Comment by rubyn00bie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rubyn00bie | Hacker News Reader

Oh yeah; we have/had this-- it is called HTML and none of us got the idea behind it (I certainly didn't); so, instead we re-created the prisons we were, and are, trying to escape.

It also is really hard to profit from ONLY meaningful data thus the death of things like RSS feeds. Can't shovel advertisements, trackers, and spyware down someone's throat just sending a nicely formatted HTML table that the client decides how to display and use.

Truly, good, semantically meaningful and correct HTML tags used without tons of obfuscating markup to appease some maniac's absurd sense of aesthetic (my own included) would be a pretty sweet API to consume. There's also the subtle reality that nearly every single worth a shit UI designer app, is under the hood, using XML-esque format to describe what you've done... which is mostly akin to "put a table here, with a given convoluted datasource."

Things like yahoo pipes come to mind as something that was frankly awesome, and totally failed to find a viable market. Likely because you can't shovel ads down someone's throat and forcefully track their every move sending them only things they want to consume.

The continued gating of data is only going to exacerbate the problem; I fear that companies like Facebook (though it's far from the only guilty party) advocate for privacy solely to protect their data monopolies. It will soon become impossible for other players to enter the market because it'll be rightfully illegal to collect or mine that data. Yet, companies like Facebook will still have access to it. I have zero reason to believe their intelligence systems are going to "unlearn" from illegally sourced data or that they can even meaningfully remove it (you really gonna go remove data from those tape backups?).

I was reading the other day about folks who want to do link previews but its essentially impossible if you're not facebook because your bot is instantly blocked. So while organizations like Facebook and Google are allowed to freely pilfer the internet of resources for their own bottom lines... and applauded for it. Anyone else is looked at like scammers and frauds. But.. I'm starting to digress and ramble; so, I'll end it here :)

Edit: Slight updates for grammar/readability.

> the death of things like RSS feeds

This is really sad[1]. RSS feeds are amazing. Thankfully they are not completely gone!

[1] Actually, the whole state of the Internet is sad.

Just curious, what (viable) state of the internet fits your definition of “happy”, or at least “not sad”?

For me at least, being able to use whatever software that adheres to the standard. This means that novice users can use a software that specifically targets them, while experienced users can use a swiss-knife program or even write their own program to handle it. For RSS specifically, most news sites do not have RSS now, which means that you need to visit them one-by-one or use an agregator that you can't modify much.

I share the passion for feeds. IMHO the decision of whether a site exports feeds should not be just up to the owner. There should be a neutral transformation layer that translates any html to rss. Shameless plug [0]. Feel free to support it.

[0] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy

RSS feeds are common, but most readers are mediocre. I'm stuck between some proprietary "pay to remove ads and subscribe for premium" crap, an emacs mode that randomly sometimes takes up to an hour to open, and Thunderbird, which recently deleted all of my RSS feeds.

NetNewsWire has been reliable.

I use newsboat on Linux, and Feeder on Android.

> Oh yeah; we have/had this

Not quite.

They are still stuck in a browser. The DOM is still largely impossible for users to parse and interact with. Web pages are still separate from each other.

> none of us got the idea behind it (I certainly didn't); so, instead we re-created the prisons we were, and are, trying to escape.

That's true for two reasons.

1. The reason you gave: we made it this way.

2. HTML isn't naturally leading us in a different direction than that.

I would say Emacs is a better implementation, though it still has faults.

Really, there is nothing that truly encapsulates this ideal. It's something that I still have difficulty articulating.

I think the most significant walls we have made are in user interface. We make programs that expect users to interact in a predetermined fashion instead of allowing users to make that decision themselves. In designing these programs, we wall the user away from engineering their own interfaces.

I think the second most significant wall is the floor. Take Emacs for example: Sure, you can alter every variable. You can change the keymap. You can change the fonts. But fundamentally, every variable has a default that the user must confront. There is no Emacs-from-scratch configuration option. This gets especially messy because default variables are organized in a carefully designed structure. They are codependent. It's trivial to make small changes, but significant refactoring requires planned cohesion with what is already there.

This topic is something that is vitally important to software design, and yet we don't even talk about it. We just keep rolling with the status quo until someone breaks down a wall and becomes a hero.

IMO one of the great things about eg semantic forms in HTML is that instead of building a GUI you essentially write a machine readable description of an API that a GUI gets generated from in a way that allows for optional styling.

When used correctly it's hard to imagine a better way to provide access to a remote service. Of course it's rarely used correctly when money is involved but I think that's a human thing that happens and the technology can't change it.

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