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> An object browser is a non-lobotomized version of a file or web browser.

> Additionally, no significant innovation has been made in web browsers since Mosaic.

Yeesh; I couldn't get past the first two insufferable paragraphs. Gonna be a hard pass from me.

Typical Hacker News post really
I don't think that's fair. Ones this bad are not unheard-of here, but they aren't common.
Right, between flagging and downvoting and moderation we don't get those sentiments showing up at the top of the discussion here. It gets buried.

C2 suffers from being editable and generally staying linear in flow (people added downward, and less frequently edited the top portions). There are some clear trolling/flame war content that was moved, there was also a culture of avoiding deletion though so even when it was moved it wasn't removed.

It is an 11-year-old post, but still.

Somebody should stick (2010) on the title, right?

Yeah I saw that (and the date should be added); but even with that context the Mosaic comment is laughable
Keep in mind that c2.com is of historic interest (first Wiki, where the term came from) but now terribly outdated.
> I don't. Programmers are retards. That's my answer to everything. And the only evidence I need is that C++ exists.

> (Literally, people lack imagination. They're satisfied with the present circumstances because they can't imagine anything different, they can't imagine what the system is lacking unless someone tells them what to imagine. The vast majority of people aren't original or even independent.)

I wasted a little more of my time than you did. I love a good rant, but this one seems to be all the sadness/depressing angst without the fun.

Yikes, I didn't think it could get even worse
Dismissing weak arguments is easy. Try imagining what a strong argument for the author's point would look like, and then respond to that.

On the topic of object browsers, I'd argue that "no significant innovation" has been made at the intersection of object browsers and Web browsers since around 2001 when Joe Hewitt checked in the original DOM Inspector for Netscape, aside from possibly the inline display of the results of expressions evaluated in the console. (DOM Inspector didn't have such a console.)

In many ways, browser devtools are worse than the DOM Inspector that was baked into Firefox 1.0. The node tree was fast, and you could open up not just a view for more than one object, but more than one view of a single object, too. Meanwhile, in the tools baked into major browsers, I can't even look at the "Layout" pane and the CSS "Rules" pane at the same time. Want to have the document's DOM tree on the screen while looking at some JSON returned by an AJAX call? Too bad.

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> Dismissing weak arguments is easy. Try imagining what a strong argument for the author's point would look like, and then respond to that.

This is great advice for going beyond the tiny world - limited by bias, habit, etc - in which I (and all people) live! It also is a communication formula guaranteeing better relationships and more civil and productive discussions.

While a bit outdated, hyperbolic, and with the familiar trade offs of c2’s wonderful community editing experiment (e.g. incoherency), there is some real gold there. Just the references (e.g. to Ivan Sutherland) are a passport to a much better alternate universe

This is literally what web browsers are.
No it's not "literally" what they are. Web browsers so something similar but what this is describing is more like Unity's inspector system.
There is already a tool with an Object Browser and it is Microsoft Word. Why hasn't it replaced Web Browsers is anyone's guess.
How is Word an object browser?
There is (was?) a feature in MS Word called the Object Browser that let you navigate a document by content types, like footnotes and headings and whatnot.

In other Words, it's a joke.