Maybe I am just naive, but this all seems terrible. There are paragraphs of ideology everywhere for every aspect of this and nothing boils down to any understandable description of what engineering mechanisms I can use or how it solves the problems laid out. I really want to like this, but if I spend 15 minutes clicking the guides, the “build a solid app on your lunch break” link, and going all over the site, and I s…
There is more information on GitHub. https://github.com/solid/solid-spec
Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
21–30 of 263 posts
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#22Seems to be a rebranding of Linked Data. Need convincing that Linked Data is key to decentralized applications.
I do think that the Semantic Web is still a cool idea though.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#23I don't quite understand "how". It all sounds magical.
I could be wrong, because I'm also a little bemused by the lack of specifics on the site, but it sounds like the Pod stores sort of "quanta of shareable information" (photos, essays, one's phone number, etc.), and makes them accessible via authenticated APIs.
So instead of posting a photo on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, one would (ideally) authorize Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to read photos stored on the Pod with a "shared publicly" tag (or similar), and then anything with that tag would show up automatically in one's feed on all three sites, and (if also authorized) push reactions and comments back to the Pod.
If I'm understanding correctly, it sounds like a neat idea. I'll be interested to see how well it does.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#24Maybe I am just naive, but this all seems terrible. There are paragraphs of ideology everywhere for every aspect of this and nothing boils down to any understandable description of what engineering mechanisms I can use or how it solves the problems laid out. I really want to like this, but if I spend 15 minutes clicking the guides, the “build a solid app on your lunch break” link, and going all over the site, and I s…
Tim Berners-Lee is as finished as Woz. We should stop giving him air time because he's just embarrasing himself. Reminds me of this recent story with Michael Atiyah.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#25From the visionaries that gave us RDF and the Semantic Web.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#26applications :( Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest. The browser was an application for navigating hyperlinked information. Other applications include email clients, news readers, FTP clients, and IRC clients. You never had to download a megabyte of minified JavaScript just to re…
Like a lot of people on HN, you appear to be conflating "download a megabyte of minified JavaScript just to read a 500-word article" with the concept of a web application, and implying that embedded applications are somehow a violation of the web's intended purpose.
But hypertext is an application, and the web was always about hyperlinked text as well as embedded content. The and tags and now defunct concepts like VRML demonstrate that the "only static, only hypertext" version of the web you miss were more due to the primitive nature of an undeveloped platform than a state of grace and purity which has since been defiled by the ability to do computation on the web... the intent for the web to host both static and interactive content was there practically from the beginning.
>Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest.
I don't. I like being able to watch videos and play games on the web, and buy things, and so on.
And webrings were fun, but modern social media offers a much bigger and more varied set of communities than the old web ever had. I know that's an unpopular sentiment to voice on HN, but as far as most end users are concerned, Reddit and Twitter and even Facebook are useful in ways that IRC and web chatrooms never were.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#27I might suggest taking a look at Blockstack and Urbit, which are efforts to do the exact same thing through two completely different approaches.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#28Is the protocol open and documented? I couldn’t see it.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#29Previous discussions (before the adoption by Inrupt):
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#30I really would like to support this, but I seem to miss the big picture. Looking at the github repos, Solid appears to be mostly about giving a second life to TBL's and W3c's failed pet projects, notably semantic web, linked data, RDF, SPARQL, JSON-LD.
I think Solid is the way those inventions (Linked data, RDF...etc) were meant to be used with each other.