Well, Hi. I'm one of the guys working on Octothorpes -- thanks all for digging into our project! So, some context. You've found the project in a sort of liminal stage between launched and not launched. We only started telling people about it at XOXO, and planned a semi-public roll out for some time this month. But then Weird Web October https://weirdweboctober.website/ asked if they could use it, and they very much are. See https://octothorp.es/~/weirdweboctober. So we're in a little holding pattern where we're keeping it open for them but not promoting it to the wider world yet. "Post on Hackernews" is definitely not in this part of the roadmap, but we really appreciate that someone considered it worth sharing!
So caveats are that our documentation isn't fully up to date, some features aren't part of core yet, and we're still in a fairly rapid test and update cycle.
I've compiled a bunch of answers to this and a discussion on Lobste.rs in a blog post > https://ideastore.dev/blog/shrodingers-launch/ but will address some specific questions about the protocol in-line here.
lifthrasiir
<link rel="octo:octothorpes" href="architecture">
Wait, no. While this wouldn't cause much issue due to the unrecognized link type, `href` should always be a valid URL and can't be a free-form string. This is more obvious when you realize that `rel` accepts multiple link types:
A conformant agent will recognize `help` and treat this like `<link rel="help" href="architecture">`. The same goes for `<a rel="octo:octothorpes" ...>`. The correct way would be using standard-recognized elements and attributes instead:
Probably the repo is currently private. Maybe they forgot to make it public?
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kaycebasques
> Backlinks are links that go … back. Pages within a Ring can see which other pages linked to them.
I'm reading up on web history. I believe this was one of Ted Nelson's criticisms of the web (and reasons why Xanadu was supposedly better), right?
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audiodude
The page mentions "rings" but only links to register on the one on the same domain. Are other rings just "theoretically possible if someone hosts the app" or are they already here?
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michaelmior
This looks interesting but I was disappointed to see that registration requires polluting the root domain with a TXT record. Would be nice if this could be at a subdomain like _octothorpe-verify or something like that.
I built this in like 2003. https://web.archive.org/web/20030212162207/http://reversible...
It didn’t work, so I built del.icio.us instead.
Well, Hi. I'm one of the guys working on Octothorpes -- thanks all for digging into our project! So, some context. You've found the project in a sort of liminal stage between launched and not launched. We only started telling people about it at XOXO, and planned a semi-public roll out for some time this month. But then Weird Web October https://weirdweboctober.website/ asked if they could use it, and they very much are. See https://octothorp.es/~/weirdweboctober. So we're in a little holding pattern where we're keeping it open for them but not promoting it to the wider world yet. "Post on Hackernews" is definitely not in this part of the roadmap, but we really appreciate that someone considered it worth sharing!
So caveats are that our documentation isn't fully up to date, some features aren't part of core yet, and we're still in a fairly rapid test and update cycle.
I've compiled a bunch of answers to this and a discussion on Lobste.rs in a blog post > https://ideastore.dev/blog/shrodingers-launch/ but will address some specific questions about the protocol in-line here.
There’s a link on that page that says you can check out some open source code.
https://github.com/stucco-software/octothorp.es
But this link gives a 404.
Probably the repo is currently private. Maybe they forgot to make it public?
> Backlinks are links that go … back. Pages within a Ring can see which other pages linked to them.
I'm reading up on web history. I believe this was one of Ted Nelson's criticisms of the web (and reasons why Xanadu was supposedly better), right?
The page mentions "rings" but only links to register on the one on the same domain. Are other rings just "theoretically possible if someone hosts the app" or are they already here?
This looks interesting but I was disappointed to see that registration requires polluting the root domain with a TXT record. Would be nice if this could be at a subdomain like _octothorpe-verify or something like that.