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Beaker Browser (mentioned as one of many possibilities in this article) is the real deal. If it doesn't get you fired up about the possibilities, then - well le

Beaker Browser (mentioned as one of many possibilities in this article) is the real deal. If it doesn't get you fired up about the possibilities, then - well let me explain I guess: * The interface is dead simple - share this folder, done. * It is a read-write browser. Netscape (and other browsers) used to be this way - they had some limited HTML creation tools. Beaker brings this back in the form of making an "editable copy" of a website. It's a choice in the address bar. * Making an "editable copy" doesn't have to mean you're now editing raw HTML. An editable copy can direct how it is edited through JS. (See the recently released "dead-lite" for an example of this.) All these attempts are exciting but I'm actually starting to use Beaker because it's so useful even without adoption.

styfle 8y ago
Can you explain what you can use beaker browser for, even without adoption?
- kickscondor 8y ago
  Yeah, so in my case, I wrote a blogging thing that runs in Beaker. I can run it from any of my machines and it has no server. This is great because it is insanely portable - I can setup the software on a new machine by just going to the URL. It is just "software as a service" but there is no server. It's somewhat similar to TiddlyWiki but Beaker adds automatic synchronization. (I still manage the JS code itself in git, but the blog posts are managed by Beaker.) Thank you for the question, styfle. Look up Tara Vancil's talk on "A Web Without Servers" if you need a crystal clear explanation - don't know if I'm doing adequately. And my blog is at kickscondor.com if you're curious why I had to write my own blog warez. Also, there is a resurgence in blogging happening right now with the shakedown of social media. It's great.
  - kingnight 8y ago
    For blogging use case, I have a few questions: 1. A (current?) limitation I've noticed with Beaker is that you can only edit a site implementation (for a specific address) on a single machine. What would you do if you had multiple computers / locations that would want to make updates (JS or User Content) 2. What about errors. Don't they persist in the address's history? What if there's something undesirable that got added by accident 3. What about mobile? How could someone visit/browse on mobile without a non-distributed proxy http address
    - kickscondor 8y ago
      Yeah, cool - thank you for the questions, kingnight. 1. So this answer is a bit convoluted because I am still learning, wish I could keep it short. So my setup might be a bit 'naughty' because I'm currently saving the 'key' in my JS in a seperate dat. Right now I have one dat that acts as the 'admin' and one that is the actual blog - but I am going to move to hyperdb (the new solution for multi-writer support.) There are actually a couple libraries cropping up for doing this sort of thing and I'm not up on all of them. So this is more of a 'need to make up my mind' thing than a capability thing with Beaker. There are a TON of libraries and a TON of possibilities - (there's an 'awesome dat' page that just goes on and on and on...) - but I am still researching a better way (and, who knows, maybe my way is fine.) I want something that could be in place ten years from now - because I do think JS and HTML will. 2. No, files can get replaced. Not sure if that is your question. Yes the undesirable will persist in the history, but you can overwrite it. I can prevent bad content, though, by checking it in my JS code and allowing a preview first. 3. Yeah this is a problem - there is a Bunsen Browser in development, but I haven't tried it. I am honestly okay with everyone browsing through HTTPS, though - I like Beaker for the admin tool. Again, I have a browser-based blog software without needing to run a server anywhere at all.
      - kingnight 8y ago
        Thanks much for the replies. I’m very interested in this and am wrapping my head around how it works and these differences so it’s great to hear perspectives from people using it.
      - kingnight 8y ago
        Also your website is amazing. Is that the blog you were referring to? Is there a write up or overview of how it’s all put together. Love it
        kickscondor 8y ago
        No, I've only written a piece on how I came to decide upon its design. https://www.kickscondor.com/ticker-tape-parade https://www.kickscondor.com/ticker-tape-parade I'm not sure how I would talk about the CSS and JavaScript - which was the most work. I will think about 'if'/'how' I can describe that. I really appreciate the encouragement. Please send me a link to your blog, if you have one. I am collecting links to personal blogs. See you around, kingnight.
  - tomcam 8y ago
    If you visit kickscondor.com be sure to turn down volume first. You may find out as I did that if you visit at night its bleeps and bloops can wake up a partner :O
    - kickscondor 8y ago
      Thankyou for saying something tomcam - I've turned down the volume on the sample - please apologize to your person in bed. I might also consider closing down in the evenings.
pfraze 8y ago
Tara gave a good intro talk at jsconfeu https://youtu.be/rJ_WvfF3FN8 https://youtu.be/rJ_WvfF3FN8
buboard 8y ago
thats a great implementation. Simple and intuitive. Far better than asking people to set up an ipfs node or sth.
zmw 8y ago
I checked out Beaker Browser, and apparently it's based on the Dat project [1], which seems to be very similar to IPFS. Then apparently it follows that, just like IPFS, you can't throw random things onto the network and expect it to stick; you need to pay someone for hosting and bandwidth (that someone could be yourself) to have it pinned, and in order to have it available worldwide at all times you still need to pay for a CDN of sort — the Linux box in your closet, or worse, your laptop that sometimes goes offline just won't cut it. Eventually it's just another protocol to copy stuff around, where stuff originates from various servers (your browser basically embeds a server, capable of serving stuff), with the possible benefit of popular stuff may be p2p'ed (but if you're a business you probably can't rely on that anyway). I fail to see how it's radically different. (Also, I'm not even sure how you could p2p private user data, unless you expect everyone to carry around one or more yubikeys, or implant chips into fingers or something; plus all devices need into buy into that. But I haven't given that much thought.) [1] https://datproject.org/ https://datproject.org/
- 7373737373 8y ago
  The fundamental difference is source independence. It doesn't matter where the data is, as long as someone has it pinned, you'll be able to access it.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - zmw 8y ago
    That indeed is a fundamental difference. But on second thought I got confused. Source independence, content addressable are nice and all, but we don't build static websites that always have same hashes; "Ubuntu Server 18.04.1 ISO" could be ipfs://<static_hash>, but even "latest Ubuntu Server 18.04.x ISO" couldn't be that. You still need to query the origin server (or client, whatever you call it), the central authority, to get those addresses. So, frequently changing websites/webapps don't benefit from this; they may even be penalized by the overhead. Only aggressively cacheable objects could benefit, but the vast majority of those probably won't be popular enough to be cached/pinned by peers anyway, so you still end up getting whatever you need from the origin server (or paid CDNs). Btw, I skimmed through Beaker docs, and it seems they resolve names through DNS (what else can they do) and even use HTTP for discovery.
femto 8y ago
I'll mention Amaya here. https://www.w3.org/Amaya/ https://www.w3.org/Amaya/ The original vision for the web was that editing/creation had the same status as viewing/consumption, and that websites were writable as well as readable. This is what Amaya implemented. It never gained wide adoption, but is served as a reference implementation of the W3C's vision of the web. (In my experience Amays is not particularly usable because it regularly crashes, but that could be fixed.) Is Beaker similar to Amaya extended to use transport layers beyond http, such as ipfs?
- nine_k 8y ago
  I'd hazard to say that the concept of "wiki" is what successfully implemented that early vision of editable WWW. Wiki markup is different from HTML markup, but it represents many of the same (early) text-formatting and resource-linking concepts, while limiting the excessively powerful features of arbitrary layout, scripting, etc.
  - edwintorok 8y ago
    Have a look at the federated wiki [0], it allows someone to easily fork someone else's page, edit it, and host it. History is tracked at the paragraph level. [0] http://fedwiki.org/view/welcome-visitors http://fedwiki.org/view/welcome-visitors
- kickscondor 8y ago
  I can't really answer this yet, because I've never heard of Amaya and I don't want to answer based on a cursory glance - but I really appreciate this link, as I love bits of Web history and I am going to do some homework on this. So, thankyou, femto!
newnewpdro 8y ago
Am I correct in undesrtanding no consideration is being made for server-executed code? How is access control implemented? It seems like this basically only applies to web content you want to give everyone access to and can have 100% of application logic run client-side. That's a pretty narrow cross-section of the existing web...
- kickscondor 8y ago
  So - there is no server-executed code - it all runs in the browser and the folder can only access itself anyway, which can't happen unless you have the private key. Access control in Beaker is through that private key - you need it in order to edit the 'dat' (name for a synced folder). So, no, there aren't a lot of complex permissions available - but you can also separate an app into several dats and use a master one to manage the permissions of those. Not terribly complex, but it's actually surprising how much you can do. (It's tough to wrap your head around not having a server - but it's actually true.) But help me out - I think alot of the Web falls into this category: * User logs in to edit their data (has private key to their dat). * User shares their data (blog, photo feed, whatever) with others (who don't have the key). * Those others merge all incoming feeds into a single master feed. You could replicate YouTube, Facebook, Twitter this way - usually there are not complex permissions in these apps, are there? (Not that you'd want to replicate them...)
  - zmw 8y ago
    Umm, having everyone’s data as a flat directory as opposed to an aggregated database sounds terribly inefficient... You need to somehow build a distributed, decentralized database on top of that flat structure, right? Otherwise your Twitter is just a microblog publishing tool plus a direct crawl RSS reader... Maybe Twitter is too specialized an example. What about any kind of search? You do need an index, and someone still has to own that index, and “donate” computing power to update that index. You own your self-hosted data, like many of us already do, but there will still be gatekeepers, e.g. Google for our current web. EDIT: I realized that with a clever enough architecture and probably much more computing power than necessary in a trusted environment, no one needs to own the index. But it seems way more advanced than this protocol. (I’m completely new to this stuff so please excuse my naive skepticism.)
dcsan 8y ago
I love your blog @kickscondor. The article you have about using Twine with the kids and the way they used it for building linked stories, reminded me how Twine is such a natural and intuitive tool for authoring linked chunks of content, much more than typing in HREFs. If you were able to build a visual map and bridge to someone else's paragraph... that would make the distributed system's easier to grasp.
- kickscondor 8y ago
  Hey thankyou! This is very encouraging. It's true - kids really love Twine and it is one of the very few tools that comes automatically to them. It is better than code.org at what code.org is 'attempting' to do. Really cool point about extending Twine! That had never occurred to me. Amazing.
frio 8y ago
Hi, I've been playing with making something similar myself -- although using IPFS rather than Dat. I notice you've married up Webmentions and Dat; how have you done that? The only real solution I've come up with is to run a bunch of regular services at an HTTP endpoint (for Webmentions, ActivityPub, Webfinger etc.) that then generate new builds of the static site, which gets added to IPFS.
- kickscondor 8y ago
  Oh believe me - that's exactly what I'm doing :D Webmentions are very much made for HTTP - since they require an HTTP POST. A variation would have to be made for Dat. (As an aside, I originally didn't like using Webmentions on a static site - I had planned on making a cron to periodically check for Webmentions and republish. But now I really appreciate that it goes hand-in-hand with moderating comments. I look over the incoming Webmentions, nuke any spam, and republish. No bad feelings about comments that sat in the queue for a day - they are still out on the web at their original URL.)

styfle 8y ago

Can you explain what you can use beaker browser for, even without adoption?

kickscondor 8y ago
Yeah, so in my case, I wrote a blogging thing that runs in Beaker. I can run it from any of my machines and it has no server. This is great because it is insanely portable - I can setup the software on a new machine by just going to the URL. It is just "software as a service" but there is no server. It's somewhat similar to TiddlyWiki but Beaker adds automatic synchronization. (I still manage the JS code itself in git, but the blog posts are managed by Beaker.) Thank you for the question, styfle. Look up Tara Vancil's talk on "A Web Without Servers" if you need a crystal clear explanation - don't know if I'm doing adequately. And my blog is at kickscondor.com if you're curious why I had to write my own blog warez. Also, there is a resurgence in blogging happening right now with the shakedown of social media. It's great.
- kingnight 8y ago
  For blogging use case, I have a few questions: 1. A (current?) limitation I've noticed with Beaker is that you can only edit a site implementation (for a specific address) on a single machine. What would you do if you had multiple computers / locations that would want to make updates (JS or User Content) 2. What about errors. Don't they persist in the address's history? What if there's something undesirable that got added by accident 3. What about mobile? How could someone visit/browse on mobile without a non-distributed proxy http address
  - kickscondor 8y ago
    Yeah, cool - thank you for the questions, kingnight. 1. So this answer is a bit convoluted because I am still learning, wish I could keep it short. So my setup might be a bit 'naughty' because I'm currently saving the 'key' in my JS in a seperate dat. Right now I have one dat that acts as the 'admin' and one that is the actual blog - but I am going to move to hyperdb (the new solution for multi-writer support.) There are actually a couple libraries cropping up for doing this sort of thing and I'm not up on all of them. So this is more of a 'need to make up my mind' thing than a capability thing with Beaker. There are a TON of libraries and a TON of possibilities - (there's an 'awesome dat' page that just goes on and on and on...) - but I am still researching a better way (and, who knows, maybe my way is fine.) I want something that could be in place ten years from now - because I do think JS and HTML will. 2. No, files can get replaced. Not sure if that is your question. Yes the undesirable will persist in the history, but you can overwrite it. I can prevent bad content, though, by checking it in my JS code and allowing a preview first. 3. Yeah this is a problem - there is a Bunsen Browser in development, but I haven't tried it. I am honestly okay with everyone browsing through HTTPS, though - I like Beaker for the admin tool. Again, I have a browser-based blog software without needing to run a server anywhere at all.
    - kingnight 8y ago
      Thanks much for the replies. I’m very interested in this and am wrapping my head around how it works and these differences so it’s great to hear perspectives from people using it.
    - kingnight 8y ago
      Also your website is amazing. Is that the blog you were referring to? Is there a write up or overview of how it’s all put together. Love it
      - kickscondor 8y ago
        No, I've only written a piece on how I came to decide upon its design. https://www.kickscondor.com/ticker-tape-parade https://www.kickscondor.com/ticker-tape-parade I'm not sure how I would talk about the CSS and JavaScript - which was the most work. I will think about 'if'/'how' I can describe that. I really appreciate the encouragement. Please send me a link to your blog, if you have one. I am collecting links to personal blogs. See you around, kingnight.
- tomcam 8y ago
  If you visit kickscondor.com be sure to turn down volume first. You may find out as I did that if you visit at night its bleeps and bloops can wake up a partner :O
  - kickscondor 8y ago
    Thankyou for saying something tomcam - I've turned down the volume on the sample - please apologize to your person in bed. I might also consider closing down in the evenings.

pfraze 8y ago

Tara gave a good intro talk at jsconfeu https://youtu.be/rJ_WvfF3FN8 https://youtu.be/rJ_WvfF3FN8

buboard 8y ago

thats a great implementation. Simple and intuitive. Far better than asking people to set up an ipfs node or sth.

zmw 8y ago

I checked out Beaker Browser, and apparently it's based on the Dat project [1], which seems to be very similar to IPFS. Then apparently it follows that, just like IPFS, you can't throw random things onto the network and expect it to stick; you need to pay someone for hosting and bandwidth (that someone could be yourself) to have it pinned, and in order to have it available worldwide at all times you still need to pay for a CDN of sort — the Linux box in your closet, or worse, your laptop that sometimes goes offline just won't cut it. Eventually it's just another protocol to copy stuff around, where stuff originates from various servers (your browser basically embeds a server, capable of serving stuff), with the possible benefit of popular stuff may be p2p'ed (but if you're a business you probably can't rely on that anyway). I fail to see how it's radically different. (Also, I'm not even sure how you could p2p private user data, unless you expect everyone to carry around one or more yubikeys, or implant chips into fingers or something; plus all devices need into buy into that. But I haven't given that much thought.) [1] https://datproject.org/ https://datproject.org/

7373737373 8y ago
The fundamental difference is source independence. It doesn't matter where the data is, as long as someone has it pinned, you'll be able to access it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- zmw 8y ago
  That indeed is a fundamental difference. But on second thought I got confused. Source independence, content addressable are nice and all, but we don't build static websites that always have same hashes; "Ubuntu Server 18.04.1 ISO" could be ipfs://<static_hash>, but even "latest Ubuntu Server 18.04.x ISO" couldn't be that. You still need to query the origin server (or client, whatever you call it), the central authority, to get those addresses. So, frequently changing websites/webapps don't benefit from this; they may even be penalized by the overhead. Only aggressively cacheable objects could benefit, but the vast majority of those probably won't be popular enough to be cached/pinned by peers anyway, so you still end up getting whatever you need from the origin server (or paid CDNs). Btw, I skimmed through Beaker docs, and it seems they resolve names through DNS (what else can they do) and even use HTTP for discovery.

femto 8y ago

I'll mention Amaya here. https://www.w3.org/Amaya/ https://www.w3.org/Amaya/ The original vision for the web was that editing/creation had the same status as viewing/consumption, and that websites were writable as well as readable. This is what Amaya implemented. It never gained wide adoption, but is served as a reference implementation of the W3C's vision of the web. (In my experience Amays is not particularly usable because it regularly crashes, but that could be fixed.) Is Beaker similar to Amaya extended to use transport layers beyond http, such as ipfs?

nine_k 8y ago
I'd hazard to say that the concept of "wiki" is what successfully implemented that early vision of editable WWW. Wiki markup is different from HTML markup, but it represents many of the same (early) text-formatting and resource-linking concepts, while limiting the excessively powerful features of arbitrary layout, scripting, etc.
- edwintorok 8y ago
  Have a look at the federated wiki [0], it allows someone to easily fork someone else's page, edit it, and host it. History is tracked at the paragraph level. [0] http://fedwiki.org/view/welcome-visitors http://fedwiki.org/view/welcome-visitors
kickscondor 8y ago
I can't really answer this yet, because I've never heard of Amaya and I don't want to answer based on a cursory glance - but I really appreciate this link, as I love bits of Web history and I am going to do some homework on this. So, thankyou, femto!

newnewpdro 8y ago

Am I correct in undesrtanding no consideration is being made for server-executed code? How is access control implemented? It seems like this basically only applies to web content you want to give everyone access to and can have 100% of application logic run client-side. That's a pretty narrow cross-section of the existing web...

kickscondor 8y ago
So - there is no server-executed code - it all runs in the browser and the folder can only access itself anyway, which can't happen unless you have the private key. Access control in Beaker is through that private key - you need it in order to edit the 'dat' (name for a synced folder). So, no, there aren't a lot of complex permissions available - but you can also separate an app into several dats and use a master one to manage the permissions of those. Not terribly complex, but it's actually surprising how much you can do. (It's tough to wrap your head around not having a server - but it's actually true.) But help me out - I think alot of the Web falls into this category: * User logs in to edit their data (has private key to their dat). * User shares their data (blog, photo feed, whatever) with others (who don't have the key). * Those others merge all incoming feeds into a single master feed. You could replicate YouTube, Facebook, Twitter this way - usually there are not complex permissions in these apps, are there? (Not that you'd want to replicate them...)
- zmw 8y ago
  Umm, having everyone’s data as a flat directory as opposed to an aggregated database sounds terribly inefficient... You need to somehow build a distributed, decentralized database on top of that flat structure, right? Otherwise your Twitter is just a microblog publishing tool plus a direct crawl RSS reader... Maybe Twitter is too specialized an example. What about any kind of search? You do need an index, and someone still has to own that index, and “donate” computing power to update that index. You own your self-hosted data, like many of us already do, but there will still be gatekeepers, e.g. Google for our current web. EDIT: I realized that with a clever enough architecture and probably much more computing power than necessary in a trusted environment, no one needs to own the index. But it seems way more advanced than this protocol. (I’m completely new to this stuff so please excuse my naive skepticism.)

dcsan 8y ago

I love your blog @kickscondor. The article you have about using Twine with the kids and the way they used it for building linked stories, reminded me how Twine is such a natural and intuitive tool for authoring linked chunks of content, much more than typing in HREFs. If you were able to build a visual map and bridge to someone else's paragraph... that would make the distributed system's easier to grasp.

kickscondor 8y ago
Hey thankyou! This is very encouraging. It's true - kids really love Twine and it is one of the very few tools that comes automatically to them. It is better than code.org at what code.org is 'attempting' to do. Really cool point about extending Twine! That had never occurred to me. Amazing.

frio 8y ago

Hi, I've been playing with making something similar myself -- although using IPFS rather than Dat. I notice you've married up Webmentions and Dat; how have you done that? The only real solution I've come up with is to run a bunch of regular services at an HTTP endpoint (for Webmentions, ActivityPub, Webfinger etc.) that then generate new builds of the static site, which gets added to IPFS.

kickscondor 8y ago
Oh believe me - that's exactly what I'm doing :D Webmentions are very much made for HTTP - since they require an HTTP POST. A variation would have to be made for Dat. (As an aside, I originally didn't like using Webmentions on a static site - I had planned on making a cron to periodically check for Webmentions and republish. But now I really appreciate that it goes hand-in-hand with moderating comments. I look over the incoming Webmentions, nuke any spam, and republish. No bad feelings about comments that sat in the queue for a day - they are still out on the web at their original URL.)