Comment by recursivedoubts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by recursivedoubts | Hacker News Reader

recursivedoubts

> if we always had hypermedia with directories and files, why hasn't the web evolved into a mesh of interconnected file systems?

It kind of has. URLs have the notion of paths, which are obviously strongly associated with the notion of file system hierarchies. People sometimes (sometimes accidentally) put their file systems directly on the web, see DirectoryIndex in apache for example.

> Why isn't a website just a remote directory on someone's computer that we can explore via a file browser?

Well now we are getting into the meat of it. To be a hypermedia requires the presence of hypermedia controls in a media. Hypermedia controls can be as simple as links, but the web introduced more sophisticated controls such as forms, and allowed HTML authors to specify more significant interactions beyond click-to-link.

IMO the uniform interface is the most interesting aspect of hypermedia, and that really emerged post Web. I like the authors concept of a file explorer enhanced with hypermedia ideas though and would be interested to see more details on it.

The directly support you get with HTTP is rather terrible. It works ok for a human browsing a directory manually, but if you want to actually download one it becomes a mess, since you can't tell if "index.html" is a file or just something Apache generated on the fly. There is no "list directory" command in HTTP (there is PROPFIND in WebDAV) and there is no "download directory" in your browser, you have to fiddle with wget and friends.

It's one of the things I love about IPFS, it has native directories along with fuse services, so you can just `cd /ipfs/...` and browse around. That has a lot of beautiful side effects in that you no longer need .zip to package directories and for a lot of things you no longer even need to download anything, you just access them directly via your file system.

Especially with FTP being removed from browsers, we could really need a proper official successor that can act as an online file system.

How many forms do you need? It should be 10, 50 or 5 million standard forms and free-form ones that could be required to request standardization.

I one time tried to make a form that works with iphone auto fill just for name and address fields. Apple insists putting the house number on the end of the street name. House numbers may have multiple letters and streets are named after people who may have a single letter second name. Boulevard Peng Da nr 1 vs Boulevard Peng nr Da 1. This doesn't work.

During corona I needed a document to work my night shifts. I received a pdf with some form fields. After filling those out the document changed it self into a static permit. I had never seen such a thing before.

When writing blog software I ponder organization a good bit. My conclusion was that depending on the size, quantity and nature of the writings different methods would work best. however! As it grows it is hard to tell which one is currently the best formula and it is very easy to maintain the full set that I define as: Hierarchical tree, Categories, tags and search.

How to do the hierarchical tree is obvious.

A limited number of Categories that should be defined in advance (if possible)

You should have as many tags as possible. This comment could be tagged #history #writing #organizing #ideas #search #link #interface etc. The user can be exposed to a small sub set of sufficiently populated tags. The tag pages can be sorted by the amount of tags per word.

Search is just search but could have topical filters and use all of the before mentioned but could also take one (or more) articles as queries (and list the results under the text)

How and when to stitch on an LLM I don't know.

> How many forms do you need?

You just need to rethink the form, which is also an inheritance from print media, as a possibly fuzzy dialogue. Incorporating multimodal input, extracting information from uploads, etc., is a huge accessibility win. This is totally achievable right now, it’s just a matter of viewing the "form" as an interaction designed to fulfill a predetermined goal. What actually complicates forms is handling conditions, state tracking, and synchronization, which can become arbitrarily complex. This sort of dynamic behavior can never be fully standardized. So special cases are always going to need special solutions.

> Hierarchical tree, Categories, tags and search.

I think it's important to highlight the distinction between exploration and retrieval. Tags and categories are perfect for powering indices and lists, enabling opinionated exploration interfaces. However, when it comes to open-ended retrieval, arbitrary conventions don't really help. Retrieval requires the searcher to have some prior information on patterns, which are media dependent.

To make the retrieval problem more manageable, information needs to be structured in a predictable manner. Patterns are powerful tools for enabling and enforcing memorization. For example, if I want to retrieve a specific academic paper, my search model will align with the typical information pattern of academic papers. This pattern encourages me to memorize key metadata, such as the publication year, author names, institutional affiliations, and keywords in the title. These elements form the standard metadata body for this type of content.

I've never actually used it but for laughs I one time elm.setAttribute('value', elm.value) for each field so that the values are in the html, then just upload the form innerHTML, append it to a file and use some dom/xml parser to get at the values. If the user needs to edit the values simply reinsert the html form into a page. If they only need to look at it use ccs to disable pointer events and remove the outlines from form fields. It was a pretty hilarious experiment. The form all of a sudden worked just like the paper version. You write your name on the dotted line where it says name then the data is stored right there.

With some js I could easily add field sets and sub sets. For example click add address, add house numbers, add additional employee/function/phone numbers sets, they can each have 100 email addresses and 1000 websites etc

xpath isn't sql but if the data looks this much like xml?

Converting posted values into table rows and back makes me feel like I'm doing something I'm not supposed to. Tables do not fit our mental model. What is the right solution if you only have one customer who has 6 phone numbers? The enterprise thing to do is add a table with phone numbers and give each number a number. lol?

DB performance is of course godly at scale but if it is just one form that lives on the users computer.... it might not be a nail?

> Hierarchical tree, Categories, tags and search.

It's a fun puzzle, no idea how far we are solving it. We should probably record what one looks at and have a button to mirror a publication locally.

I've often pondered how discovery can be pushed so that things of interest to you may gravitate towards you (and to those with similar interests). 100% accuracy at that would be a game changer. Someone out there is writing precisely that what I need or want to be reading.

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