Ancestors

Written by matt wilkie on 2025-01-31 at 17:51

File Systems: The Original Hypermedia - https://jon.work/og/

file under: things-worth-reading-contemplating

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Written by matt wilkie on 2025-01-31 at 17:54

"When we think about other types of media, such as text, photography, or film, it’s easy to infer the character of their artifacts. If someone says they’re going to show us a picture, we expect to see a rectangular artifact depicting a place or object. If it’s a physical picture, we expect it to be made of pigment on paper. If it’s a virtual picture, we expect it to be made of pixels.

The depicted place or object does not interfere with the substantive, constructive character of the medium. All digital pictures are rectangular arrays of pixels."

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Written by matt wilkie on 2025-01-31 at 17:55

"The same rationale extends to film, text and audio. A proper medium have innate and stable constructive and reproductive character.

The same cannot be said for hypermedia as it exists on the web today. With the cartesian, stylistic approach having brutally usurped the semantic, data-oriented foundations of authoring, it is no longer possible to reliably infer how a given hypermedia artifact will be structured, let alone how it will function. In my view, this undermines the status of web hypermedia as a proper medium."

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Written by matt wilkie on 2025-01-31 at 17:59

"What’s curious is hypermedia, as encoded by HTML, actually does have a stable and inherent character, but for computers. ... not properly factoring in sociological [etc] considerations ... every artifact produced ends up reinventing the medium itself. It's cursed by aesthetic [being] steered by aesthetic, it has no aesthetic at all.

This is the fundamental reason we need entire industries focused on producing and maintaining web hypermedia. ... essentially hypermedia service providers capitalizing on the web’s complexity and unpredictability by offering a stable, understandable multimedia environment that humans can engage with."

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Written by matt wilkie on 2025-01-31 at 18:02

"To borrow vocabulary from economics, the difficulty to trade hypermedia across systems renders it unsuitable as a reliable commodity. This is striking because, while we consume it as if it were a commodity, the entangled mess of the underlying representations makes archival and redistribution in native form costly and ineffective, leading us to resort to taking pictures and screenshots of hypermedia as a means of preservation."

--- hey you! stop reading these out of context highlights. Go read the OG ---

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Toot

Written by matt wilkie on 2025-01-31 at 18:08

"the central problem prompting... conceptualize the web was the need for an overlay system enabling fast jumps between hierarchical nodes, essentially, an escape hatch to bypass traversing trees in a strictly ordered, top-to-bottom manner.

So it seems that, strictly speaking, it's not the case that hierarchies cannot model the real world, but hierarchies alone are insufficient ... hierarchies are undeniably doing the heavy lifting at the base layer of systems; this is true both for the system exemplified in Tim's passage and, ultimately, on the web at large."

Exhibit A: Domain Names. everything web is inside a domain tree

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Descendants