3 ms·
I always thought the most clever thing that could be done in this app category, would be to design and standardize a microformat for presentation customizations
by derefr 5y ago
I always thought the most clever thing that could be done in this app category, would be to design and standardize a microformat for presentation customizations, that could be written into the SQL-standard “comment” metadata field that’s attached to almost every SQL-standard DDL object (tables, views, procedures, triggers, etc.)
Then, admin panels could all interoperate in terms of showing e.g. “pretty” names for things; and could also pick up presentation metadata burned into the DB’s objects at creation time (by e.g. your app's DB migration logic), even if the admin panel is not able to change the data itself.
(Of course, you could use something like this for more than presentation metadata; you could use it to encode type-binding hints for particular ORMs, for example. Think of it as the equivalent of the old macOS “resource fork” for the object — an unstructured thing that could be informally structured into a sort of user xattrs storage if people are willing to cooperate.)
- notreallyserio 5y agoSounds sort of like “the semantic web”, perhaps with slightly less interoperability outside of the organization.
- derefr 5y agoMy own personal comparison would be to how many Helm charts for various Kubernetes resources bundle Prometheus-metrics endpoint resources, and Grafana-dashboard definition resources alongside them; such that if you're using the k8s-resource-aware Grafana (e.g. the one in the Prometheus operator), it'll pick those declared dashboards up automatically and show you the metrics for the thing you're running. In this case, the "Helm chart" is an app like Wordpress that runs DB migrations; the "monitoring resources" it deploys are the SQL-comment microformat data created by those migrations; and "Grafana" here is the DB admin panel, taught to look for that data.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tailspin2019 5y agoI like where this idea is going. I’ve always eyed up that comment field with a desire to use it for something clever like this!
- nitrogen 5y agoAges ago there was a company trying to do this kind of auto-discoverable UI through their proprietary protocol for controlling and monitoring audio/video processing equipment. It seems like it should be possible, but for some reason hasn't caught on yet in any industries I'm aware of.