i think honestly what i want out of a storage solution is to like maybe upload stuff to some kind of object storage and then separately have a graph database or rdf quad store for the metadata. but i’m wondering if it can be made simpler without losing the ability to handle any general use case, or if this is as simple as it gets
(a filesystem is the wrong level of abstraction, i’m interested in logical handling of objects which may or may not have content that is either binary or text)
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the area where my thinking seems to differ from most of what i've seen so far is that i don't make a real distinction between text and binary anymore. content is content. so this implies that the object storage is not just for media, but for everything, including text files. but the thing is that content should be strictly content. what most people get "wrong" with HTML for example is that they require an entire structural wrapper, which is itself wrapping not just a body but also a header
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entirely natural, of course -- HTML is most often used to serialize documents that are browsed on the Web. but for the most part, that's all presentational stuff! if you removed it, you would lose aesthetics, but the core of the message is only some certain part, that can be extracted and handled on its own. the rest of it is just part of the view or (re)presentation.
i've talked before about how you can combine body content with header metadata and get a document that can itself be body,
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and you can of course unwrap those layers of containers of head+body as well. when there's nothing left to unwrap or extract, that leaves you with some base atomic content, which may be just some plain text.
i argue that this is not meaningfully different than, say, a png file. it's just that text is often inlined into the presentation layer. we don't go about browsing the metadata and then linking to the content, we just stick the content directly into the same view as the metadata...
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but just as we can inline text content, we can also separate it and link to it, we can stick it into object storage and address it as that literal text. and we can then arbitrarily package and wrap it into whatever containers or as many layers of containers as we care to do so. we could take some plaintext content and wrap it in some HTML template that itself gets wrapped in what eventually becomes an HTML document which itself gets wrapped in an HTTP message. this is more or less how we do rn.
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the takeaway really, is that if we want the content to be replicable and manageable by some user(s), then it needs to be put into some data store, and it is exactly that data store that i am trying to model. the data model needs to support lossless serialization into whatever convenient format some person might ask for or need. i don't think "sql data dump" is an ideal export format, and i don't think "a really big json file" is ideal either. i want something that can be split up into atoms.
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@trwnh what does splitting things into atoms buy us? it sounds nice conceptually, but im not sure i understand the use-case
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@tech_himbo the main use case is easier handling of the content as data. for the most part, content is just data meant for human consumption. but what we lack is convenience around managing content as data. think of how a CMS works for example. now say you have a friend who runs a different CMS. what's the easiest way to export/import some content from you to them? how do you "share" content? reuse? and so on.
having the atomic data makes it easier to handle, logic with, reason about, wrap up,
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@trwnh doesn’t this double the problem, though? if CMS A uses HTML snippets, and CMS B uses markdown with a header, you just need to translate from HTML to markdown. but if A uses JSON-LD and plaintext, and B uses XML and RTF, then you have to do two translations. although maybe your proposal is to ban everything but plaintext — in which case, why make plaintext the standard over any other format?
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@tech_himbo not so much "make plaintext the standard" as much as it is "make the human meaningful thing the standard"
so i could write plaintext or i could write semantic html or i could write markdown or asciidoc or whatever. doesn't matter. the serialization is less important than the actual information being conveyed
so CMS A and CMS B don't need to agree on jsonld or xml, but they do need to agree on what an "article" is. they can then (separately) describe that "article" with metadata.
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@trwnh so, they need to agree on a serialization format for articles, and we need a mapping from A’s metadata format to B’a metadata format to enable import/export. is that right?
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@tech_himbo no, they need to agree on the semantics of the "content". serializations and formats can be anything, and can be negotiated between peers ("i understand a b c", "i understand c d e", "okay let's agree to use c for this session")
this is about the semantic content model basically
in practical terms say instead of sending you an entire HTML document i just sent you a single paragraph element or perhaps only its inner text
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@trwnh ok, so the requirement is that both services must support a common format, even if that format isn’t a broad standard. is that right?
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@tech_himbo yes, but also the most straightforward solution to content is to literally just pass it along 1:1 without any containers or metadata
the "problem" is essentially that, for something like an HTML document saved to disk as .html, we pre-bundle the content in the middle of a bunch of presentational stuff that is not content. or for a JSON document, we put an escaped string as the value of some key. i'm saying we don't need to always do that
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