Better forum

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Wed, 5 Dec 2012 16:41:35 -0800
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> 
> I alluded to protocol over application earlier, and perhaps it's worth
> belaboring the point. The reason the Internet even exists today is
> because somebody had the sense to realize that relying on a specific
> software application simply will not cut it. It's not scalable, not
> interoperable, and not practical on any non-trivial scale. Instead of
> forcing everything and everyone to conform to a single software
> application and a single way of doing things, a set of powerful
> generic protocols were designed. By standardizing on the protocol
> rather than the software, an entire field was opened up: it doesn't
> matter what OS or software you're using and what OS or software I'm
> using, as long as they speak the same protocol, they're automatically
> compatible. You can have a hundred completely different OSes, twelve
> hundred completely different software applications all by different
> vendors, but by virtue of their speaking the same protocol, they can
> interoperate. And they will continue to interoperate with *future*
> OSes and software that haven't even been dreamed of yet, as long as
> the same protocol continues to be used.
> 
> Had the designers of the internet back in its embryonic stages decided
> to standardize instead on a specific set of software programs from a
> single vendor that can only communicate amongst themselves, the
> internet wouldn't even *exist* today. Version incompatibilities,
> program bugs that become depended on (and therefore unfixable),
> non-interoperability with anything but software developed by that one
> vendor, etc., would have killed off the internet years before it
> became the internet.
> 
[...]
> 
> It's the protocols that matter. It's the protocols that build
> infrastructure. Walled-garden web forums are just an anachronism to
> the pre-internet days of gratuitous system incompatibilities,
> inability of interoperating, and pointless turf wars over which
> program is "better" (hint: they *all* suck).

Amen! (If I were a religious man I would print that out and tape it
into a bible as The Gospel According To Teoh and then go
missionary-ing with it. Ok, maybe not, but you get the point ;) )

I often feel like the Web-2.0/Cloud crowd is dragging us all back to
an equivalent of the DOS days where every program included its own set
of video/sound/printer drivers and every program's UI worked
completely differently. And worse, it's all claimed to be, and accepted
as, being amazing ingenious new technology and nothing short of
"better". Ridiculous. All these Web-2.0/Cloud jokers have done is
reinvent the 286: Except the 286 responded to user input much faster
than my 64-bit dual-core does when using their web-based so-called
"software". And the 286 didn't spit out tracebacks every goddamn
time I tried to run (or even install) Python-written crapware, because
mercifully there was no Python.


> All web forums assume (1) you're using a browser, (2) your browser is
> GUI-based, (3) your browser is configured with certain minimal
> features like Javascript, cookies, etc.. There is (1) no way to use
> anything *other* than a browser (and a *graphical* one to boot --
> it's so painful to use with a text browser you might as well be
> talking HTTP with a magnet, a pair of tweezers, and a really steady
> hand holding a cat5 cable) to use the forum, even though forums
> themselves have no inherent need for the bloated monstrosities that
> today's browsers have mutated into, (2) no way to access the forum
> data directly -- it's walled behind the guises of a graphical
> UI-centric paged interface designed for GUI users' consumption, and
> therefore inconvenient or just plain impossible for programs to work
> with directly, which results in (3) you *have* to use that interface
> to access that data, and if that interface is hard to use or buggy,
> well, life just sucks, deal with it.  IOW, (4) you cannot easily
> archive posts, sort them by thread, navigate them programmatically,
> back them up en masse in your personal archives.

The newer and really Web 2.0-ified forums probably offer REST APIs. But
even then you still have all the HTTP bloat and, much worse: each BB
server software package is still going to have its own unique,
non-standard API that's incompatible with every other BB system.
So...umm...yay for "progress"...


> Just ask Nick about github sometime. :-P :-P
> 

Hee heh heh :)

I swear I'm going to have to make that github/bitbucket-commoditizing
tool sometime. But then some asshole will find someway to undo that
newly-created compatibility in the supposed name of "progress", and
we'll be right back to square one. Still, I swear I have to at least
attempt it sometime.