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Comment by simbolit | Hacker News Reader

I have to say I don't understand this.

Tiddlywiki was great because it was a single file, the whole point of tiddlywiki was being a single self-modifying html file. No app needed.

And back when it was created it worked fantastically. Then browser vendors closed a number of 'security loopholes' and TW stopped working as intended.

I understand wanting a modern app-style hypertext-note-taking thing. I don't understand why you'd use TW as a template.

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TiddlyWiki still works as intended: https://tiddlywiki.com/#GettingStarted but there are so many different clients to run on. Mobile or Desktop ? What OS? What Browser?

This effort https://val.packett.cool/blog/tiddlypwa/ is remarkable as the mobile side of saving is not as robust as on the desktop side of things and there is a scaling limit on performance as the number of tiddlers grows. Also the syncing between tw documents between different desktop/mobile clients can be a challenge with diffing.

Since then I've moved back to plain vanilla vim for a wiki (map gf :tabe <cfile><CR>) but tw.html is still good for data other than plain text and TiddlyPWA https://tiddly.packett.cool/ is a great effort to revisit TiddlyWiki again.

> I don't understand why you'd use TW as a template.

Probably because tiddlywiki is very close to ideal for certain use-cases. One of the main reasons I switched away from tiddly wiki was I needed better mobile support and syncing was always a monumental pain. Not to mention saving the HTML file was fundamentally broken in modern browsers at the time.

I'm actually using obsidian in essentially the same way I used tiddlywiki so this is VERY interesting to me.

I'd like to see a proper tiddlywiki in an Electron application. The one that exists now is quite ugly and annoying to use. Maybe what I really want is someone to re-imagine TW as something similar to Obsidian (or Obsidian->TW?)

> Then browser vendors closed a number of 'security loopholes' and TW stopped working as intended.

Pardon me, but what are you talking about?

I built my ADHD wiki site on TiddlyWiki. Never knew it was not working as intended:

https://romankogan.net/adhd

TiddlyWiki is great for the reasons you mentioned.

In the first few of years of TiddlyWiki (mid/late '00s), the way it worked was that you just had a local copy of your tiddlywiki.html. You just opened it in a browser, and did your editing. Then you could just click the save button inside the page. And the page was saved to disk. This worked on every desktop browser.

Obviously, generically letting webpages, even local ones, have this sort of access to disk had lots of security implications. So, eventually all browsers removed this functionality. Now, you need all these extensions or tools to save the file.

You can do it with Chromium browsers using the native file system access API. Unfortunately, I think Firefox didn’t actually read the whole spec and Apple doesn’t like it because it cuts into their App Store revenue.

Or you can set it up to make a git commit instead of saving to a local file.

Oh, wow, if you just set up git+https with CORS, then you could push to a git remote from a browser. That's real interesting.

Yep, that's where you get tools like Netlify CMS: https://v1.netlifycms.org/

what was the api like back then that let a webpage write to storage? Was it just calling the browser’s “save webpage” thing? And storing the state in html somehow?

you saved like you can "save page as" now from the browser menu.

That part still works in modern browsers. What broke were the browser extension APIs for automatically saving to the file system without a dialog.

I took a lot and identify with a lot.

But I was wondering how much of this is the effect of the internet on cognition? Specifically in the "ADHD bingo", there are things like "having 50 tabs open" or "forgetting why I was looking at my phone". Isn't that just computers destroying our attention? Or do I have ADHD?

Article expresses that the software evolved since then into a de facto app platform. If so, this new undertaking makes tons of sense.

So it may not be what you knew before. Or it may still be that, but also other new stuff.

But as far as I understand, the 'apps' built on top of the TW platform don't work on the TiddlyPWA. Am I wrong?

Are you saying the author needs to verify that all the plugins built so far are compatible with their own new undertaking, for this to remain True Scotsman TW?

I think it's just a basic question about the tradeoff, if any. It's not that the author needs to verify or support compatibility with TW plug-ins, but it's worth asking because plug-ins provide a value add that's orthogonal to the value add of making TW a PWA.

I was able to get something very similar working for Chromium browsers at https://slaymaker1907.github.io/tiddlywiki/plugin-library.ht.... It doesn’t use a browser plug-in or anything, it’s just Chromium is the only engine to support the native file system access API (Firefox, please prioritize stopping actual Google bologna like the web integrity stuff).

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