hackernews client

Not del.icio.us (Thanks for all the fish!), but I experimented with bookmarklets [1] embedding JavaScript back in the 2000s as a way to create an independent bookmark system for browsers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookmarklet

lifthrasiir

12 hours ago

    <link rel="octo:octothorpes" href="architecture">

Wait, no. While this wouldn't cause much issue due to the unrecognized link type, `href` should always be a valid URL and can't be a free-form string. This is more obvious when you realize that `rel` accepts multiple link types:

    <link rel="octo:octothorpes help" href="architecture">

A conformant agent will recognize `help` and treat this like `<link rel="help" href="architecture">`. The same goes for `<a rel="octo:octothorpes" ...>`. The correct way would be using standard-recognized elements and attributes instead:

    <meta name="octo:octothorpes" content="architecture">
    <a href="/blabla" itemscope>
        <meta name="octo:octothorpes" content="architecture">
        blablablabla
    </a>

chrismorgan

10 hours ago

Even in <a rel="octo:octothorpes" href="/architecture">, when it says that href “references a Tag on an Octothorpes Ring as well as a URL on your website”, it doesn’t say how it worked out that it’s #architecture.

The whole thing is clearly half-baked, written by someone who doesn’t understand the meanings and reasons for things. I wouldn’t touch it, as it stands.

Using a fetch preload to index, and identify what the actual ring is that’s being used, since you just use keywords later on and not full URLs… yuck. That’s legitimately dreadful. Suppose you want to be on two rings, and they use the same keyword, but differently—what do you do? “You can only be on one ring” is a rather unnecessary and limiting restriction.

Now it’d be fine to use href if only they had the full URL: <link rel="octo:octothorpes" href="https://octothorp.es/~/architecture">.

lifthrasiir

9 hours ago

A late fix: the second `<meta name="octo:octothorpes" content="architecture">` should use `itemprop` instead of `name`. I thought I have made that edit before...

treve

11 hours ago

rel is also broken. It should probably use a dash instead of a colon, unless octo: is intended to be a new uri scheme.

lifthrasiir

11 hours ago

In this context `rel` will be an unordered set of unique space-separated tokens [1], which have no restrictions other than not including any ASCII whitespace.

[1] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/common-microsyntaxes....

codetrotter

13 hours ago

There’s a link on that page that says you can check out some open source code.

https://github.com/stucco-software/octothorp.es

But this link gives a 404.

Probably the repo is currently private. Maybe they forgot to make it public?

kaycebasques

12 hours ago

> Backlinks are links that go … back. Pages within a Ring can see which other pages linked to them.

I'm reading up on web history. I believe this was one of Ted Nelson's criticisms of the web (and reasons why Xanadu was supposedly better), right?

somat

10 hours ago

Backlinks only work within a benevolent autonomous domain. In a federated system, it is quickly discovered how to flood them with spam. which is why, rightfully so in my opinion, the web does not even try to have automated backlinks. That is, you can only link to something, you can't link from something, you can't put a link on somebody else's site pointing to your own.

The closest it has is the referer header. And if you feel lucky you can build your backlink system out of that.

zozbot234

7 hours ago

You don't need a single autonomous domain, you just need a web of trust where other hosts are allowed to send trackbacks/webmentions to your site once they prove free from abuse. That's essentially how the Fediverse works - bad servers can simply be banned from the network. (And the Fediverse shares a lot more than simple backlinks, so the risk of abuse is correspondingly higher.)

082349872349872

10 hours ago

at the time, it was folklore that lack of backlinks was the key "worse is better" inferiority/superiority which meant Sir (as he is now) Tim's web became —unlike all the sundry previous attempts at hypertext— world wide.

Lagniappe: https://github.com/floren/ching/blob/2d36a6ca0dd89f5a2e317d8...

nonrandomstring

9 hours ago

Good critical overview. My impression is that Ted Nelson came at hyperlinks from a purer information scientists POV, whereas Sir Tim and CERN team were more pragmatic network engineers. They probably didn't anticipate the spam problem but likely did see that asking another host to store state on your behalf wasn't optimal.

hnbad

6 hours ago

Obviously that comes with a lot of caveats: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...

user

7 hours ago

[deleted]

audiodude

11 hours ago

The page mentions "rings" but only links to register on the one on the same domain. Are other rings just "theoretically possible if someone hosts the app" or are they already here?

michaelmior

7 hours ago

This looks interesting but I was disappointed to see that registration requires polluting the root domain with a TXT record. Would be nice if this could be at a subdomain like _octothorpe-verify or something like that.