org/) does it very well in my opinion

Interestingly, the page as I just read it does not (no longer, I guess) mention "version control". Probably the author changed their mind towards simplicity. This is funnily, ironically meta.

That said, I agree with the author and discussed the topic with friends for years.

On the "do you practice what you advocate?" side, my freelancer company website is, since day one 8 years ago, a totally static (no script, no cookie... except the one my hosting provider added without letting me options, I will quit them some day) collection of documents with readable stable URLs. https://fidergo.fr/ And the smaller English language https://fidergo.com/

The part detailing dozens of software projects is generated in advance from a structured data store into static pages uploaded to server. https://fidergo.fr/expertise

Version-controlled, scripted deployment.

Safe for me to serve, safe for you to browse and read.

That is the web of documents.

> Interestingly, the page as I just read it does not (no longer, I guess) mention "version control". Probably the author changed their mind towards simplicity. This is funnily, ironically meta.

Author here. The article has not been edited since it was originally published. I agree that version control is an important topic, and I applaud efforts such as IPFS; it is, however, tangential to the main point of "documents vs applications" that I was trying to make.

Oh, sorry, thanks for correcting. That line from a commenter was actually an additional idea, not from you. I totally agree with you. Bundling a global visitor-visible version-control system would bring the whole idea closer to the never-implemented xanadu project.

> On the "do you practice what you advocate?" side...

Sure, I do that with my websites too, and I monetize none of them. (I do use cookies because some of my sites require logging in for access control.)

However, you and me can afford to do that because our livelihoods don't depend on revenue directly from page views. There is this subset of the web that is already just a web of documents, because we can afford to keep them this way.

But what about people whose livelihoods do depend on revenue from page views, and page views alone? It's very frustrating when people who can afford to not do X talk about X without even acknowledging people who can't.

If that's what you're interested in discussing, why don't you start your own discussion about that? It's not constructive to arbitrarily require every single comment on X to give a perfunctory acknowledgement to people who can't afford to do X. You're commenting on a website yet don't acknowledge people who can't even afford electricity. Let people talk about what they want, and if you want to talk about something else, you can do that too.

“While I personally adhere to X just like you, do realize that by holding X to be practical in general you have ignored all people who simply cannot do X” is a valid counterargument to “I agree with X and I personally adhere to it.”

I do encourage you to stay on this site longer before you start throwing straw man analogies at other users demanding that they change where and how they would like to comment.

I've been on this site for years with other accounts that I've forgotten the login to. If there is some policy regarding what I'm allowed to do based on the age of my account, please direct me to it.

I am curious how you consider "do realize that [...]" to be an argument, let alone a counterargument.

> Interestingly, the page as I just read it does not (no longer, I guess) mention "version control".

I think you're misreading gp, they want to add version control to the requirements, they're not discussing an earlier version of op that had it.

Wouldn't this result mutating documents, i.e introducing PUT or POST or DELETE and recreate?

From the article: > A book is a document, to me

How can versioning work for the above statement? Will there be a new book or we modify the existing book?

Let's say I'm the NY Times and I host a page on my server at nytimes/2020/01/22/some-article. 1 hour later I realize I got one of the facts wrong, so I modify that hosted page on my server.

I'm not making HTTP requests here, but, to your point, I am mutating the document at that url.

Maybe the protocol would somehow store the diff between those 2 documents somewhere. There could be an organization, similarly structured to ICANN, that stored and surfaced those diffs long term to users.

That is the essence of IPFS.

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