[HN Gopher] Come back, c2.com, we still need you
___________________________________________________________________
Come back, c2.com, we still need you
Author : joshuanapoli
Score : 291 points
Date : 2023-05-15 14:01 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wiki.c2.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (wiki.c2.com)
| akritrime wrote:
| I thought c2.com was in the middle of a redesign. Is it actually
| gone or just a technical glitch?
| shagie wrote:
| That redesign has been sporadic.
| https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling/graphs/code-fre...
| exabrial wrote:
| wow. New site is fucking awful. http://fed.wiki.org
|
| What an abomination. JavaScript is ruining the internet.
| Dwedit wrote:
| I just see a blank page.
| tempodox wrote:
| By now it only says, "page does not exist". :(
| aigoochamna wrote:
| Using an SPA to reduce server load, when you could generate this
| content and use edge caches and have zero server load?
|
| I'm more upset with the new design choices than the architecture
| choice. The old site was ugly in a retro-cool way. The new site
| is just ugly.
| killerstorm wrote:
| Frankly, I don't find it particularly useful - almost everything
| is written in such a way that you have to know what the page is
| about to be able to understand. It's more like a collection of
| links than a wiki proper.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| It was a wiki that didn't try to separate the content from the
| community that created it, so it was more like a forum where
| people could more or less agree on how to summarize a thread.
| kragen wrote:
| this is literally the site that the word 'wiki' was invented to
| describe; it is the embodiment of the platonic essence of 'a
| wiki proper'
| shadowgovt wrote:
| ... or the alpha version that subsequent experiments with the
| idea improved upon.
| kragen wrote:
| some other wikis are certainly quite wonderful
| ajmurmann wrote:
| In a way it's like most pages in corporate wikis I've
| encountered. Of course the topics and content here is light-
| years better.
| dexen wrote:
| The C2 wiki was re-written and re-implemented as single page app,
| currently at http://fed.wiki.org/
|
| It is an interesting change, to a more federated style.
|
| I ended up doing a small project inspired by this change, at
| https://github.com/dexen/tlb
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Complete with unnecessary page transitions, cascading loaders
| and a ton of layout shifting. Classic SPA success story.
| bongobingo1 wrote:
| I don't 100% disagree with the sentiment, but I think in this
| case the push-in style transitions fit well with a knowledge
| base wiki in which you (or at least, I) often drill down and
| pop out of topics.
|
| Though... that particular implementation seems to not handle
| unwinding the stack very well. And as the classic web2 adage
| goes, if you think your animation is "just right", knock
| another 3rd off it at least.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| IMO TiddlyWiki[1] is a much better implementation of this
| UI idea of bite-sized, heavily linked text (card catalog?)
| with multiple simultaneously visible entries. (No
| federation and a bizarre storage approach though.)
|
| [1] https://tiddlywiki.com/ (haven't looked at the homepage
| in years, the current one seems kind of awful and not
| really bite-sized unfortunately).
| imachine1980_ wrote:
| holly cow this redisign is awfull, im not against federated
| content, but this inst a wiki at all
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _It is an interesting change, to a more federated style._
|
| what does "federated" mean in this context? do you mean
| decentralized segmented "peer to peer" storage, or something?
|
| unfederated wikipedia is not helpful in defining federated:
|
| _Federated content is digital media content that is designed
| to be self-managing to support reporting and rights management
| in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. Ex: Audio stored in a digital
| rights management (DRM) file format._
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_content
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| That's certainly.... a definition of a thing. That I haven't
| seen once in my life. In any case, the relevant page is https
| ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_(information_techno... .
|
| The idea is essentially to follow the way email (and partly
| the Web) works: users aren't tied to one server
| (centralized), but neither are they required to each run
| their own one (peer-to-peer), instead there's a narrower
| group of server operators who host users, but those users can
| cause the server software to connect to a server it doesn't
| know about if they mention it explicitly.
|
| Of course, if the protocol is too weak in allowing the
| operator to control those connections (in either direction),
| it will evolve informal means for that which will make all
| but the largest servers extremely unreliable, much as email
| did. On the other hand, the experience of Mastodon shows the
| dangers of operators exercising too much control (where e.g.
| Mozilla seems eager to defederate with any server that has
| anyone post anything even slightly offensive or objectionable
| to anybody whose opinion Mozilla considers valid).
|
| The federated _wiki_ idea as promoted by Ward seems to be to
| have the federation (network of servers) be able to browse
| each other's pages--so far so Web--but then to allow each
| user to clone and edit any page anywhere, storing the clone
| on their own server. The original page isn't affected, except
| I think there's a provision for some sort of backlinking
| (referral spam? what's that?). It doesn't sound unreasonable,
| but I'm not sure it can support anything interesting either--
| for a large pool of collaborators you'd need a Torvalds-like
| full-time merge BDFL, and I haven't even seen a discussion of
| pull requests or anything similar.
| Zanfa wrote:
| This is completely broken and unusable on latest iOS Safari.
| manojlds wrote:
| Works bad on mobile with some weird transitions. Can't believe
| C2 is fallen to this trap as well.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| But all the old content seems to be gone (or all links to it
| are broken)
| insulanus wrote:
| Sadly, I've had bad experiences with some Single Page Apps.
| Here are some problems I've had:
|
| Linking to a specific topic.
|
| Archiving the site.
| SpaghettiCthulu wrote:
| Also routing breaking if you trigger back/forward too fast
| (looking at you, GitHub)
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> The C2 wiki was re-written and re-implemented as single page
| app, currently at http://fed.wiki.org/_
|
| It seems empty. Or am I not grasping what this is?
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| I don't believe C2 was moved here. The Federated wiki seems
| to be Ward Cunningham's experiment - an answer to centralized
| wikis - also invited by Ward. It is interesting, but as far
| as I can tell not some kind of mirror of the content on C2.
| If you click "recent changes" a lot of stuff comes up, mostly
| about federated wiki.
| ilyt wrote:
| ...that is fucking terrible.
|
| Do they not know back button and tabs exist in browsers ?
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| If you find inspiration in converting a raft of long-term
| usable URLs into a single page usability clusterfuck one
| questions your motives and your craft.
| pcunning wrote:
| I fixed it (rebooted the server).
|
| Anecdotes: Ward (My dad) and I recently moved c2 off a server in
| a colo where it had lived for over a decade because the colo was
| closing. Now it lives in a cloud provider. It will live on.
| Eventually I envision It will get moved like the Agile Manifesto
| to a static site for long lived prosperity as a relic of the
| early internet.
| javcasas wrote:
| Can I suggest making it a torrent? Good Internet relics deserve
| to live duplicated in random computers all over the place, just
| like the Internet itself.
| joshuanapoli wrote:
| Thank you; I'm glad that you're keeping c2 online.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Make sure it gets archived by an archive team not just hosted
| thanks
| pcunning wrote:
| Recommendation of who to work with?
| davikr wrote:
| Archive Team, #archiveteam on the hackint irc.
| monkpit wrote:
| I am consistently shocked that anyone ever found c2 insightful or
| helpful. Maybe it's one of those things that was better in ye
| olden days.
|
| Every c2 link I have ever followed was just an incoherent blob of
| text arguing with itself.
|
| The TvTropes of the programming community, and just as much of a
| waste of time too.
| remexre wrote:
| It's useful as a survey of (perhaps somewhat old) opinions
| about a topic; it's pretty useful as a collection of pros/cons,
| and imo interesting for its historical context besides.
| Bjartr wrote:
| > an incoherent blob of text arguing with itself.
|
| That's exactly why I find it valuable. Little to no pretense of
| looking good and a bunch of perspectives in little space. An
| occasionally useful starting point to get the lay of the land.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's also almost perfectly what any long-running or stickied
| thread on any forum ever was, and that was usually a good
| thing.
| omoikane wrote:
| > The TvTropes of the programming community
|
| Not sure what you were expecting, but that was very much what
| some of us were looking for.
| q845712 wrote:
| > an incoherent blob of text arguing with itself.
|
| Kinda like HackerNews but from before someone invented modern
| threading and quoting, yeah?
| thagsimmons wrote:
| C2 was an incredible place at its peak - I was lucky to have
| started my career while the community was still (only just)
| functional. Looking back, it's hard to over-state how formative
| my time on C2 was - not only did I learn a lot about pattern
| languages, and coding, but the Wiki idea and the way the
| community operated is something I still think about today.
|
| C2 was a utopian vision of well-informed, kind, co-operative
| people working together in a radically open and egalitarian way.
| And it really did work, for a while. Unfortunately, the reasons
| why C2 ultimately died have been obscured by a well-meaning
| process of pruning that I think is meant to remove the "bad
| stuff" and leave only the "good stuff" for posterity. This is a
| shame, because the truth really is instructive - a few very
| prolific, toxic, borderline delusional people started dominating
| the wiki to the extent that more reasonable contributors just
| moved on. The C2 community started with an assumption that
| everyone could be reasoned with, and tried to handle the
| situation kindly and rationally. It was amazing to see the damage
| a very small number of people - basically just two - could do to
| a whole community of hundreds of well-meaning but naive people.
| It got to the point where there were pages dedicated to trying to
| think about the problems these people posed, with endless
| discussions about the paradox of tolerance and handling things
| through openness and kindness, and small factions arguing for
| permanent bans. Ultimately I think both badd actors _were_
| banned, but by then it was too late - all the air was sucked out
| of the community. Watching the death of C2 unfold really darkened
| my view about the prospects of truly open societies, and deeply
| informed work that I've done on building communities since.
|
| Today, nearly all signs of the way this devastation played out
| have been erased from history. If you search for the names of the
| malignant characters there are a few mentions here and there, but
| there's no way to piece together the true sequence of events. I
| think an important part of C2's story, and one that is more
| relevant today than ever, has been lost as a consequence. I'm
| sure Ward has the full edit history of the wiki around, and I
| think he should publish it, complete and unvarnished, so we can
| study it and learn from it.
| kalium-xyz wrote:
| I love c2 its wiki and would be very sad to see it gone. Im
| certain I can find some archives but this still feels like a
| loss.
| shagie wrote:
| (I've mentioned this on another thread here)
|
| Here's a copy of the entirety of C2 from
| https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501
|
| And an implementation of a server to run it (search indexing
| and such) https://github.com/adamnew123456/wiki-server
| psnehanshu wrote:
| Why do you love c2? If I may ask.
| kalium-xyz wrote:
| Doing searches on google has ended me up on it so many times
| I ended up bookmarking it and searching it instead.
| shagie wrote:
| It is a frozen discussion from some of the people who we now
| hold in fairly high regard on a number of topics that are
| fairly core to software development.
|
| It is like being able to go back and be a fly on the wall in
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr-Einstein_debates# for
| physics (one can debate about the degree of significance of
| the topics and individuals - but I'm trying to get back a
| "this is where things where happening at the time.")
|
| As an aside, there was a community-fork of c2 where part of
| the community was more interested in communities rather than
| code. That site is still available -
| http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/ (
| http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/MeatballBackgrounder ) which has
| a lot of the same charm as c2.
|
| The thing with other great debates - there aren't any
| transcripts of them. C2 is the best that we have of the early
| "trying to figure out is now called agile".
| knome wrote:
| the portland pattern repository was an invaluable resource for
| me when I was searching out programming material on the web in
| the early 2000s. hopefully whatever this is is just a hiccup in
| their service
| tolciho wrote:
| [flagged]
| InvisibleUp wrote:
| There was a mirror at https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/ without the
| SPA stuff, but that seems to be 503'd right now. (And even if it
| wasn't, I don't think it has a root page; you'd need to type in
| one of the page URLs manually.)
| adamnew123456 wrote:
| Huh, my other pages don't have the same issue. I guess the
| search indexer must've died - I'll restart it in an hour or
| two.
|
| FWIW, the snapshot of c2 that this runs off of is somewhat
| dated (https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501), so the
| last ~7 years of updates after the move to the federated wiki
| aren't present.
|
| Does anyone know where these original pages ended up in fedwiki
| after the migration?
| InvisibleUp wrote:
| Oh, it works now. Thanks!
|
| For those reading the comments here,
| https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/CategoryCategory is a great
| place to start browsing.
| shagie wrote:
| The instructions for spinning up a read only mirror:
| https://github.com/adamnew123456/wiki-server and in
| particular the C2 archive from
| https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501
| waynecochran wrote:
| This is what I get page does not exist
| gjvc wrote:
| I expect it's being replaced by http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-
| visitors/view/about-federat...
| kevinmgranger wrote:
| Ooh, is that tiddlywiki, or at least inspired by it?
| gjvc wrote:
| Not tiddlywiki, but instead a complete reworking of the
| original Wiki, work done by Ward Cunningham himself.
| anononaut wrote:
| It occurs to me again that I need to figure out how entire
| websites can be downloaded and archived. Like Archive.org, but
| local.
| danparsonson wrote:
| https://www.httrack.com/ is a good option
| mesarvagya wrote:
| Most of SPA websites today cannot be downloaded through
| httrack.
| danparsonson wrote:
| Yes SPAs will be next to impossible for a tool like this;
| I'm not sure how any tool could archive such a site tbh?
| _a9 wrote:
| I use browsertrix-crawler[0] for crawling and it does
| well on JS heavy sites since it uses a real browser to
| request pages. Even has options to load browser profiles
| so you can crawl while being authenticated on sites.
|
| [0] https://github.com/webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler
| shagie wrote:
| The entirety of the archive pre rework can be found at
| https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501
| psychoslave wrote:
| https://bash-prompt.net/guides/wget-mirror-website/
| bhouston wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230510153013/https://c2.com/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham
| gpderetta wrote:
| The copy of the wiki on webarchive doesn't seem to work for me.
|
| The C2 wiki is on of the foundational relics of the old web
| that need to be preserved for the future.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20170430022841/http://wiki.c2.co.
| ..
|
| I picked an arbitrary older date and it seems to be working
| for me (pre-redesign).
| layer8 wrote:
| What you're linking to is already the "new" JS version. See
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35951027 for the last
| static version.
| [deleted]
| psnehanshu wrote:
| In the source: <noscript> <center>
| <b>notice</b> <p>javascript required to view this
| site</p> <b>why</b> <p>measured improvement
| in server performance</p> <p>awesome incremental
| search</p> </center> </noscript>
| insulanus wrote:
| It would be great if there was a read-only version of the site
| that can be crawled.
|
| Much easier to do that supporting both HTTP and JS for both
| read and write.
| tempodox wrote:
| Indeed, that was a relatively recent change that I never
| understood. It had been working without JS for a long time
| before that. And page loads became slower, not faster, for me.
| masklinn wrote:
| > And page loads became slower, not faster, for me.
|
| They're not exclusive, smaller server loads doesn't mean the
| experience is better for the client.
|
| For instance the server might just stop doing server-side
| template rendering. Instead it sends one static page, then
| the client requests and render the JSON for the article, or
| maybe the page only contains the JSON for the article instead
| of the rendered one.
|
| Then the template rendering cost stops showing up on the
| server, because it's not performed on the client, and
| serialising to JSON is almost certainly cheaper than
| rendering an ad-hoc and half-assed template format.
|
| But now the client has to perform a bunch of extra requests
| (to fetch the javascript and possibly the json) and it pays
| the cost for the template rendering, and that might be even
| halfer-assed, and more expensive, because it's out of sight
| of the server loads / logs.
|
| The result is that the server has gone from, say, 80ms CPU to
| 40ms CPU per page (which definitely qualifies as a "measured
| improvement in server performance"), but the client now needs
| an additional 300ms to reach loading completion.
| blowski wrote:
| Good description. And the site owner may have decided that
| trade-off works well for them - they are not incompetent or
| evil just because a few niche but noisy users have a moan.
| masklinn wrote:
| At the same time, the users are rightfully complaining,
| their experience has been made noticeably worse in
| multiple ways to no benefit. Worse, they essentially get
| taunted.
| samtheprogram wrote:
| > the users are rightfully complaining [because] their
| experience has been made noticeably worse in multiple
| ways to no benefit
|
| Depends on your definition of rightfully. This is a ad-
| free, cost-free website. If they want to reduce server
| load or prioritize something other than non-JS
| experience, it's their prerogative.
|
| Especially when the complaint is "it's slower on my
| client" and not "I can no longer access the data without
| JavaScript"
|
| > Worse, they essentially get taunted.
|
| Please explain?
| skrebbel wrote:
| Sometimes I feel like all 7 people who have JS disabled have an
| HN account so they can tell people that their site doesn't work
| with JS disabled
| lynx23 wrote:
| It just violates the KISS principle too much when the site in
| question is mostly presenting documents. I can see JS being
| useful if you have some sort of SPA app. But essentially docs
| with JS are a total no-go. Why do I need to fire up a 50MB
| binary to read a simple document again? Ahh, because reasons,
| I see...
| chefandy wrote:
| Whether or not something is 'simple' depends on what type
| of simplicity you're optimizing for and your use
| case/requirements. Front-end js frameworks could make
| development much simpler than relying on vanilla code or
| back-end frameworks to accomplish the same tasks.
| Personally, I don't see the benefit of defining simplicity
| by how much work the browser has to do unless there's a
| specific, tangible requirement that demands it.
|
| Accessibility isn't any more of a problem than it is with
| HTML. For screen readers, et al it's still something that
| needs to be deliberately incorporated into the document
| structure, and modern frameworks are more than capable of
| handling it. What about older browsers with crappy JS
| implementations? Front-end frameworks have tools designed
| to extend support to much older browsers with limited JS
| support. The percentage of people who have access to a web
| browser but _can 't_ use javascript applications is
| vanishingly small. When I've worked with people making
| publicly-funded tools for which accessibility must
| accommodate people with very limited technical means--
| unhoused people, for example-- developers tend to skip the
| web interface altogether and go with SMS combined with
| telephone or in-person service. JS is not the barrier.
|
| Obviously that 50MB binary is hyperbole, but the baseline
| Vue include is 16k. It's certainly easier to make make
| front-end JS heavy and unreliable than plain static HTML,
| but it's pretty easy to avoid it, and design that poor
| would probably fuck up plain-old HTML and CSS just as bad.
| The fact is that most users do appreciate the dynamic
| features and responsiveness that is only possible with js.
| If you don't, and want to exclude yourself from modern web
| functionality, then be my guest. I think it's pretty
| strange that you'd expect other people to go out of their
| way to accommodate your rather uncommon preferences to make
| an experience most users consider worse and doesn't work
| towards satisfying any tangible business needs.
| lynx23 wrote:
| I know this discussion is lost and the times have
| changed. However, two things I cant let stand: Using
| semantic HTML tags is _all_ you need for proper
| accessibility of text documents. Calling that out as
| being specia attention for accessibility is false in my
| opinion. And yes, you just found one of these very rare
| people. I still spend 99% of my work day in tmux on a
| plain text console. I can, of course, fire up Firefox on
| a second machine I have next to me for just these
| problems, but it breaks my workflow not being able to
| read a text document with a text browser. Dont even
| bother telling me that this use case is no longer
| supported. I know that. That doesn 't change my technical
| opinion that JS is way too much of a gun for documents.
| chefandy wrote:
| > Calling that out as being specia attention for
| accessibility is false in my opinion.
|
| I didn't. I said that accessibility is no more of a
| problem for js-fueled pages than HTML pages, which was
| not always true.
|
| > Dont even bother telling me that this use case is no
| longer supported
|
| Then don't say people are making websites wrong when by
| common practice you're using the wrong tools to interact
| with them.
|
| > I know that. That doesn't change my technical opinion
| that JS is way too much of a gun for documents.
|
| Like I said, feel free to opt out of the modern internet.
| It's your life. It's just flatly absurd to be in your
| position and accuse developers of having poor practices
| when they provide an objectively _better experience_ for
| probably 9999 out of 10000 other users by using widely
| accepted, standard, reliable practices that often require
| less development time.
| lynx23 wrote:
| I am blind. I do rely on accessibility to interact with a
| computer. Yes, you could accuse me of deliberately
| avoiding the modern web, but I have my reasons. Primary
| reason is performance. Even though I feel like you are
| talking down to me from a pretty high horse, I still
| don't wish for you to ever experience how sluggish it
| feels trying to use the "modern web" with a screen reader
| on something like Windows. Don't even make me start about
| the hellhole that is Linux GUI accessibility. It was a
| nice ride once, before GNOME 3 and the elimination of
| CORBA killed most of the good work done by good people.
| Fact is, I am too used to a system which reacts promptly
| when I press a key to be able to switch to a modern
| browser by default. That would kill all my productivity.
| Yes, its a trade, but for now, having no JS engine by
| default is still _way_ better then the alternatives.
|
| Have a nice day, and enjoy your eye-sight.
| Zanfa wrote:
| There's no reason to think SPAs are in any way
| objectively better in terms of either UX or DX.
|
| I can't count the number of SPAs that manage to break
| basic browser functionality like links, back/forward
| navigation and scrolling. It's insane.
| lynx23 wrote:
| Well, there is obviously a conflict in UI experience. I
| can very well see how back/forward breaks the idea of a
| web "app", because what would backward mean in a
| classical app, except for maybe undo? I tend to put web
| addresses in roughly these two categories: those that try
| to be an app, and those which just present a document.
| True, inline editing may blur the line, but thats how I
| try to see it. IOW, I am not mad at someone killing my
| back/forward buttons if these just dont make any sense in
| the context of the app they are providing. OTOH, I am
| pretty pissed if someone steps outside of classic HTML if
| all they are doing is basically prviding text/images.
| Zanfa wrote:
| Sure, if you're building Figma, SPA all the way. If it's
| a dashboard or a semi-static document, SPAs are misused
| and that's when basic functionality gets replaced with
| JS, but typically in a broken fashion.
| Kerrick wrote:
| Have you tried https://www.brow.sh to preserve your
| workflow?
| xigoi wrote:
| When you want to display a document, using a document
| format is clearly simpler than using a programming
| language.
| postalrat wrote:
| Makes sense if they don't need JavaScript for hn.
| kevincrane wrote:
| [flagged]
| __s wrote:
| uBlock Origin allows disabling JS by default, I use on my
| phone to preserve battery life
| aftbit wrote:
| There are dozens of us! Dozens!
|
| I mostly browse sites with JS disabled (with lots of
| exceptions of course) to get rid of those awful Euro cookie
| banners. Are those required in US now for some reason? My
| browser doesn't save the cookie that says they can save
| cookies, so they constantly prompt me.
| sneak wrote:
| There are actually 8 of us, not counting Ed Snowden, who once
| famously explained to Bart Gellman: "turn off the fucking
| scripts".
|
| Almost all modern browser compromise is via JS.
| layer8 wrote:
| Here is one of the last snapshots before the C2 wiki was replaced
| by the awful JS version:
| https://web.archive.org/web/2014/http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?Welc...
|
| I'm linking to a bit earlier in time because on _web.archive.org_
| every hyperlink takes you a bit further to the future, eventually
| (sometime in 2016) ending up on a redirect to the JS version.
|
| Edit: Here is a mirror that is now functional again:
| https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/WelcomeVisitors. In particular, it
| has a working search page:
| https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/FindPage
|
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35952055 if you want to
| create your own mirror.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| What happened?
| LordShredda wrote:
| The web happened
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Never having heard of this site: what is/was it?
| Scarblac wrote:
| Among other things, the home of the first Wiki, where people
| talked about software design and development since the 90s.
| Lammy wrote:
| Check out the HN submissions from this domain:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=c2.com
| joshuanapoli wrote:
| It's the original wiki, by Ward Cunningham. It has a lot of
| interesting discussions about software topics. I noticed the
| site was down because it has a page about the "Cobol Fallacy":
| that it is a misconception that software would be easier to
| create in natural language. I wanted to see how the (old)
| discussion on the topic compares with the present LLM
| mania/break-through.
| jwilk wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb
| mistrial9 wrote:
| software development wisdom from a time before cookie-cutters
| rileyphone wrote:
| the original wiki
| oniony wrote:
| There are people saying it was the original wiki, but let me
| spell out what that actually means.
|
| Before the C2 WikiWikiWeb, few web sites had experimented with
| making it possible for its users to alter the site's contents.
| Granted, there were many sites with messaging forums you could
| post to, and there were places where you could add review or
| contribute new content entries, but not anything I can remember
| where you could edit the fabric of the site itself. Sites back
| then were 'published' by someone who owned them, and any
| contributions would go through a moderation process before they
| would be accepted and published, so there was no immediacy to
| such edits.
|
| The C2 wiki wiki web allowed any user to immediately make an
| edit or create a new page, and it the site relied upon its
| persistent history to roll back changes that the community
| deemed destructive. I remember feeling quite excited by the
| concept because it was so alien at the time -- that someone was
| willing to allow anonymous users to put stuff on a site they
| were ultimately publishing.
|
| The C2 WikiWikiWeb experiment is what ultimately lead to the
| creation of Wikipedia: an encyclopaedia that could be edited by
| the end users, hence the name. (In turn, the WikiWikiWeb was
| named from the Hawaiian word 'wikiwiki' meaning 'quick', which
| alluded to the lack of any moderation steps in its edits.)
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| Everything2 was another example of a user-driven site that
| allowed linking between pages. It's actually still alive
| today:
|
| https://everything2.com/title/Y+combinator
| twic wrote:
| h2g2.com is a another user-edited encyclopedia site which
| is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike e2. It launched
| about a year after e2, and about two years before
| wikipedia.
| shagie wrote:
| There's a whole family of sites based on the same codebase
| of everything2 (which was a cousin of the /. codebase).
|
| https://everything2.com/title/Everything+Engine
|
| Aside from E2, it is likely that PerlMonks is the other
| still active site - https://www.perlmonks.org (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PerlMonks )
|
| The others seem to have fallen into disrepair if they are
| still up at all.
| msie wrote:
| I don't like the pop-up page ui.
| qingcharles wrote:
| That's weird. I spent some time going through the wiki last
| night. I was actually trying to find the original source for
| WikiWikiWeb, but I couldn't find a download anywhere.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Cool URLs don't change.
|
| https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
|
| If you simply must redesign a site, make sure all the existing
| URLs still work and take someone visiting to the same equivalent
| in your new site.
|
| If you're going to drop a site before its redesign is ready...
| _what the hell are you doing?_
| PcChip wrote:
| >If you simply must redesign a site, make sure all the existing
| URLs still work and take someone visiting to the same
| equivalent in your new site.
|
| looking at you, vmware
| no_identd wrote:
| Personally I consider what The Cybernetics Society pulled
| with regards to their new homepage / the botched (in numerous
| ways) move of their old homepage to
| https://archive.cybsoc.org/ far more atrocious, because with
| Microsoft and VMware it feels less tragic
| sph wrote:
| Shameless plug. I'm working on a service to solve this very
| problem. I hate 404s, they're so frequent even my mum knows
| what a 404 Page Not Found error is.
|
| Right now I'm focusing on simple, automated link checking in a
| closed free alpha with a few users, but the killer feature I
| want to implement by the end of this month is notifying users
| if they redesign their website and forget to set redirects to
| old content. [1]
|
| I would love to have more alpha testers, and the plan is to
| make it available for free to open-source projects and
| documentation sites, like c2.com. If you join the waitlist,
| I'll let you straight in.
|
| https://bernard.app
|
| --
|
| 1: I am redoing my personal website, trying different static
| generators, and I cringe at the thought that I am completely
| unaware if I break someone's bookmarks, or the RSS feed URL
| changes and I lose the couple followers I have. Bernard exists
| first and foremost to solve this problem _for me_ , and I hope
| it might be useful to others that care about this issue.
| kevinmgranger wrote:
| Is this a deliberate shutdown or just an outage?
| marttt wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I browsed the java version last week, or maybe
| even just 2-3 days ago.
|
| Links to the JSON-formatted pages (thanks, fellow HNers!) don't
| seem to work either:
|
| https://c2.com/wiki/remodel/pages/EgolessProgramming
|
| https://proxy.c2.com/wiki/remodel/pages/
|
| I really love(..d?) the "stream of consciousness" nature of the
| c2 discussions. It is easily among the greatest intellectual
| rabbit holes of oldschool internet. The extremely minimal, kind
| of robust formatting probably also contributed to why it was such
| a compelling read at times. Content over form, for sure.
| Kelamir wrote:
| From the source: <center> <b>notice</b>
| <p>javascript required to view this site</p> <b>why</b>
| <p>measured improvement in server performance</p>
| <p>awesome incremental search</p> </center>
|
| It does load faster now that it doesn't display anything.
| [deleted]
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