71–80 of 263 posts
applications :( 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…
I have had a similar idea about the future of the Web. Instead of navigating to websites that give you both data and presentation, how about sites that only give you data adhering to a defined convention. Then you can consume this data in a common ui and visualization platform that can merge data from various sources for you and answer questions and visualize info on the fly.
What convention did you have in mind?
You could even mix data from different schemas in the same document, using something like namespaces.
Like, some kind of extensible markup language, almost.
applications :( 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…
> 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 understand the premise. Tumblr is / was over ten times larger than Geocities. It did what you're describing. It was still wildly popular with young people just as recently as a few years ago.
With Geocities you could see millions of high school art students demonstrating for the entire world that they don't know the first thing about design or color.
Tumblr is the epitome of a walled garden. The flowers look pretty, but you still have to plant them in neat, orderly rows. Even Facebook's Pieces of Flair offered more of a creative outlet.
You can still make oversized blinking purple Comic Sans text on a black background above an animated "Under Construction" GIF. But you have to do it in CSS.
applications :( 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…
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.
Gopher pretty much died long before Google was a thing. Here's a good article: https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-goph... (lots of interesting comments below the article from many of the people involved)
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.
They have very little use. There's also a web proxy:
http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw
Browsing it makes clear why Gopher would not still be a thing, except in the same sense that there are hobbyists who maintain Model Ts and steam engines and whatnot. For a time, Gopher was a miracle and a wonder. That time lasted about a year. The web does all it does and infinitely more.
applications :( 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…
This created space for passionate amateurs to create content for their niche. You got wonderfully personalized, quirky sites that didn’t look weird or suspicious and, importantly, actually got traffic (or what passed for a decent amount of traffic at the time.)
The rise of Google, security issues, “walled gardens”, blogging platforms, and YouTube have basically ended the ability of a new amateur site to get a significant amount of new traffic. Internet stardom has moved to YouTube, Twitter or more specialized communities like Reddit, StackExhange, or Wikipedia. The Wikia networks have driven out most need for fan sites. Social networks are a better sharing mechanism than personal blogs meant for keeping friends and family up to date.
This all has had the effect that the internet “feels” far more structured and professionalized than its early days, and IMO is much more a “winner take all” environment for content. I miss the amateur web the same reason I go to high school sports and watch low ranked college football teams- the play may not be as good, but passion is the same, the games feel more human and occasionally you see unexpected flashes of brilliance, beauty, and serendipity that you’ll never see in the professional world.
I have had a similar idea about the future of the Web. Instead of navigating to websites that give you both data and presentation, how about sites that only give you data adhering to a defined convention. Then you can consume this data in a common ui and visualization platform that can merge data from various sources for you and answer questions and visualize info on the fly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Maybe I am just naive, but this all seems terrible. I do have most respect for TBH and I would consider everything he thinks and writes about, but this does not sound too good to me either. The idea of linked data and semantic web has been around for almost two decades now and I have yet to see an application, technique or site that amazes me. On the contrary, most of the things in this space I have seen are bloate…
Maybe I'm missing something, but what does this have to do with the semantic web and why is everyone discussing that? Solid appears to be a decentralized identity platform.
RDF, LDPs, and Linked Data in general are all child projects of the Semantic Web movement, and nigh-on inseparable from it in practice. The venn diagram of their user communities is one circle.