There are all kinds of wild assertions dismissing semantics in describing links that the author seems to just hand wave away. I went back specifically to read the part about parent semantics and the conclusion is that this can be derived from links’ text, without acknowledging that that’s not how link text is typically used. Those kinds of relationships are usually encoded in additional semantic markup or data the links are derived from.
This is an interesting attempt to reduce a problem space, but ultimately I think it ignores a lot of factors either in play where they see success or likely to cause it to falter should such reductionism be pursued. And in evidence is another major use case cited: attempts to replace hierarchical file structures have not been successful, because those hierarchies are meaningful for people who use them. This isn’t for lack of trying! Even the accompanying screenshot shows the detritus of that effort, just noise in the sidebar.
I expected some sort of implementation at the end; something like, "and here's how you implement all of these ideas in one novel framework", maybe something to do with Gemini or something, but there wasn't anything. I get that the concept of linking is important, no one would deny that, but I thought they were talking about implementing all of these things in literal hypertext links.
Assume you have your filesystem as a set of HTTP links, and you have tagging, and whatever else. How do you tell the difference between a link to a file and a link to a tag? It seems like you'd need to impose an additional structure, or type system, on top of just links.
Exactly. Whereupon you build a semantic system which has supposedly failed. But probably more haphazardly because your only primitive is links. Which, not to beat the horse I already declared dead but… is an effort pursued by great resources, and with lots of evidence it doesn’t work.
> I expected some sort of implementation at the end
I wanted to see that because as I read on I honestly had more problems understanding the concept and wanted to see the idea implemented so that I might understand. But nope :(
I have never wished so much to put a gif in a comment on HN, but I’ll do better and transcribe it. “I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology.”
This is an interesting attempt to reduce a problem space, but ultimately I think it ignores a lot of factors either in play where they see success or likely to cause it to falter should such reductionism be pursued. And in evidence is another major use case cited: attempts to replace hierarchical file structures have not been successful, because those hierarchies are meaningful for people who use them. This isn’t for lack of trying! Even the accompanying screenshot shows the detritus of that effort, just noise in the sidebar.