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JSON Canvas – An open file format for infinite canvas data
151–160 of 168 posts
Re: JSON Canvas – An open file format for infinite canvas data
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
SVG is great and you are the first person I have ever seen who would (and did) imply that SVG might be or would be better than JSON for this kind of thing. SVG really stretches the “human readable” thing to its limit, and I personally would not adopt an SVG-like format for anything that isn’t SVG.
Looking at the samples, this isn't human readable either (long opaque id strings for linking dominate the syntax) and both syntaxes have vast amounts of punctuation and whitespace. And neither of them are particularly human writable. But something svg-based would have lots of existing options for additional processing in consistent ways, that would be ad-hoc for a json-based syntax. (Given that this is coming from ob…
I opened a JSON created with the Obsidian canvas thing and renamed the long ids with human readable names and it keeps working without re-renaming. So they or whoever uses this format could maybe come up with a way of using some form of human-readable ids[0] to make it easier to modify the JSON by hand
Re: JSON Canvas – An open file format for infinite canvas data
#153this seems like vendor lock in and hardly solves anything complicated
Re: JSON Canvas – An open file format for infinite canvas data
#154Obsidian is one of the few closed-source applications I would consider relying on, due to their commitment to building around simple, open file formats. Sure, they could screw me over and start charging absurd amounts of money for their app, but high quality open source alternatives would pop up immediately. Meanwhile, as long as they don't screw me over, it's unlikely an open source alternative is going to be able t…
The big gap I would love to be solved is a, preferably selfhosted, browser based view into my notes. That way I could access my notes from computers you can't or won't install obsidian on. If it was open source that would be more likely to happen
I threw something together to address that goal. It was really hard to render obsidian-md into html that looked about the same. I started with general MD libs, then ultimately used obsidian-html. Obsidian's MD is not standard at all, though I'm not sure any MD is fully specified since there are so many edge cases.
Sample output (should be viewable since I put `#public` at top of the document): https://bigasterisk.com/vault/esp%20cams.md
Server code: https://bigasterisk.com/code/vaulterrific/files/tip/
Re: JSON Canvas – An open file format for infinite canvas data
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obsidian's own file format might have merit, but posting it as an "open file format", "created to provide (...) interoperability, and extensibility to data created with infinite canvas apps"... and then publishing 1.0 without consulting with anybody else... is rather egregious, I think. I agree with you that posting Obsidian's spec to start the conversation would have been welcome, but this is not what they did.
Obsidian's philosophy is file over app [1] and releasing a spec for their Canvas feature is fulfilling that promise. It's a strictly positive 'today is better than yesterday' thing for them to have done so. You shouldn't need to ask permission or consult anyone to do this. That's a silly bar, 'egregious' even. When markdown was created, Gruber wasn't asking all his friends making text editors whether they'd support i…
However, you should ask Gruber if he is willing to bless your your name if you include a hint towards “markdown” in it (referencing Commonmark), or else there’ll be a big kerfuffle. (funny example to use)
Re: JSON Canvas – An open file format for infinite canvas data
#156Whoa! Didn't expect this to bubble up to the top of HN. Some context about why we created JSON Canvas: https://obsidian.md/blog/json-canvas/ We just released it today, so this is still a very nascent project. A little over a year ago we released Obsidian Canvas. The .canvas file format has felt stable enough to give it a name and resources that other apps can freely use. See the original Show HN: https://news.ycombin…
I agree with a lot of comments that it's minimal, but in my opinion that is a good thing. I'm a big fan of Obsidian, and of the things I like about it is the data source is all markdown files. Markdown is meant to be very lightweight and portable, and overcomplicating it will limit adoption and extensibility (imagine markdown vs pdf). JSON Canvas seems to follow in that spirit by being very lightweight, so a lot of i…
> I agree with a lot of comments that it's minimal, but in my opinion that is a good thing. I'm a big fan of Obsidian, and of the things I like about it is the data source is all markdown files. Markdown is meant to be very lightweight and portable, and overcomplicating it will limit adoption and extensibility (imagine markdown vs pdf).
What Markdown got right was creating a nicely readable lightweight markup syntax.
And Markdown also demonstrated how to create a bad precedence for future consolidation by being so loosey goosey and underspecified (and with a bad reference implementation). That there is a Commonmark at all is solely because of others picking up the slack and doing the unthankful gruntwork of creating 100 if-then-else statements in a semi-formal prose format.
Re: JSON Canvas – An open file format for infinite canvas data
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Of course one can program all kind of check constraints, like one can program all kinds of value validations in javascript. I don't consider this a valid distinction where databases are concerned. If you define a datatype in an ordinary SQL database, and try to pass it invalid data, it will fail at runtime. How else could it work? There's no compile-time interaction between the value and the database. If you define…
Types are a contract, that both parties can understand. This notion is not captured by operational semantics. Parties that do not read the database contract will get caught by runtime validation. However, any code that targets the database contract could make use of that contract, e.g. with scaffolding. This might enable tighter integration with type checking in the client program. What you propose is not a contract,…
What are operational semantics to you, if not a contract?
Re: JSON Canvas – An open file format for infinite canvas data
#158This is neat, I'll definitely try it out. I do have a related question: what are people using to implement high performance canvases on React these days?
The canvas in Obsidian is as the whole app very well made. I wondered what they are using as well. My guess is https://www.xyflow.com/ , which is for drawing nodes. More general purpose would be http://fabricjs.com/ . Or very low level https://pixijs.com/ .
Thank you very much!
Re: JSON Canvas – An open file format for infinite canvas data
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Of course one can program all kind of check constraints, like one can program all kinds of value validations in javascript. I don't consider this a valid distinction where databases are concerned. If you define a datatype in an ordinary SQL database, and try to pass it invalid data, it will fail at runtime. How else could it work? There's no compile-time interaction between the value and the database. If you define…
Heh, I haven't seen that particular datetime constraint before, thanks for that!
If there's a risk of properly-formatted but nonetheless invalid dates, like 2024-03-34, one can do this: DATE(date_column, '+0 days') IS date_column). The '+0 days' causes 2024-03-34 to normalize to 2024-04-03 (this is part of the ISO standard!) and therefore the check fails.
Admittedly these sorts of tricks are obscure, if by 'obscure' we mean "you have to feed a search engine a string like 'Validate SQLite datetime' and read some sources". But to reiterate my point slightly differently, the verbosity of these CHECK constraints doesn't indicate that they're doing anything different from a "typed database".
Out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT, which got the "well formed" version, when I pointed out it would accept 2023-03-34, it gave a correct explanation of what SQLite would do with that date, and suggested `CHECK(date_column = strftime('%Y-%m-%d', date_column))`, which is more satisfying than the other one, and has the same effect. Really gotta keep an eye on the chatbot.
Re: JSON Canvas – An open file format for infinite canvas data
#160Whoa! Didn't expect this to bubble up to the top of HN. Some context about why we created JSON Canvas: https://obsidian.md/blog/json-canvas/ We just released it today, so this is still a very nascent project. A little over a year ago we released Obsidian Canvas. The .canvas file format has felt stable enough to give it a name and resources that other apps can freely use. See the original Show HN: https://news.ycombin…
I wonder why this document has been labelled "1.0" while it is so poorly specified (many ambiguities).