4 ms·

Maybe I am just naive, but this all seems terrible. There are paragraphs of ideology everywhere for every aspect of this and nothing boils down to any understan

by mlthoughts2018 8y ago

Maybe I am just naive, but this all seems terrible. There are paragraphs of ideology everywhere for every aspect of this and nothing boils down to any understandable description of what engineering mechanisms I can use or how it solves the problems laid out. I really want to like this, but if I spend 15 minutes clicking the guides, the “build a solid app on your lunch break” link, and going all over the site, and I still don’t have the foggiest idea of the actual engineering mechanisms, something is wrong. It is hard for me to believe some consortium of really knowledgeable web architects and inventors made this. It feels like a PR website with attractive purple colors to make me feel cozy. But I want to know really how it works!

mtrn 8y ago
> Maybe I am just naive, but this all seems terrible. I do have most respect for TBH and I would consider everything he thinks and writes about, but this does not sound too good to me either. The idea of linked data and semantic web has been around for almost two decades now and I have yet to see an application, technique or site that amazes me. On the contrary, most of the things in this space I have seen are bloated, unusable or simply unnecessary - whereas every paper sounds like revolution is around the corner. In that combination, it is the worst of both worlds: academic output, that claims practicality and fails to deliver. Peter Norvig put it best, when he said: "The semantic web is the future of the web and always will be." A recent discussion touches upon a few problems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18023408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18023408.
- jacobsimon 8y ago
  Maybe I'm missing something, but what does this have to do with the semantic web and why is everyone discussing that? Solid appears to be a decentralized identity platform.
  - msbarnett 8y ago
    The proposal here seems to be that data, as Linked Data (as RDF, specifically) be exposed directly to the web, manipulated by rich front ends written in JS using an RDF parser. The marketing speak is so thick that it’s impossible to discern much of the technical detail, but presumably the server side is an LDP server backed by something (triplestore?). RDF, LDPs, and Linked Data in general are all child projects of the Semantic Web movement, and nigh-on inseparable from it in practice. The venn diagram of their user communities is one circle.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    Maybe this disagreement about what Solid is demonstrates the GP's point that the intro site is a piece of PR puff so that nobody knows what it's supposed to do.
- adventured 8y ago
  The failure of the semantic Web is that it's repetitively being built by and for technologists rather than to meet a real need of real end users. It's technologists in a vacuum building approaches that don't actually solve problems that millions of people have. So long as they keep doing that, it will perpetually fail. Freebase as a prominent example, was pointless for an average person. There was no reason for it to exist in regards to doing something for millions of people. Wikipedia, Quora, Stack Exchange, etc. are what people want to consume. Until the semantic Web leads to a dramatic improvement on those types of end user products, it's not going to matter.
  - lucas_membrane 8y ago
    > The failure of the semantic Web is that it's repetitively being built by and for technologists The failures of the semantic Web are pretty much the same as the failures of the Web of evil, i.e. the internet: 1. You cannot make people tell the truth. 2. You cannot always determine when someone is not telling the truth. 3. You cannot always make people do things the right way. 4. You cannot always determine when someone is not doing things the right way. So, you are correct. The true creed of each hard-core technologist is: "Everything would work great if only everyone always did everything my way."
  - mindcrime 8y ago
    The failure of the semantic Web is that it's repetitively being built by and for technologists rather than to meet a real need of real end users. The Semantic Web hasn't "failed" and it's not something that end users need to see, know about, or care about directly. It's those technologists that use Semantic Web tech and data to build applications for the end users. Freebase as a prominent example, was pointless for an average person. Likewise Github is pointless to an average person. Because the average person isn't who it's meant for.
- mindcrime 8y ago
  Peter Norvig put it best, when he said: "The semantic web is the future of the web and always will be." Norvig is a smart guy, and maybe he meant something different by that quote than the obvious reading, but at first blush that sounds silly. If he's saying "The semantic web "always will be" the future because it will never happen, then he's objectively wrong. The semantic web is here and has been for a long time. The key thing to remember though, is that the semantic web is about machine readable data... semantic web technologies are not, by and large, something end users interact with, or even need to know about, themselves. They empower things for developers, but are mostly invisible to the average user. Google, Yahoo and other major search engines have been extracting semantic data - in the form of RDFa, Microformats, etc., - and using that data for at least 10 years now. OTOH, if Norvig mean that it will always be the future because it's always evolving, adapting, and growing, then, well, yeah... of course. And that's exactly where we are. Semantic Web tech just keeps getting better and more useful.
- smacktoward 8y ago
  > The idea of linked data and semantic web has been around for almost two decades now and I have yet to see an application, technique or site that amazes me. Ted Nelson invented the idea of hypertext in the early '60s. It wasn't until the creation of HyperCard in 1987 and the WWW in 1990 that there were practical applications of hypertext that you could put your hands on and use. Ideas can take a long time to mature.
einrealist 8y ago
There is more information on GitHub. https://github.com/solid/solid-spec https://github.com/solid/solid-spec
- snissn 8y ago
  https://github.com/solid/solid-spec/blob/master/examples/user-posts-note.md https://github.com/solid/solid-spec/blob/master/examples/use...
takeurr 8y ago
Tim Berners-Lee is as finished as Woz. We should stop giving him air time because he's just embarrasing himself. Reminds me of this recent story with Michael Atiyah.
- pistoriusp 8y ago
  So brave of you to post this from a freshly minted account.
- bass3l 8y ago
  Ain't we all fed up with the current status of the web? At least there's someone sticking to his vision, and maybe (maybe) his work could inspire others to come up with a real solution.
  - jackfraser 8y ago
    Were it not so esoteric, I'd be all in favour of something like Urbit that builds a whole new layer on top of the existing foundation with a real push for _personal computing_, not just application services.
    - michaelmrose 8y ago
      Since a real computer costs jack all anymore and gigabit will be increasingly common routers should have an app store. P2P via other peoples routers could handle load beyond what the individual router could handle.
gameswithgo 8y ago
Same. I clicked "about solid" and it gave no clue what solid is.
msbarnett 8y ago
Terrible seem apt. As proposals go, this seems to border on the insanely naive. It’s impossible to find in the impenetrable marketing speak, but presumably the backend here is some off the shelf LDP? Existing LDPs tend towards being profoundly unscalable; typically the number of clients they can handle without choking per second is in the low single digits. All of the implementations I’ve seen are more concerned with adherence to an ill-conceived shitpile of “standardize-first, use-case later” W3C standards than ever tackling the core performance and protocol problems. And I cannot imagine a worse choice for presenting Linked Data to the modern web than RDF. It’s ugly, dog-slow to parse, and is INCAPABLE of representing a simple ordered list without significantly painful work-arounds that practically by their nature force N+1 queries on to clients. JSON-LD solves a lot of this and has existed for years. And then we’ve got yet another attempt to pretend the W3C’s WebACL spec is anything other than a lunatic’s fever-dream of a UI and UX nightmare. We’ll apparently just expose it to end users to let them manage their data. That’ll end well. The Semantic Web Community’s biggest problem is that they think continually recreating “existing thing but with as many of these awful W3C standards as they can shoehorn in” is some kind of Good in and of itself, no matter how bad the resulting user experience would be.
snomad 8y ago
The Solid Spec from their github. https://github.com/solid/solid-spec https://github.com/solid/solid-spec

mtrn 8y ago

> Maybe I am just naive, but this all seems terrible. I do have most respect for TBH and I would consider everything he thinks and writes about, but this does not sound too good to me either. The idea of linked data and semantic web has been around for almost two decades now and I have yet to see an application, technique or site that amazes me. On the contrary, most of the things in this space I have seen are bloated, unusable or simply unnecessary - whereas every paper sounds like revolution is around the corner. In that combination, it is the worst of both worlds: academic output, that claims practicality and fails to deliver. Peter Norvig put it best, when he said: "The semantic web is the future of the web and always will be." A recent discussion touches upon a few problems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18023408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18023408.

jacobsimon 8y ago
Maybe I'm missing something, but what does this have to do with the semantic web and why is everyone discussing that? Solid appears to be a decentralized identity platform.
- msbarnett 8y ago
  The proposal here seems to be that data, as Linked Data (as RDF, specifically) be exposed directly to the web, manipulated by rich front ends written in JS using an RDF parser. The marketing speak is so thick that it’s impossible to discern much of the technical detail, but presumably the server side is an LDP server backed by something (triplestore?). RDF, LDPs, and Linked Data in general are all child projects of the Semantic Web movement, and nigh-on inseparable from it in practice. The venn diagram of their user communities is one circle.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Maybe this disagreement about what Solid is demonstrates the GP's point that the intro site is a piece of PR puff so that nobody knows what it's supposed to do.
adventured 8y ago
The failure of the semantic Web is that it's repetitively being built by and for technologists rather than to meet a real need of real end users. It's technologists in a vacuum building approaches that don't actually solve problems that millions of people have. So long as they keep doing that, it will perpetually fail. Freebase as a prominent example, was pointless for an average person. There was no reason for it to exist in regards to doing something for millions of people. Wikipedia, Quora, Stack Exchange, etc. are what people want to consume. Until the semantic Web leads to a dramatic improvement on those types of end user products, it's not going to matter.
- lucas_membrane 8y ago
  > The failure of the semantic Web is that it's repetitively being built by and for technologists The failures of the semantic Web are pretty much the same as the failures of the Web of evil, i.e. the internet: 1. You cannot make people tell the truth. 2. You cannot always determine when someone is not telling the truth. 3. You cannot always make people do things the right way. 4. You cannot always determine when someone is not doing things the right way. So, you are correct. The true creed of each hard-core technologist is: "Everything would work great if only everyone always did everything my way."
- mindcrime 8y ago
  The failure of the semantic Web is that it's repetitively being built by and for technologists rather than to meet a real need of real end users. The Semantic Web hasn't "failed" and it's not something that end users need to see, know about, or care about directly. It's those technologists that use Semantic Web tech and data to build applications for the end users. Freebase as a prominent example, was pointless for an average person. Likewise Github is pointless to an average person. Because the average person isn't who it's meant for.
mindcrime 8y ago
Peter Norvig put it best, when he said: "The semantic web is the future of the web and always will be." Norvig is a smart guy, and maybe he meant something different by that quote than the obvious reading, but at first blush that sounds silly. If he's saying "The semantic web "always will be" the future because it will never happen, then he's objectively wrong. The semantic web is here and has been for a long time. The key thing to remember though, is that the semantic web is about machine readable data... semantic web technologies are not, by and large, something end users interact with, or even need to know about, themselves. They empower things for developers, but are mostly invisible to the average user. Google, Yahoo and other major search engines have been extracting semantic data - in the form of RDFa, Microformats, etc., - and using that data for at least 10 years now. OTOH, if Norvig mean that it will always be the future because it's always evolving, adapting, and growing, then, well, yeah... of course. And that's exactly where we are. Semantic Web tech just keeps getting better and more useful.
smacktoward 8y ago
> The idea of linked data and semantic web has been around for almost two decades now and I have yet to see an application, technique or site that amazes me. Ted Nelson invented the idea of hypertext in the early '60s. It wasn't until the creation of HyperCard in 1987 and the WWW in 1990 that there were practical applications of hypertext that you could put your hands on and use. Ideas can take a long time to mature.

einrealist 8y ago

There is more information on GitHub. https://github.com/solid/solid-spec https://github.com/solid/solid-spec

snissn 8y ago
https://github.com/solid/solid-spec/blob/master/examples/user-posts-note.md https://github.com/solid/solid-spec/blob/master/examples/use...

takeurr 8y ago

Tim Berners-Lee is as finished as Woz. We should stop giving him air time because he's just embarrasing himself. Reminds me of this recent story with Michael Atiyah.

pistoriusp 8y ago
So brave of you to post this from a freshly minted account.
bass3l 8y ago
Ain't we all fed up with the current status of the web? At least there's someone sticking to his vision, and maybe (maybe) his work could inspire others to come up with a real solution.
- jackfraser 8y ago
  Were it not so esoteric, I'd be all in favour of something like Urbit that builds a whole new layer on top of the existing foundation with a real push for _personal computing_, not just application services.
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    Since a real computer costs jack all anymore and gigabit will be increasingly common routers should have an app store. P2P via other peoples routers could handle load beyond what the individual router could handle.

gameswithgo 8y ago

Same. I clicked "about solid" and it gave no clue what solid is.

msbarnett 8y ago

Terrible seem apt. As proposals go, this seems to border on the insanely naive. It’s impossible to find in the impenetrable marketing speak, but presumably the backend here is some off the shelf LDP? Existing LDPs tend towards being profoundly unscalable; typically the number of clients they can handle without choking per second is in the low single digits. All of the implementations I’ve seen are more concerned with adherence to an ill-conceived shitpile of “standardize-first, use-case later” W3C standards than ever tackling the core performance and protocol problems. And I cannot imagine a worse choice for presenting Linked Data to the modern web than RDF. It’s ugly, dog-slow to parse, and is INCAPABLE of representing a simple ordered list without significantly painful work-arounds that practically by their nature force N+1 queries on to clients. JSON-LD solves a lot of this and has existed for years. And then we’ve got yet another attempt to pretend the W3C’s WebACL spec is anything other than a lunatic’s fever-dream of a UI and UX nightmare. We’ll apparently just expose it to end users to let them manage their data. That’ll end well. The Semantic Web Community’s biggest problem is that they think continually recreating “existing thing but with as many of these awful W3C standards as they can shoehorn in” is some kind of Good in and of itself, no matter how bad the resulting user experience would be.

snomad 8y ago

The Solid Spec from their github. https://github.com/solid/solid-spec https://github.com/solid/solid-spec