Hacker News

Talk about data being separate from programs always reminds me what a good job Microsoft did with the spacial filesystem (that means one folder is one window, and they remember their location), single-document interface (a UI paradigm) and COM (a cross-process communication system). As a novice user not understanding a whole lot about the system, your documents were in the operating system and not in a specific program (this still wasn't perfect and a lot of new users did think their documents were in programs, which might be why we gave that up) and those programs could talk to each other and embed each other's documents.

This stuff probably seemed moderately innovative if you didn't grow up with it, seemed blindingly obvious if you did grow up with it, and somehow, like idiots, we've managed to lose it again!

> It also reminded me what an excellent job Wikipedia does with their hierarchical classification

As someone who once tried to use that supposedly hierarchical classification for data organization, it is unfortunately not excellent at all.

It is rather arbitrary, inconsistent, extremely incomplete, and not infrequently circular. Think of it more like a bunch of haphazardly applied tags that make perfect sense in the context of a single page, but quite frequently make very little sense when you look at the actual pages and sub categories that belong to a category. Category membership is just not something visible enough for it to wind up being organized and curated in any kind of systematically accurate way.

On the other hand, the presence of an infobox of a certain type is extremely reliable for categorizing many types of articles.

> They had this project called Cairo that was supposed to throw out that scruffy old file-based filesystem and bring in a shiny new Object Based File System instead. It never happened, so we'll never know exactly how it might have turned out.

Nowadays we call those APIs. They are REST based rather than file-based to make them distributed, the main difference is that you don't get a common user interface that all providers adjust to; you need to choose your own client to read them and write into them.

And because they're created by programmers for programmers, they're not what you'd call user-friendly. Usually the only efficient way to use them is programmatically, so that you need to create a specific user interface for each API. Somehow, I doubt that Cairo would have come to be anything much different from that in the end.

Somehow this reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373 released by CERN on 30th anniversary. Pretty sure Berners-Lee in recent years was contributing to decentralized web/Internet concept that does also reminds a little bit of early WWW.

There was also this submission from 9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13361523 - and probably not the only one of such ideas

> This is really impressive. It's exactly what I imagined the original Microsoft Network in Windows 95 would have been like.

That's actually not far off. It was an old-fashioned BBS like Compuserve in a Windows Explorer-like window. The topic-specific icons you see in this mockup are actually very on-point, though on the Microsoft Network they would be for general BBS sections not encyclopedic articles or media.

That really sounds like the idea behind Plan9. Interesting.

Knowledge doesn’t neatly align to a nested hierarchy. Especially written knowledge.

Language is an imperfect means to convey knowledge, and people store that knowledge in subjective and highly personal ways.

You may mentally recall balloons within “entertainment” or “party”, whereas I might store that knowledge under “horror”.

Add onto that the massive focus on using graph theory to scale social networking technologically, and you effectively lose any motivation for rigid hierarchy.

I agree, for some reason I have always alternated between wanting not just the universal search box but a browsable hierarchy to mentally run my fingers over and discover in a structured way.

We let go of the the manual index somewhere along the way since it doesn’t scale like search, obviously, but for the same reason I keep a library and enjoy traversing others’ private ones and visiting public ones, I keep coming back to browse.

I guess this model doesn't maximize engagement

This is why I frequently post about how I miss Gopher. It kind of forced this hierarchy.

I dunno, I never had a "Sheep Looking at Viewer" category in my mental model until I randomly clicked around the media folder.

Definitely not MCE: the title bars are bright blue with the "Fisher-Price" orange buttons, which was the hallmark of regular XP.

I agree. We focus on content where usually it’s so poorly structured and displayed it lacks final touches. I prefer wider scrolling bar than extra white space in the browser. Same goes for finder. I find old systems to be much more usable for me than modern ones

Hm. It is a clear UI, but I would prefer more space for the content.

I lasted less than one minute. Can't read anything when there's an unstoppable animation in peripheral vision going blinky blinky blink.

Wikipedia category namespace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles

If you click on the tile icon at the top of the window, you can have it display as a list!

"More milk" is a redirect to that page

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=More_milk.&redire...

The "Windows XP" website displays the same article when you click on "More milk" there

CHM files were great, it actually made documenting enjoyable. I miss those days.

Not sure why they downvoted you because you have a point - icons are not the same as Windows XP's, wallpaper flat color reminds me more of Win 95/98 and the taskbar design has some details that do not match precisely with Windows XP's. I'd also bet it's due to copyright concerns

Ask LLM to make a 98/XP styled website and you will discover the reason.

Because it's obviously vibe coded (look at the source code).

What does Wikipedia do differently? I don't think I have ever used Wikipedia's internal navigation - if I want to find something I usually type 'XYZ wikipedia' into Google and click the first link.

> love how it loads instantly and feels smooth.

Unlike Wikipedia these days.

Yes. It definitely lacks the hourglass mouse cursor experience!

I guess XP (x64) could run like this on modern PCs.

It kinda stays true to the Windows File Explorer as its search was always mostly useless

It's also missing the defrag tool. Without it, it's going to be very slow as the disk fills up.

Should put a shortcut to it on the desktop as well, so that users who experience significant lag can defrag at will.

Presumably none, since its only searching english wikipedia, and that looks to be belarusian.

Lucky 10000?

Three tricks if you didn't already know:

1: you'll find categories at the bottom of regular mediawiki pages

2: if you click one, you'll end up on a page like eg. this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computers

3: the tree style tabs plugin in combination with middle-click is criminally underrated for navigating hierarchical data. (middleclick open-in-new-tab is only mildly handy, tree style tabs seems tepid by itself without it)