Quotebacks – Quote the Web
quotebacks.net
quotebacks.net
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23467586. There were a few comments there but we moved them hither.)
Verdict: it's nice! I'll be using this.
I tried it out with an HTML page here, for some JavaScript tutorials taken from medium, dev.to, and one illustration (also embedded) not using this library from Pinterest.
https://www.mediazed.com/learn-javascript.html
Disclaimer: That's my own page. Normally if I could I'd also provide a link or explanation of the content, that doesn't link to my own page. However, the content here is pointless without being embedded in a webpage. But if you just want to see what it looks like without following the link, I took a screenshot.
I could see this being useful for me for quotes in an article. It looks nice and does what it says on the tin. For a quote or two, I'd recommend it.
It's a much more interesting development in the same direction! The implementation currently only seems to work when transcluding content on the same domain, rather than quoting anything from across the web. Having discovered this, I feel I have a bit more context for where the creator is coming from!
An idea: when you take a quote, send the webpage through archivebox.io and pin the resulting artifacts to IPFS... or other repository the author can maintain. Key feature: the quoting author maintains the copy of the document they are quoting. The embedded "quote" fixture on the page will always point to the original URL and citation date alongside the author's "copy" of the page if it happens to die or change.
It's not best-practices or accessible but works across the board, from academic PDFs to tweets. There's also more options for annotation (color highlighting, sarcastic emoji etc) in an image.
Note that Hypercore is different from Bittorrent in that you can actually update your site after you originally create it, although older versions are always available.
This article kind of says it all: "The InterPlanetary File System Wants to Create a Permanent Web"—https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/78xgaq/the-interplanetary...
If the source supports [Webmentions][https://webmention.net/], I'll send it too.
Blogging could be so much improved if there were ways to discover other writers doing interesting things from one writer that you enjoy. Modes of intertextuality like this are key to building healthy, interesting communities.
Edit: Looking at the code it looks like they're indeed searchable with the help of fuse.js (fuzzy search library): https://github.com/Blogger-Peer-Review/quotebacks/blob/maste....
Where is the JS pulling the title and image from? OpenGraph?
I'm sorry about your bones, but you can already lie and misquote on the Internet!
Although I suppose the frame around the quotes that this service provides does give the text an air of authority.
Sounds nice, but my gut feeling is that you wildly underestimate how far people will go to work around anything that could change their beliefs.
This seems to hold true on all sides of the political spectrum, in art as as well as in science and the only difference is what beliefs people stick to.
As a deeply religious person this might come of as really ironic and the irony is not lost on me: quite the contrary and for that reason I've thought about it multiple times.
The man agrees, "Yeah, corpses don't bleed."
The doctor pokes him in the arm with a needle and blood wells up.
The man looks at his bleeding arm in astonishment and says, "I'll be damned! Corpses do bleed!"
(This is a true story. I think it's in "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" IIRC.)
In the happy path (where the quoteback is genuine) the browser could indicate to the user that the quoteback is genuine and the link would take the user to the normal website if it still has the quote, otherwise to the archive snapshot.
In the unhappy path (where the quoteback is disingenuous) the browser could notify the user that the quoteback is disingenuous.
If the snippet does indeed come from the website in question, the website will return a signature which the quoter can embed along with the snippet on their own website.
The signature would prove that the content came from the same person who controls domain X (as attested by the CA fo your choice). The user agent can display all this information where the content is quoted.
Alternative: Isn't there some way to save an HTTPS request in a way that others can verify that the webpage was signed with an authorized certificate?
Future: I wish authors would sign their content directly rather than depend on TLS and certificate authorities. P2P networks do this well (because they have to) but it hasn't caught on in the rest of the web.
That sounds a lot like "Signed HTTP Exchanges"[0], which has some support in Chrome but doesn't automatically provide a way of checking quotes in web pages.
[0] https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-http-origin-...
I suggest trying out ScrollToTextFragment https://github.com/WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment if you haven't already I know it was a little controversial and it's currently Chrome-only, but it might improve the UX for some people.
Very cool, though!
Secondly - I wish I could get ScrollToTextFragment to work reliably. I've tried integrating this into Quotebacks and every time it just works so sporadically that I roll it back. Somehow Google thinks this is robust and stable enough to put into production but my experience is very hit/miss.
Full interview of Ted Nelson from “Lo and Behold”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqx6li5dbEY
> Nelson, who was featured in Werner Herzog’s latest film, Lo and Behold, believes that instead of the existing formats we use online, where text often mirrors the constraints of paper, we should have a system of two-way links that would allow readers to see the context of any quotation...
> There are a few offline examples, such as the Talmud and the Rosetta Stone, where text is read side-by-side. Nelson believes this is how online documents should be constructed.
> “As far as I’m concerned, this is the way literature should develop,” he says. “I don’t consider this technology, I think it’s literature. Being able to see visible connections between pages seems to me absolutely fundamental.”
> Nelsons says this setup would be the ideal format for reading annotations, additional details, correspondence, and disagreements: “It’s essentially a different genre of writing.”
> As Nelson sees it, our current use of online documents is very limiting. He’s particularly disturbed by how we use the words cut and paste. When the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, cut came to mean “hide this piece that I’ve just marked in an invisible place,” and paste became “plug whatever’s in this invisible place to where I’m pointing.”
> “To me that was an outrage because no one has yet got a decent re-arrangement system that allows you to see the all the parts of the arrangement as you’re writing,” Nelson says. “Those words meant something entirely different until 1984.
> Balzac, the French novelist, carried a razor blade around his neck for cutting up his manuscript. Tolstoy would cut up his manuscripts and leave all the pieces around the floor. This is true cut-and-paste, where you’re re-arranging on a large scale and able to see the relationships between parts.”
> Ironically, Nelson is friends with Larry Tesler—the man responsible for our modern use of cut and paste—but still calls their mislabeling “a crime against humanity.”
https://qz.com/778747/an-early-internet-pioneer-says-the-con...