Digital Garden | Notes

World Wide Web

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https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html

WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project

From: T. Berners-Lee/CN, R. Cailliau/ECP Date: 12 November 1990

Abstract

HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. Potentially, HyperText provides a single user-interface to many large classes of stored information such as reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line systems help. We propose the implementation of a simple scheme to incorporate several different servers of machine-stored information already available at CERN, including an analysis of the requirements for information access needs by experiments.

Hypertext concepts

The principles of hypertext, and their applicability to the CERN environment, are discussed more fully in, a glossary of technical terms is given in. Here we give a short presentation of hypertext. A program which provides access to the hypertext world we call a browser. When starting a hypertext browser on your workstation, you will first be presented with a hypertext page which is personal to you : your personal notes, if you like. A hypertext page has pieces of text which refer to other texts. Such references are highlighted and can be selected with a mouse (on dumb terminals, they would appear in a numbered list and selection would be done by entering a number). When you select a reference, the browser presents you with the text which is referenced: you have made the browser follow a hypertext link :

(see Fig. 1: hypertext links).

That text itself has links to other texts and so on. In fig. 1, clicking on the GHI would take you to the minutes of that meeting. There you would get interested in the discussion of the UPS, and click on the highlighted word UPS to find out more about it.

The texts are linked together in a way that one can go from one concept to another to find the information one wants. The network of links is called a web . The web need not be hierarchical, and therefore it is not necessary to “climb up a tree” all the way again before you can go down to a different but related subject. The web is also not complete, since it is hard to imagine that all the possible links would be put in by authors. Yet a small number of links is usually sufficient for getting from anywhere to anywhere else in a small number of hops.

The texts are known as nodes. The process of proceeding from node to node is called navigation . Nodes do not need to be on the same machine: links may point across machine boundaries. Having a world wide web implies some solutions must be found for problems such as different access protocols and different node content formats. These issues are addressed by our proposal.

Nodes can in principle also contain non-text information such as diagrams, pictures, sound, animation etc. The term hypermedia is simply the expansion of the hypertext idea to these other media. Where facilities already exist, we aim to allow graphics interchange, but in this project, we concentrate on the universal readership for text, rather than on graphics.

Applications

The application of a universal hypertext system, once in place, will cover many areas such as document registration, on-line help, project documentation, news schemes and so on. It would be inappropriate for us (rather than those responsible) to suggest specific areas, but experiment online help, accelerator online help, assistance for computer center operators, and the dissemination of information by central services such as the user office and CN and ECP divisions are obvious candidates. WorldWideWeb (or W3 ) intends to cater for these services across the HEP community.

Web Browser

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A web browser (commonly referred to as a browser) is a software application for accessing the World Wide Web. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the web browser retrieves the necessary content from a web server and then displays the page on the user’s device.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browser

Statement of Intent

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Hypha’s practice is situated across many topics that are present in the theme of Adaptive Reuse & Creative Misuse. Drawing from our collective experiences, histories, and methodologies, our goal for the micro-residency to investigate how notions of digital infrastructure can be reused, reinterpreted, and reconfigured, to realize a kind of public space. Our approach to this theme will be composed of a few, very preliminary, subjects that will ground the residency: the situated histories of digital infrastructure, the implications of protocols for publishing (Hypertext, RSS, Peer-to-peer) in defining public spaces, and the possibilities of cooperative approaches to maintenance and repair. Our intent is to make the process of this investigation public through online tools mapping our thinking about the theme (Open channels in Are.na as one example) and cultivating a Digital Public Garden as part of Hypha’s contributions to the initiative (a resyndicatable adaptive online notebook). The outputs from the micro-residency will be a written contribution to the Field Guide to the Digital Real and a micro-website containing the synthesis of our investigations and our evolving practice. The outputs will be textual and visual, and draw from our collaborative practices as a cooperative. They will explore ways to represent relationships with existing and emergent technologies within our communities. Through our micro-residency we will capture a poetic interpretation of the theme and provide prompts for institutions in the city on how they could reconfigure technology to create radically creative platforms.

SSB

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Paul Frazee, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Scuttlebutt is a decentralised secure gossip platform.

Like other social platforms, you can send messages to your friends and share posts onto a feed. The cool thing is that the underlying technology here means that messages are passed directly between friends via a peer-to-peer (p2p) gossip protocol.

As a decentralized social network, Scuttlebutt passes the data from friend to friend, without any central server. The data is localised and distributed so it also happens to work offline!

The name, Scuttlebutt, came from sea-slang for gossip. Basically, like a watercooler on a ship, where sailors and pirates go have a yarn.

https://scuttlebutt.nz/

RSS

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RSS (RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. These feeds can, for example, allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator. The news aggregator will automatically check the RSS feed for new content, allowing the list to be automatically passed from website to website or from website to user. This passing of content is called web syndication. Websites usually use RSS feeds to publish frequently updated information, such as blog entries, news headlines, or episodes of audio and video series. RSS is also used to distribute podcasts. An RSS document (called “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, and metadata, like publishing date and author’s name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

Recent reporting and reflecting on the afterlives of RSS: “RSS is undead” “RSS died. Whether you blame Feedburner, or Google Reader, or Digg Reader … the humble protocol has managed to keep on trudging along despite all evidence that it is dead, dead, dead.” (Danny Chrichton, 2018); “Today, RSS is not dead. But neither is it anywhere near as popular as it once was.” (Sinclair Target, 2019); “The technology is dead for mainstream acceptance but still has plenty of uses.” “RSS…lives on as a ghost” (Some dude says, 2020)

Partially convinced by the take that the current web is “the legacy of RSS, even if it’s not built on RSS” (Werbach, quoted from below):

The first is a story about a broad vision for the web’s future that never quite came to fruition. The second is a story about how a collaborative effort to improve a popular standard devolved into one of the most contentious forks in the history of open-source software development. RSS was one of the standards that promised to deliver [a] syndicated future. …And yet, two decades later, after the rise of social media and Google’s decision to shut down Google Reader, RSS appears to be a slowly dying technology, now used chiefly by podcasters, programmers with tech blogs, and the occasional journalist.
The fork happened [in 2000] after Dornfest announced a proposed RSS 1.0 specification and formed the RSS-DEV Working Group. RSS would fork again in 2003 [into Atom], when several developers frustrated with the bickering in the RSS community sought to create an entirely new format. After the introduction of Atom, there were three competing versions of RSS: Winer’s RSS 0.92 (updated to RSS 2.0 in 2002 and renamed “Really Simple Syndication”), the RSS-DEV Working Group’s RSS 1.0, and Atom. Today we mostly use RSS 2.0 and Atom. Today, RSS is not dead. But neither is it anywhere near as popular as it once was… [The most pervasive explanation is] … Social networks, just like RSS, provide a feed featuring all the latest news on the internet. Social networks took over from RSS because they were simply better feeds. Another theory is that RSS was always too geeky for regular people.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3mm4z/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss

Not sure to believe the take that it’s all about product design:

[Lack of prioritization, discovery and curation for users, and lack of analytics and branding content for publishers] are just some of the product issues with RSS, and together they ensure that the protocol will never reach the ubiquity required to supplant centralized tech corporations. [For] solving RSS as business model. There needs to be some sort of a commerce layer around feeds, so that there is an incentive to improve and optimize the RSS experience.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/07/rss-is-undead/

Its death in spite of its ubiquity and cheapness:

RSS has largely been forgotten but lives on as a ghost on almost every major website. The RSS feed exists, it’s updated, and everything is accessible without anyone touching it. It’s so stable no one has to think to check the RSS feed; it just works. RSS is also so computationally cheap no one bothers to exclude it since it’s effectively a rounding error in processing.

https://somedudesays.com/2020/04/rss-in-2020/

Publishing

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Publishing as a way of making a thing public, making it known and available. A sense of (re) distribution of the work or thing and knowledge associated with it.

Purely definitional:

Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the distribution of printed works, such as books, newspapers, and magazines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishing

and from Oxford English Dictionary:

publishing, n.

The action of making something publicly known; official or public notification; promulgation, public announcement; = publication n. 1.

The action or business of preparing and issuing books, newspapers, etc., for public sale or distribution; an instance of this; = publication n. 2. Cf. publish v. 3a.

(pulling from publish:)

publish, v. I. To make public.

a. transitive. To announce in a formal or official manner; to proclaim; to promulgate (a law, decree, etc.); †to pronounce (a judicial sentence) (obsolete). b. transitive. To announce or read (banns) in church before an intended marriage; (U.S. regional, chiefly north-eastern) to announce publicly the name of (a person intending marriage).

https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/154077 https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/154072

Experiment around digital publishing from fellow Hypha Co-op member-workers:

We are building the Distributed Press — a beginner friendly, open-source publishing tool for the distributed web. Aiming to empower authors, Distributed Press utilizes the distributed web to amplify free expression worldwide, while exposing sources of misinformation. We all have a sense of the wide-ranging and complex issues facing publishing today: political censorship, disinformation, walled gardens, and the decline of independent media. Yet the solutions to these challenges remain unclear. Working with authors, audiences, and distributed web communities, we hope to co-develop new tools, in order to make publishing fair, democratic, and dignified for all.

https://distributed.press/

Something about recent ecosystem of publishing (James Pogue. January 2020. “They Made a Movie Out of It”):

Almost all notable book-length nonfiction written in this country emerges as an expansion of work that was first published by a magazine, so—whether they admit it or not—magazines are the incubators for the nonfiction writers who describe our world. But these outlets generally make not the barest pretense of trying to pay writers enough to build a life. Instead, editors at prestige outlets increasingly view writing as germinal IP. We have a perfectly good word for the kind of writing and reporting this all encourages: trash.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/they-made-a-movie-out-of-it-pogue

Protocol

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A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any kind of variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics and synchronization of communication and possible error recovery methods. Protocols may be implemented by hardware, software, or a combination of both.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_protocol

“Protocols” from the Lab Book of the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR):

Protocols are the “attitudes” or “the manner in which one approaches each and every element in our space.” They are different than pure rules or instructions; they are ways that we establish order and maintain practices across our group […] – They define the way we ought to proceed or behave in different situations. As such, they are normative, or premised on values, morals, and an idea of how things ought to be done. They are a manifestation of our values.

https://civiclaboratory.nl/clear-lab-book/

peer-to-peer

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Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application. They are said to form a peer-to-peer network of nodes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer

Projects

IPFS

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https://github.com/krl, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol and peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. IPFS uses content-addressing to uniquely identify each file in a global namespace connecting all computing devices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System

Initial Seeds

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Set of areas that guide our reveries?

The history of hypertext, rss+adjacent protocols and standards.
The act of publishing as “making something public” → publicness → hybrid public space.
The possibilities for the infrastructural (maintenance/repair) to draw from the past to rethink the present through co-operative approaches.

Publish from RSS to arena?
RSS to twitter? The gram?
Use DPress to get it on SSB?

What if… we travel back in time and blow up BGP? Would Xanadu be realized? Would actual plural internetworking have persisted?

Publishing → making things public

» COMMISSIONING BODIES «
Economy as a form a expression

Antagonizing the separation of frontend/backend