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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

I feel like "You can move things from one to-do app to another to-do app!" is not really a compelling answer to the question "Why would I want to build blocks with the Block Protocol".

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One use case might be for federated chat. Rich media can exist as blocks and remain chat client agnostic.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/

I knew what xkcd it was just by looking at the link. Lol

That's because people whip it out constantly and almost always where it's not appropriate. It's pretty rare that anyone tries to enact a new standard. So, instead we see this comic use to downplay every time that anyone does anything resembling anything that has ever been done before. Which is to say: to downplay everyone else's efforts. It has long gone past being funny to just being dismissive in it's widespread use.

Yeah, it seems like it shows up any time a standard is suggested, which is taking a two sentence premise and ignoring 2/3 of it.

I came here for this comment

What are the existing standards?

HTML, JSON, iframes

The HTML and JSON standards don't get close to this by themselves.

I don't think iframes really do it either, but even if they do nobody uses them that way and a replacement seems okay. It's not really a "competing standard" if nobody wanted to use it.

If you look at https://blockprotocol.org/hub and can survive the <5fps (yikes!), you can see that they've demonstrated reimplementations of <p>, <img>, <h1> by piling mountains of Javascript/JSON on what is (hopefully?) just those standard HTML elements under the hood.

If I have to pick between standard slow-moving HTML and wild west HTML-reimplemented-in-React, I will choose the former every time. I will never have to worry about "my <p> has been abandoned by its maintainer and is now malware!".

http://microformats.org/

Exactly this. There may not be a 'standard' that does any of this already, but the goal of this being portable across websites requires all of those websites to support this 'new' standard -- so there probably isn't a way this becomes wide spread enough to be useful.

Relatedly, this follows the Notion model, where the UI is intrinsically tied to and limited by the data model. This may have appeal to developers who already are primed to think that way, but it's a terrible UI paradigm for everyone else.

Like many others, one of the first things I thought of. This ain’t Mr. Spolsky‘s first rodeo, he must know of this specific xkcd!

The naming, given 2022’s technology landscape, is also super confusing. Block… no chain, but is it related? Or is this the payment platform formerly known as Square and they released some protocol???

Nope - It basically a React component library/package manager - ReactComponentHub. I do hope it works well, but like many, doubtful from previous examples in the past.

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