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Comment by RodgerTheGreat | Hacker News Reader

"This site uses features not available in older browsers."

It is difficult to express the degree of my frustration with C2 being rewritten from a gunmetal HTML page that worked everywhere into an inaccessible heavyweight SPA mess with a frankly bizarre UI.

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C2 is such a good resource. It's a shame a simple, plain readable and most accessible website has been turned into a bloat.

Is C2 doing some sort of A-B testing? Because when I go to the link I see the exact same interface that I have seen there for the past quarter century or so!

Click on any of the links and instead of taking you to a new page it's a pop-up page on top of the existing one (plain left click, not middle-click or whatever you have registered to "open in new tab"). Happened a few years back, very annoying. Performance has improved but I remember a few years ago getting a noticeable delay on some pages.

If you don't follow any links (or you open them in new tabs) it does pretty much look like it always has.

It does look like just another bloated SPA, but Federated Wiki was a geniune advance when Ward was developing it a decade ago. Still is. Shame it hasn't caught on.

I agree it was a mistake to move the existing c2 content into it. Maybe a better try was to start a new wiki of some kind. But the temptation to leverage the existing site to launch Federated Wiki is understandable.

No offense, but how is it an advance? Who needs a wiki that can't be edited? (If I'm mistaken about this, maybe someone can educate me)

If you know git: a federated wiki works like that. To make a federated wiki work like a traditional wiki, you can think of there as being a "canonical copy" which you can clone, make edits, and then use a 'pull request' process for incorporating those edits back into the original. But you also don't need to have a single source of truth: you can, for example, have a group of people—say, students studying for a class—who are building their own wikis, and among each other they can copy in pages, make changes, copy changes back, and so forth, all building a web of things. In the same way that git can replicate a subversion-like workflow but also introduces the possibility of different workflows, a federated wiki can replicate a traditional wiki but also has a number of workflows it can accomplish.

Thanks! I'm aware of the abstract technical idea, but is there any evidence that Ward's wiki ever worked like that? Did he ever accept a "pull request" or are there any notable forks which do?

The federated wiki concept is that you run your own wiki, and replicate, or "fork" content from other federated wikis to yours.

I don't get the qualm.

It works like the Wikipedia mouse-over popups. (Besides that you need to click.)

That's actually quite convenient.

The only real issue is that it does strange things to the browser back button. (Seems like a bug to not pop stuff form the history stack when closing the "popups".)

Let them know.

I did (last year). Ward Cunningham basically told me to GTFO (not quite so directly, but that's the impression I got from him).

That's interesting. I just looked again and I had exactly the same problem for this same site and raised it a couple of years ago as well. The same guy, Ward Cunningham, sent me the text of the page but was otherwise not receptive to my plaint (but wasn't rude). I guess if enough people (more than two anyway) start complaining maybe he'll listen.

I do share your frustration with clever shit over basic usability. Flipside is, I guess, Cunningham isn't your average guy. But I think lesser mortals are still allowed to disagree.

Anyway, thanks for actually complaining instead of just moaning and doing nothing like so many others on the web.

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