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Comment by pilgrim0 | Hacker News Reader

> If you think that file system is a viable approach to web site, how would implement Hacker News?

Hacker news is a web application, with a client-server architecture. Indeed would be impractical to replicate with the file system model.

Still, I think it would be useful to have standardized hypermedia documents. It would allow for content that's naturally multimedia to be much more easily handled and distributed. I find it super weird that we need to create a 'website' just to have a multimedia, responsive document. It practically must be hosted on a server because nobody sends HTML around. Mind you that I used the file system just as a metaphor for what an offline-first hypermedia document model could look like.

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One of the huge advantages of the web is that there is no distinction between static web sites and web application. The backend implementation can change per page based on what is needed.

The remote filesystem needs a server. HTTP is a much better protocol for serving multimedia documents. The remote file system protocols are slow because they are based on RPC and make lots of requests.

It is dangerous to use filesystem for sharing cause have to carefully limit write access. None of the current filesystem protocols do that well.

If you were designing something new, it would probably end up like WebDAV or S3, an object store that can be used like a file system. There is a place for distributed storage, like IPFS but better, but that wouldn't be a file system.

There is a standard for hypermedia documents, HTML. There were attempts to make it more semantic, like XHTML 2.0 or using RDF, and they failed. There were attempt to transform XML, XSL, and that failed.

People send HTML around, they upload it to servers like I did a few days ago. But HTML is usually generated, for me because Markdown is easier to edit and can use templates.

I’m not at all suggesting replacing HTML; it's a treasure we have.

I think you're failing to see the point. Having hypermedia documents follow a file system model does not imply that you would need to basically give up hypertext protocols. I'm sure you’ve at least once visited an Apache directory index on the web. Heck, just type file:///Users/ianburrell in your browser, and you'll have a hypermedia document modeled after the file system. Take that concept to its ultimate conclusion, and you'll see that a dead-simple hypermedia document can be built without resorting to any new technology or infrastructure.

It can be built that way, but only locally. If you want it over a network you need something to serve it.

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