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Finding this sort of thing always makes me stop short and realize, "Oh yeah, no matter how smart I think I am, there are people a million times more accomplishe
by invalidOrTaken 15y ago
Finding this sort of thing always makes me stop short and realize, "Oh yeah, no matter how smart I think I am, there are people a million times more accomplished than me on HN." Not to make me despair so much as take care to avoid blathering the first thing on my mind before reading and considering what others have said.
- gojomo 15y agoThe 'magnet URI' was merely the right suggestion, for a tiny sliver of shared convention, at the right time. You can look at the original writeup – http://magnet-uri.sourceforge.net/magnet-draft-overview.txt http://magnet-uri.sourceforge.net/magnet-draft-overview.txt – and find a goofy ad-hoc mechanism where local software interested in 'magnet' links listened for localhost web hits, in a certain port range, rather than fighting over the 'magnet' URI scheme handler. That could be seen as either a blathering kludge or a very early attempt at 'web intents'. I don't know if any code other than my demo ever implemented that localhost-handler trick. But the main idea – of a generically-named URI that was descriptive rather than location-centric – had its own legs. It spread from software to software, even without any formal spec stewardship/revisions. A key step for its longevity, when 'magnet' was adopted to wrap the 'btih' identifiers for DHT-based torrent tracking, happened long after my attention moved elsewhere. I'd like to think the continuing adoption was because the original draft, even though crude and incomplete, had the right mix of a familiar/defensible URI syntax, wide-open descriptor semantics, and a catchy name/icon.
- cookiecaper 15y agoGood ideas don't have inventors so much as they have stewards. Keep trying and one day such a thing will find you. :)