Forum Federato

@noondlyt so delicious

@davew in wiki world we talk about the "WikiNow". This kind of timeless way that we can interact across days and decades. I love seeing it in blogs, too.

http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/WikiNow

#ActivityInThePub

@bkardell how so?

@mtlgazette This sounds awesome

@davew those ones I remember!

@davew I mean, TIL about the relationship of RSS to Pointcast. I already knew that you can look things up using the Google search engine, even if I don't always practice it.

@davew TIL! Those are fascinating posts.

@rwg Yeah, I think the first implementation work was as a plugin or fork? It's been a long time. You're absolutely right; it was the turning point.

I wonder if @davew ever talks about some of the grotesque syndication products like PointCast and Castanet from the late 90s when he's discussing the history of RSS.

@BreakingNerd I mean, that's a bad practice, sure, but it wasn't a commercial product by a single company foisted onto the Internet by gullible Web developers. Nobody had to download RealPlayer to get a table layout to work.

@scanner Oh, boy.

@hongminhee It's a place where our loosey goosey style goes into nondeterminism. We should tighten it up in the next version. My main answer would be: publishers, don't do that.

The Web Standards Project was instrumental in this work. Their efforts probably generated a trillion dollars in value for the planet and saved countless lives. Open standards fucking matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Standards_Project

One question that @rwg asks is when Mastodon chose to adopt ActivityPub to replace OStatus. I remember this Tweet from the period:

https://x.com/evanpro/status/851155551325229058

I don't know if anyone else read it, but I remember it being a hard thing to write. I was happy about the work but I felt that OStatus was the past and AP was the future, and I wanted to point new projects in the right direction.

I don't know if modern Web developers are aware how much of a struggle it was to get to the HTML5 stack we use today. There was a loooooooooot of bullshit to wade through. VBScript, ActiveX, Java applets, browser plugins, Flash. It was a fight every step of the way.

Thinking about VBScript.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VBScript

Thanks, all. I say yes for both of my countries of citizenship. It feels like we've been fighting rearguard battles for the last decade; I want to get back to the promise of a better future.

@tsupasat search for username@threads.net in Mastodon

Prepping for the @rwg #Fediforum discussion by searching for all the occurrences of my name in the text.