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Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

geoffreylitt.com

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Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

#41

Post by willberman »

jcelerier wrote: post #19
willberman wrote: post #10

I've been following this lab's work for a while and actually suggested to them that the implementation for this be based on an RDF style data model. Ontology languages are the level of abstraction up from a spreadsheet and are an atomic unit in semantic web technologies. It looks like the way this fits in to the existing architecture is that the site adapters would extract data as RDF triples. Professor Daniel Jackso…

Please don't bring RDF out of its coffin. It has been tried and failed because it's overly complex and verbose. It's terrible, and technologies which still use it are terrible to interact with to this day.

Interestingly enough I think that the core of rdf (the subject predicate object triple) is a quite elegant abstraction for knowledge graph representation.

I do agree that the layered system of different ontology languages as present in current semantic web standards is not beginner friendly, but it doesn’t mean they can’t be improved on.

I think you might be throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

#42

Post by matijash »

I like the demos a lot, it is easy to understand the idea from them! How hard was it to write the browser extension and how well does it work for the different sites?

Obviously the main challenge, as other mentioned, is that not all of the data is present on the frontend. Also, user cannot permanently change the app, since just the DOM is changed and that is not persisted anywhere, am I right?

But the whole idea to be able to peek "under the hood" of an app and customise/edit it sounds very appealing to me! I am actually working on the open source project that has that aim, to "understand" the web app from within.

But of course for that we had to go with a bottom-up approach, so we are building a DSL for describing how a web app behaves: https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp

Would be happy to hear your thoughts on it!

Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

#43

Post by yumaikas »

denster wrote: post #39

This is very cool! While I'm biased [-], I think this only scratches the surface of what spreadsheets can do. What if spreadsheets could be used to create all software? Could the software be of the same quality & sophistication as that built with code? To fellow readers on HN -- what do you think, is it possible? [-] Founder of MintData, https://mintdata.com

I think a lot is possible if you could use spreadsheets to create all software (I even have an idea on the back burner to try in that direction).

That being said, $95/month isn't an accessible price point for anyone that isn't trying to integrate this into a business of some sort. Which might be fine for your market, but it doesn't work for most hobbyists, or people wanting to write personal projects. Heck, Adobe Creative Cloud can be had for half of that price.

I realize your market probably doesn't include those people right now, which is a valid business decision. I've got plans to try to make a scriptable web spreadsheet application that allows people to make their own websites with that sort of thing.

That being said, if you had a $5/month or $10/month tier, or an option to self-host without some of the fancier functionality, I'd be all over trying those out.

Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

#44

Post by carapace »

gklitt wrote: post #28

Author here, happy to answer any questions! To bring it full circle, here are a couple recent demo videos I made of using Wildcard to customize the HN front page: https://twitter.com/geoffreylitt/status/1229251217118892032

This is really cool, congrats. :-)

Are you aware of Ted Nelson's ZigZag data model? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigZag_(software) It seems like that might work well with Wildcard.

Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

#47

Post by emj »

elamje wrote: post #7

I know this is front page, but I’m surprised more people aren’t chiming in. Maybe the web used to be this way where you can easily manipulate views to your liking, but as a 20 something I’ve never even envisioned end users crafting their own views of pages. It honestly makes a lot of sense to represent pages how you see fit as a user, and no, inspecting each page and changing the source isn’t practical at all in Web…

I've found this dream is not about age people just think about this differently, and some are jaded saying we will never get there.

As a 50 something it has been one of my ultimatedream, but it has proven to be hard all trough my very short history with computers. Letting the user modify their view in a GUI is always a hard task to solve.

The curl trick worked for so long[1], it's nice to see that you can get a better experience with wildcard with the div/js spaghetti today.

[1] curl https://example.com/apartment/[0-1000] -o \#1.html

Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

#48

Post by irq-1 »

gklitt wrote: post #31
fxtentacle wrote: post #13

I don't think this can work. It seems to rely on a willingness of the company owning the data to disclose their full data set up you. Currently, with things like GraphQL, we are moving in the opposite direction in that the server only sends you those columns that are absolutely required to fill the fields in your GUI. Since they used it as the example, I don't see any incentive for AirBnb to let random people on the…

You're absolutely right that limited data access and pagination exclude certain types of modifications. So far, we've decided to defer thinking about that limitation, and first focus on other questions like getting the spreadsheet interactions right. We're making new site adapters every week and finding that we can build lots of useful modifications for ourselves which work even with only one page of a paginated list…

Tell the websites what is being done with the data/spreadsheet. If hacker news is being filtered to exclude domains, or people are searching for all things LISP, the admins could use that information to change the website. Try making a sharing website (like greasemonkey scripts) -- users post scripts and discuss what their trying to do, and website admins can comment and post changes or scripts, etc...

Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

#49

Post by evrydayhustling »

My company, frame.ai, uses a lightweight version of this pattern and have gotten a lot of value!

One of our products helps teams ensure response times on shared Slack channels. On some teams, the duty schedule of who should respond in these channels evolves in complicated ways - for example, complex business hours and holidays, account managers with backup reps, and so on.

Rather than attempt a one size fits all interface, we expose configuration via an Airtable base that we prepare. Airtable makes it much more convenient to enforce structure and give a nice interface to the configuration - plus an API. Highly recommended.

We have been pretty surprised at the variety of processes folks have implemented there, and it's easy for our support team to help them. Airtable did a write-up about the pattern here: https://blog.airtable.com/api-content-series-frameai-convers...

Excited to see the OP, which takes the concept much farther!

Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

#50

Post by [deleted] »

warpech wrote: post #21

This is the most inspiring implementation of live web scraping that I have seen. However, I think it will only work well on semantic HTML. I don't know about AirBnb, used in the paper, but I can say many good words about GitHub. GitHub is an awesome example of a customizable web app thanks to solid, semantic HTML structure. You can see hundreds of web extensions and Tampermonkey user scripts for GitHub that work cons…

[deleted]
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