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Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

solid.inrupt.com

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Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#101

Post by throwawaymath »

Moru wrote: post #82
wpietri wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't. For me to get a nostalgia rush I need to go down to the Computer History Museum and see yet older stuff. Nostalgia isn't a function of quality, but of age. Douglas Adams expressed this well: “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything t…

Except that a lot of things was instantaneous just 20 years ago. I can't believe how slow even new smartphones are when I'm trying to make a phonecall... Every press of a button feels slow, there have to be animations scrolling screens left and right instead of instantly activating something. Every time I'm using something new and flashy, I feel like I'm stuck in sirup.

I don't recall anything on the internet being instantaneous 20 years ago. Surely you're misremembering?

I also don't find that new smartphones have much touch-based interface latency; but even so, that kind of latency doesn't have anything to do with the internet, nor the halcyon days of late 1998. To my recollection browsing the web in the late 90s was far more exciting but also far less useful than today.

The modern internet has a lot of inefficiency, but I don't see how you could seriously claim it's slower than what we had 20 years ago. Sometimes heavy web applications are relatively slow because they're underoptimized, but that's less of a technology failing and more of a developer failing. Most websites load spectacularly faster, and perform better, than all but completely static HTML websites from two decades ago despite having much larger byte footprints.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#102

Post by Moru »

lstamour wrote: post #91
Moru wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that a lot of things was instantaneous just 20 years ago. I can't believe how slow even new smartphones are when I'm trying to make a phonecall... Every press of a button feels slow, there have to be animations scrolling screens left and right instead of instantly activating something. Every time I'm using something new and flashy, I feel like I'm stuck in sirup.

The closest thing dialup ever got to instantaneous was text-based terminal interfaces. And I remember agonizingly slow load times in Lynx just as often as agonizingly slow load times in Mosaic, NN and IE. Our expectations change, however, and as tech speeds up, we ask “why aren’t people optimizing for what we care about, performance?” But there’s a multitude of answers, many of which are sadly non-technical. Speed an…

Yeah, didn't mean old modems, more like applications. My 300 baud modem was pretty slow. But applications were always very fast compared to most new stuff.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#103

Post by leveck »

reaperducer wrote: post #64
drawnwren wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not. Geocities was a miserable collection of weird text that was almost completely unusable. FTP and IRC were great for the people who used them, but the community was small and still exists. For all the people lamenting the loss of the old internet, most of it is still there(irc,ftp,rss,ncurses email clients) -- you can still use it. You should probably ask yourself why you aren't.

You should probably ask yourself why you aren't. Because there's no gopher client for macOS. I bet if Google indexed Gopher sites at the outset, Gopher would still be a thing.

Use lynx in your terminal emulator...

There is a vibrant international community of people still on gopher, and a lot of us run our own servers. Check out gopher://gopherproject.org

There you'll find a getting started file, and other useful things such as a curated site listing (think DMOZ for gopher) called the Gopher Lawn.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#106

Post by hobofan »

Disclaimer: This comment contains some self-promotion (as we are working on a related solution)

Solid overall looks very interesting, and I can very much empathize with the "decouple data and applications" magic aspect of it (even though they're not doing a great job describing it). My personal experience has been that with a good linked-data approach, building apps can become a lot easier, as linked (more specifically semantic data) mimics traditional information gathering much better, where you start with a small information point, and then enrich the data by just adding more and more related data points to it. I also found that a linked-data approach lends itself better to adaptive UIs, where one entity might be missing data, that another one has.

All that being said, I feel like Solid made some (non-)decisions that might lead it down the same path as the things that were tried in the last Semantic Web hype:

- Solid is using the same old linked-data formats, that are largely URL based. The problem with URL based systems is that the content behind those URLs might at any point disappear, or change. That makes it especially hard if you try to achieve some semantic conciseness, where the data you entered keeps at one point in time is guaranteed to keep its semantic meaning forever. - In a world where most application developers think about data models on the level of database tables, RDF/JSON-LD is too low level and verbose when trying to use it for building something sophisticated. W3C also standardized a higher level format, OWL2 (which can also be expressed in RDF(S)), which provides a nice abstraction level in its native form.

Those are some of the lessons I've learned while working on Rlay[0], where among other things we've built a content-addressable adaptation of OWL2[1] for the decentralized web. We had to cut some small parts out of the specification so that the semantic stability of concepts is guaranteed when adding additional concepts to the worldwide ontology everyone is sharing, but overall the expressiveness is the same.

Content-addressability has many nice side-effects, but the one I like the most when it comes to Semantic Data is that it allows for a much more organic evolvement of the concepts people are using. If you decide to add a new property to a concept, you can just do that, get a new content-addressing-hash and start using that instead of the old one. No need to add it to the de-facto centralized schema repository that is schema.org.

I hope I didn't go off on too many tangents here. I've been meaning to write a blog post about the topics I touched on for a long time, but never really got around to it. Well at least this comment exists now.

[0]: https://rlay.com [1]: https://github.com/rlay-project/rlay-ontology

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#107

Post by afpx »

nulbyte wrote: post #87

After reading what little documentation is available and installing a single-user solid server myself, I wonder if this is how people felt when the World Wide Web was first invented. I find myself asking: Okay, now what? Except I think even the World Wide Web, when it was first invented, at least had a demo that worked. Solid doesn't even seem to work. Following instructions for "learn[ing] how to install and run you…

I hope there’s a lot more than that. I mean, they claim that they’ve been working on it for 15 years.

“Solid has taken 15 years of development work to finally deliver this.”

I probably missed something, but I didn’t see mention of Solid being taken through a standards body, either (even his own one). Web protocols were standardized early and were royalty free, with working prototypes. That helped lead to quick adoption.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#108

Post by galfarragem »

gfodor wrote: post #88
nulbyte wrote: post #87

After reading what little documentation is available and installing a single-user solid server myself, I wonder if this is how people felt when the World Wide Web was first invented. I find myself asking: Okay, now what? Except I think even the World Wide Web, when it was first invented, at least had a demo that worked. Solid doesn't even seem to work. Following instructions for "learn[ing] how to install and run you…

AFAICT there are literally no apps to try this on. Why did they decide to announce this and publicize it before a basic, well-polished, example was ready? The pod signup process is using vanilla bootstrap, there wasn't even a visual design pass.

It seems kind of vaporware to test people's reactions and get allies. It's definitely interesting and could be game changing if well implemented. Microsoft and Apple could push it and win an important battle.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#109

Post by NeedMoreTea »

throwawaymath wrote: post #101
Moru wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that a lot of things was instantaneous just 20 years ago. I can't believe how slow even new smartphones are when I'm trying to make a phonecall... Every press of a button feels slow, there have to be animations scrolling screens left and right instead of instantly activating something. Every time I'm using something new and flashy, I feel like I'm stuck in sirup.

I don't recall anything on the internet being instantaneous 20 years ago. Surely you're misremembering? I also don't find that new smartphones have much touch-based interface latency; but even so, that kind of latency doesn't have anything to do with the internet, nor the halcyon days of late 1998. To my recollection browsing the web in the late 90s was far more exciting but also far less useful than today. The moder…

I find exactly the opposite.

Some websites overloaded the 98 web by being an entire page of diced and sliced graphics that assembled the page. Most were mainly text and appeared pretty much instantaneously. Images came slower than the article you could be already reading if you were on dial up.

One of the things I dislike about the current web, is how slow most sites have become - mostly thanks to an absurd overhead of JS and third party SaaS just to display a text article with a few pictures. The number of sites that will unreadbly bounce the content around as various web fonts, icon fonts and other trivia load is pretty ridiculous. It's the main reason I now browse with JS off and white list JS for a tiny few.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#110

Post by sanderjd »

throwawaymath wrote: post #101
Moru wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that a lot of things was instantaneous just 20 years ago. I can't believe how slow even new smartphones are when I'm trying to make a phonecall... Every press of a button feels slow, there have to be animations scrolling screens left and right instead of instantly activating something. Every time I'm using something new and flashy, I feel like I'm stuck in sirup.

I don't recall anything on the internet being instantaneous 20 years ago. Surely you're misremembering? I also don't find that new smartphones have much touch-based interface latency; but even so, that kind of latency doesn't have anything to do with the internet, nor the halcyon days of late 1998. To my recollection browsing the web in the late 90s was far more exciting but also far less useful than today. The moder…

Yep - I remember very carefully planning which mp3s I wanted so that I could dedicate my small window of modem time each day to download them because each one took 10-30 minutes. Sometimes I was able to get through a full game of Age of Empires before disconnecting due to lag or because my dad needed to make a phone call. I find long page loads due to excessive javascript as annoying as the next person, but I'm much happier with the internet in 2018 than 1998.
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