Lumifer comments on Turning the Technical Crank - Less Wrong

43 Post author: Error 05 April 2016 05:36AM

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Comment author: DanArmak 05 April 2016 04:25:18PM *  4 points [-]

[edit: I might add a bullet-point summary to the bottom of this post without justifications after I've had a chance to see the comments and which objections people actually raise]

I assumed you didn't want people to raise technical objections to this post, and let you present your argument first. But if you want them now, here are some objections that gjm didn't mention:

  1. Our goal is to make something better than the existing LW software / UX. But we must also allow free linking in, to posts and comments, from ordinary blogs and other sites. These links will be the natural gateway for users new to the community, and lurkers. They must also have a UX at least as good as today's LW, exposing the features of the new / non-web solution, or else this whole endeavor will be a regression and doomed to fail.
  2. People won't like a plaintext-oriented interface; they want rich text, inline images and tables, which in practice (in the world of NNTP) translates to HTML. But HTML is far too rich (and unsuitable for human editing). We need an equivalent to comments' markdown support (or something better that would also be usable for posts). With NNTP, this would be client dependent, so at best it would vary by poster and at worst it would simply not be supported (or not out of the box).
  3. Editing of posts and comments is a crucial feature which NNTP doesn't provide.
  4. Other features we need or are used to: RSS feed; tagging; user management and direct messaging without the trivial inconvenience of creating a new pseudonymous email account on a different site; server-based state (e.g. 'unread' message state in user inbox) for those with multiple client devices; .....
  5. Any proposal that isn't for a gradual change to the existing site will need to be run on a new site. The old lesswrong.com won't be shut down until the new one has clearly succeeded. So you'll need to directly compete with lesswrong.com to convince users to switch. You can make an LW -> NNTP gateway, but not an NNTP -> LW gateway; that is, lesswrong.com can't automatically publish content (comments) posted via NNTP (or any other protocol, really). So during this period of competition, even if users cross-post, discussion threads will be separate. The new software will have to be clearly superior to convince LW users to switch, let alone diaspora blog authors.
Comment author: Lumifer 05 April 2016 06:16:41PM 1 point [-]

But HTML is far too rich (and unsuitable for human editing).

Contemporary HTML. On the other hand the original HTML (of the early 90s vintage) is a simple page description language designed to be hand-coded.

A well-defined limited subset of HTML would probably be easier to implement than some superset of markdown.

Comment author: DanArmak 05 April 2016 06:32:00PM 2 points [-]

A subset of HTML is still unsuited to human editing. Even more so than full HTML, because it doesn't have the justification of being a complex and extendable syntax. A superset of markdown would be much more usable, for people writing plaintext, than a subset of HTML. Especially if, as now, the majority of posts and comments require more or less only regular markdown and no superset features like tables.

Comment author: Lumifer 05 April 2016 06:47:03PM 2 points [-]

A subset of HTML is still unsuited to human editing.

People from the 90s would disagree and rich text editors can output whatever. Of course markdown is better for specifying minor formatting while you write the content -- that's what it was explicitly designed for. However the advantage of HMTL is ubiquity.

the majority of posts and comments require more or less only regular markdown

The majority of posts and comments use only links, bold/italics, and an occasional bulleted list. Inline images are culturally disapproved of and tables are rare. At this level pretty much anything would work.

Comment author: DanArmak 05 April 2016 07:05:15PM 1 point [-]

However the advantage of HMTL is ubiquity.

I don't get your point here. HTML's ubiquity is important for display, not for editing. Markdown is converted to HTML for display. As a user I prefer writing in markdown to writing in HTML. Don't you?

At this level pretty much anything would work.

That doesn't mean anything would be equally as comfortable as anything else.

Comment author: Lumifer 05 April 2016 07:16:44PM 1 point [-]

We are talking about the acceptable format for messages as they are processed and stored by the system, right? Ease of input is a separate issue and your editor can and should allow you to write in whatever way you find most comfortable.

Comment author: Error 05 April 2016 07:30:58PM 1 point [-]

The format for server-side processing and storage should be the input format unless there is specific cause not to use it (3.2). Conversion to display formats should be done client-side and as late as possible. HTML, as Dan says, is a display format.

(this distinction exists even for server-side clients, e.g. web clients)

Comment author: Lumifer 05 April 2016 07:46:09PM 2 points [-]

The format for server-side processing and storage should be the input format

When you say "input" here you mean "what the client sends to the server". When DanArmak is talking about input, he is talking about the user experience, ease of writing and editing. These are obviously not the same thing.

HTML, as Dan says, is a display format.

It is, now. When designed, it wasn't.

Comment author: DanArmak 05 April 2016 07:28:19PM *  1 point [-]

If all users input in the same format, then it should be the storage format too. Rendering to HTML can be done when it's actually needed. (Plus or minus caching/prerendering for performance.)

If users can choose to input in different formats, and we can't convert between these formats (e.g. from HTML to markdown), then I think it would be easiest to just store whatever the user originally input. The main reason for original-format storage is editing, and users normally edit only their own content, so they shouldn't mind the format it's in.

If I write in markdown, but my editor has to send HTML to the server, then it has to implement an HTML-to-markdown conversion for editing, which raises all kinds of issues (like supporting the HTML output of an old version of the editor, never mind of different editors) and trying to solve them just doesn't seem worth the bother. What does adopting HTML as a storage format get you?

Comment author: Error 05 April 2016 07:20:37PM 1 point [-]

Asciidoc might be an alternative when more power is needed. I haven't used it, but ESR once said that it does markdown's job better than Markdown itself.

HTML is wholly unsuited to human editing or even reading. I blame it for ruining email. Well, that and top-posting.

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