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inkdroid
inkdroid.org · Personal blog · on HN since 2011
Ed Summers writes about web infrastructure, APIs, Wikipedia data visualizations, JSON, and libraries and archives.
What HN saysHN commenters link it for his Wikipedia edit stream visualizations, his PURL post on web infrastructure, and his notes on Douglas Crockford and JSON.
22HN people shared it
6linked it in comments
22stories submitted
330story points
2 years agolast shared
2011people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Lessons of JSON3 people · 97 points · first shared 2012 · 32 comments on HN
- 2An Ode to Node3 people · 15 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 3Realtime visualization of Wikipedia edit streams2 people · 102 points · first shared 2011 · 20 comments on HN
- 4A bit about PURLs2 people · 44 points · first shared 2022 · 9 comments on HN
- 510:21 PM EDT2 people · 6 points · first shared 2016 · 1 comments on HN
- 6Fielding notes1 people · 22 points · first shared 2013 · 2 comments on HN
- 7Automated testing to discover quiet API changes1 people · 18 points · first shared 2016 · 1 comments on HN
- 8Why CongressEdits?1 people · 5 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 9Running CERN httpd 3.0A from 1996 (2022)1 people · 3 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 10Creepy Polaroid1 people · 3 points · first shared 2013 · 4 comments on HN
- 11Things to consider when deciding to start building with "AI" in libraries1 people · 3 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 12The Web As A Preservation Medium1 people · 2 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 13Ici - Wikipedia Articles Here1 people · 2 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 14Learning From People Who Do1 people · 2 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 15Polling and pushing with the Times Newswire API to create nytimestream1 people · 2 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
brentashley · 2012-05-28
Douglas built the JSON spec
1) to be language agnostic. Following ES5's syntax directions is fine for ES5 focused development, possibly not for others.
2) to be final - i.e. there is no version number. If you want to extend or build something else, I am fairly certain Douglas would prefer that you call it something else. See http://inkdroid.org/journal/2012/04/30/lessons-of-json/ at 5:30 in the video.
Don't take these points as criticisms, I too would like to be able to use single quotes and trailing commas and everything else here. I think though that in order to work with JSON as a static spec, an alternative approach could be to have your project be a layer like HAML, SASS or CoffeeScript. Each of those tools compiles or transforms to conforming input for their target specs rather than replacing them.
siavash · 2011-12-04
Brilliant! Care to elaborate on the implementation?
Edit:
Found some details on the about page http://inkdroid.org:3000/about/
and everything else at https://github.com/edsu/wikistream
cxr · 2022-01-05
> Maybe this little post will whet someone else’s appetite to looking closer at PURL as a web infrastructure. I think it also is a great example of how exposed pipes are useful when building applications that are meant to be infrastructure.
I come away with the opposite reaction: exposed "pipes", in this instance, are undesirable. Their being exposed raw probably contributes to the kind of problem that PURLs were created to cure.
URLs are document identifiers foremost—that's what they're supposed to be. Too often, though, they reflect instead the organizational scheme of the current content hierarchy (apt to change at someone's whim sometime in the future) or expose details of the underlying tech stack. You see this in blogs a lot. Take this post, for example. This document's identifier is <https://inkdroid.org/2021/12/16/purl/>. It could just as easily be <https://inkdroid.org/blog/2021/12/16/purl/> or <https://blog.inkdroid.org/2021/12/16/purl/>, and at some point in the future, after a tech migration, it very well might be. This is a problem. I've seen companies submit blog posts to HN, and then just a month or two later switch something up in their publishing pipeline, so now the link at the top of the discussion doesn't resolve anymore. Nobody seems to care about this. In a concrete example I recall, I reached out to someone involved to say that their link is returning a 404, and the response was basically, "Yep. It is. We switched things up," and not, "Oh…
pennaMan · 2022-08-20
Plan to throw one away
https://inkdroid.org/talks/notredame/plan.html
TranceMan · 2013-08-02
You are correct - confirmed in this video: Lessons of JSON
'A recent (and short) IEEE Computing Conversations interview with Douglas Crockford about the development of JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) offers some profound, and sometimes counter-intuitive, insights into standards development on the Web.'
http://inkdroid.org/journal/2012/04/30/lessons-of-json/
{ Thank you Douglas for your vision :) }
edsu · 2011-12-05
Thanks for the interest! I wrote up some high level notes at http://inkdroid.org/journal/2011/11/07/an-ode-to-node/ if you want to know a bit more.