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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

A "pageless document that lives online" is also known as... a web page.

Instead of creating web pages in html, css, and js, people will now create them using familiar "word processing" and "spreadsheet" apps on Google Drive.

And these web pages come with nice fine-grained access controls -- authors can specify who is able to view, comment on, and edit their documents with a few clicks.

Makes perfect sense.

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That is a weird criticism. A document is clearly not a webpage, main use of Google docs is easy collaboration and that’s not really a thing with html.

Most people would not set up something like a git repo to track changes and comment on the content for example.

My comment was not meant as criticism. I'm not sure why anyone would interpret it as such.

Your opening sentence came off to me as sarcastic opining that this is an inferior reinvention of a 30-year-old wheel.

Thank you. That's what phreack said too. See my response to him here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30555760

The way you laid out the beats of your original comment made it sound sarcastic if you read it expecting the usual off-hand snark that's prevalent on the internet, so "makes perfect sense" would turn into "makes no sense at all" - therefore seeming like the product is useless or a step back when web pages already exist.

Thank you. Your feedback is helpful: In hindsight, I can now see my comment could be misinterpreted as sarcastic, even if that wasn't my intention. (If anything, I think giving people more/better tools for creating online content is great -- with the obvious caveat that all this content will reside in "private webs of documents" controlled by a single company.)

It came off as sarcastic initially to me, but I read it again and realized it was earnest.

I understood it as intended, but I can see how people would read it that way. It has roughly the structure of a "it's just x with y baggage" comment at the outset and could trip that wire in the mind of someone who doesn't finish reading before commenting.

edit: more comments appeared while I was drafting. I guess it never hurts to have the same feedback framed different ways...

Apologies for mistaking it as such. After re-reading it again I can see your original intent. I need to brush up on my principle of charity :/

Thank you. I appreciate it :-)

It seems we've all come across so much (unhelpful) sarcasm on the web that whenever we see certain phrases or grammatical constructs, we are unconsciously preconditioned to think the intent is negative -- even when it isn't.

On my end, I'll try to be more mindful about my phrasing next time.

Speaking of editing web pages using gdocs, I implemented this approach[1] on a recent project to make an easy-to-use CMS. The server acts as a proxy to get the HTML from google docs and does some cleanup[2]. It's pretty good for simple info pages that don't require any special CSS or layout.

[1] https://github.com/rocdata/rocserver/blob/main/website/views... [2] https://github.com/rocdata/rocserver/blob/main/website/views...

This is Frontpage for 2022.

What ? This is not a web page, this is a text editor with no page layout. It has nothing to do with a webpage. You have the implication backward (all web documents are pageless but not all pageless documents are web pages..)

Edit: I also thought your comment was sarcastic, my bad

This is exactly what I was thinking. I read that page, and at the end, I thought "...so HTML then?"

How do three nontechnical writers collaborate on an HTML document?

In the real world typically with Wordpress if the target group is outside the company or Confluence if the target group is inside the company.

I prefer the process of writing up a short document describing a feature proposal or small project using Google docs over confluence. Its self contained, limited (focused) in scope and the highlighting/commenting/editing feedback loop between multiple authors is way better.

Yes. Html/css/js is to a first approximation only usable by professionals anyway. It makes no sense to require normal people to employ professionals to simply make web pages.

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