Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications
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Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications
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Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications
#2This looks really excellent, and is the future (meaning, these sorts of worse-is-better tools scraping loosely structured messes into very simple standard structures are the future).
Something that's conceptually related but pretty different is Workbench from the Columbia School of Journalism (although glancing at their page they may be some kind of dumb startup now).
Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications
#3My favorite example from the (ecommerce) domain in which I work is https://www.cobby.io/ - I know the team behind it, and while it perfectly solves the problem of product data for shops of a certain size, the live-editable cell idea always sparks conversation about the broader applications. Years later and we still see the genius of spreadsheets.
Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications
#4Wow, this is the real deal. First time I've heard of this work and I've got some more digging to do. Has all the right language and some great references with pretty awesome related work on digital tools should anyone want to keep digging.
Low floor, high ceiling is the best case for that framework, and should be every toolmakers ideal.
The Airbnb story reads like a sign of the times. Platforms can do as they like, users just have to conform. PCs and the internet promised the kind of programmatic control described here(I wonder if there is a better term than "programmatic" control?), end users should be able to come up with arbitrary representations of the data they query on the fly and realize them as quickly as possible.
Web UIs are stupidly underpowered, table based queries for flights as presented here seem much more usable. Michel Beaudouin-Lafon has a few great ideas to explore here, "One is Not Enough" which he described in a different context but I think can apply to the desire for composability between multiple tools here (Airbnb + walkability) and "software is not soft" describing the boundaries placed on software users. I have many tools for manipulating strings or sorting numbers, why can't I use them on the Airbnb table listings, served up on my computer?
Thanks for sharing.
Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications
#5Wow, I absolutely love this concept.
It is messy and overly ambitious, but promises something like a return to the "view source" mindset of the old web - where data was in plain sight and anyone curious and a little tenacious could reshape the web for their own needs.
I have gone partway down this path for a related concept, and browser extensions are really the only way to go. The biggest risk and hassle is a reliance on brittle, site-specific logic to make things work well. I haven't dug into this project yet to see how automated any of this is or might become, but if there is an element of community sourcing (like a ruleset for scraping AirBnB effectively) it opens up a potential attack vector like any GreaseMonkey-tyoe script, especially if passed routinely to less technical users. Not a huge issue on day 1 but not an easily solvable issue.
Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications
#6[deleted]
Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications
#7I 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 2.0 div spaghetti. It seems pretty practical to have a spreadsheet formatted UI for your most popular sites.
Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications
#8Some ten years ago there was an online spreadsheet startup called Hypernumbers which, I believe, at one point pivoted to letting people build websites using their spreadsheet. Intriguingly close to this, but without the mashup angle, which is important.
Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications
#9This is essentially the early Filemaker Pro all-in-one desktop app (pre-Apple), maybe even Microsoft Access, but in the browser. I always liked the flexibility of Filemaker, being able to add a new field and pull data into it. I could never find anything comparable. Good to see a revival of the concept.
Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications
#10I'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 Jackson runs this lab. His book, Design by Concept, is a phenomenal read. It made me understand why software can be so unintuitive for people who haven't grown accustomed to its idiosyncrasies that I've come to internalize.