Comment by p_ing | Hacker News Reader

Comment by p_ing | Hacker News Reader

I struggle to parse this with every paragraph surrounded by a border. It feels unnatural and extremely distracting.

To the author's take of using a file system as an interconnected 'web', we have networked file systems today, typically clustered though.

We've also had the _concept_ of a media-rich file system, like WinFS [as an overlay to NTFS], which was dead before it was alive due to the WWW.

Networking file systems is _complex_. All vendors would need to agree to a common export model on top of their preferred file systems. Or users would need a specialized partition/overlay developed just for this purpose.

FSes are great, but they're not fit for WWW. Without a control plane, they lack any tooling that makes the WWW better -- redirection, access control, programmatic execution of content (ASP.NET, PHP, CGI ...), etc.

Ultimately this would be a complex solution. Just like many don't simply "open up" their web server to any and all traffic to any and all content, a file system would need to be carefully partitioned the same.

The time for file systems as the vehicle for WWW content is long since past. We have better ways to do things, better caching mechanisms, better performance [through CDNs], better security mechanisms, and so on.

...not to mention, I certainly don't want to open my personal computer's file system up to the Internet.

There would have to be a big leap in evolution of file systems across all major operating systems for the author's dream to come true. I would certainly be excited to see it, but we're talking about allocating _talented_ developers to create a new file system and certainly an open source file system. Like many file systems, it would take years to become a trusted file system to host any content of value.

In the mean time, the author can always investigate WebDAV. Slower than dog shit, but it's available with every major web server.

Sorry for the poor experience with the current design, still experimenting.

I cannot disagree with you, you’re on point on everything when considering the file system as an OS component.

But if we entertain the thought of file system as a document model, or as a transactional data structure, it should come naturally that we can piggyback on the modern infrastructure, at the application level, to achieve the desired qualities.

This very website is an experiment on how this could be done. The main takeaway with my research is that we have much to gain if we leave presentation and layout concerns out of hypermedia documents, letting the client software decide on it, like we do with our editors and IDEs, choosing the theme and font we like, the information is the same no matter. To abandon the fetishism inherited from print media and to transact pure data is to make the web democratic. That’s precisely the recipe used by all social networks: standardized, systemic presentation of schematic payloads following a given ontological model. We need only to copy them with an open model

> Sorry for the poor experience with the current design, still experimenting.

Never stop experimenting.

> file system as a document model, or as a transactional data structure, it should come naturally that we can piggyback on the modern infrastructure, at the application level, to achieve the desired qualities.

I'm having a little difficulty groking what you're trying to say, here. Can you explain it like I'm stupid? My mind immediately bounced to SQL storing binary data or a document DB of some sort.

> if we leave presentation and layout concerns out of hypermedia documents, letting the client software decide on it

Every browser engine does this today. Every engine developer has their own idea of how a standard should be implemented. Granted, this isn't end-user choice, which is probably what you're after. Well, sorta, you have some customization of fonts and [link] colors.

> To abandon the fetishism inherited from print media and to transact pure data is to make the web democratic.

It sounds like you would like some simple scheme that provided you the text and binary data (images) of the website which allowed you to manipulate them into the "newspaper" layout of your choice. Am I getting that correct?

You cannot fully leave presentation concerns out of browsers. Layout and decoration is an integral part of authoring, it’s supported at the markup level. HTML and friends are practically rendering instructions at this point, as if a PostScript for screens. Worse, this has a double edge, for instance, not always what should be a single paragraph of text comes as a single <p> tag, because the mere availability of styling leads people to author ad-hoc structures, since they know it could always be visually reconciled.

What I’m proposing with the research is a data structure transmitted as text. This text payload is the equivalent of a file system volume or tree. Each line in this payload is the equivalent of a file. It’s only a semiotic analogy to file systems.

Given this is such a trivial structure, it’s easy to develop multiple rendering approaches that maintain an isomorphism between the text representation and graphical representation. It does not transmit layout information, the syntax itself is the higher-order layout.

You might wanna checkout the source of this article by appending index.fifo.txt to its URL.

> Sorry for the poor experience with the current design, still experimenting.

It also is simply a blank page when browsed with UBlockOrigin blocking all the java script from executing.

I was expecting this. Sorry, it can’t be helped with the current architecture. This site is a proof of concept using client side rendering. But it’s only a handmade, ~20kb vanilla parser and renderer for the experimental document format. Sorry for the inconvenience

> WebDAV. Slower than dog shit, but it's available with every major web server.

You lost me there. WebDAV is nothing more than HTTP calls with some XML data with a slightly different syntax than the S3 API. There is no fundamental stuff in the spec that command the protocol to be "slower than dog shit" as a file transfer protocol. Please prove me wrong with another argument than: "the particular server implementation I tried was dog shit"

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