The original wiki was full of the hope of the web.
Here, the UI is unintuitive. The site depends heavily on client-side processing. It loads slowly - there's no intelligent processing in advance. It uses canonical URIs OK, but the window.history updates late and the URIs are designed in a way that makes them difficult to share. The code is hosted on an ethically-dubious commercial site. The wiki has lost all the old data.
I'm doubtful of the author's claim that this will last 20 years except at his own behest - I don't see how this is an improvement?
It seems to me like the people contributing to this project still have lots of hope for the web.
The original wiki had plenty of UI quirks, too. How much time have you invested into figuring out how it works? Is the problem that the main page doesn't explain things clearly enough? Maybe you'd like to contribute some documentation?
With regards to loading times, that's an engineering issue to be improved. Efficient loading of documents is very possible with asynchronous requests; right now it looks a little glitchy, but this is not a fundamental issue.
> Is the problem that the main page doesn't explain things clearly enough? Maybe you'd like to contribute some documentation?
No. There are several problems, the first of which is that I am served content as a Javascript-dependent blank page for no good reason.
I'm not sure why you think I would contribute to this project. It contradicts my ideals for the future of the web on many levels, as I already explained, and some of which you overlooked when making your comment.
Firstly, I do not want to support something that represents a backwards movement from my preference, and secondly, any change I would choose to make would likely be reversed as against the spirit of the project.
My belief is that the Benevolent Dictator for Life/cult of personality model of existing open technologies is broken and should be shunned. (With apologies to Ward Cunningham, who I do not mean anything personally towards). People committing their resources to this project are not providing for the diversity that 7 billion web users need.
I have plenty of hope. My hope is that other people will take this technology in a better or just different direction.
I think the Federated Wiki concept is very interesting, and I agree that it would be very nice to serve functioning static pages—this could be added and probably should.
That's why I'm wondering if you have looked into the project's ideals and roadmap. Maybe they have different priorities than you would prefer. Maybe, as I said, they are already working on providing for your needs.
This is not a product someone is selling to you; it's a public work-in-progress with a pretty ambitious idea.
If you think that JavaScript applications in general are opposed to your ideal future of the web, then I understand your disappointment.
The original wiki was full of the hope of the web.
Here, the UI is unintuitive. The site depends heavily on client-side processing. It loads slowly - there's no intelligent processing in advance. It uses canonical URIs OK, but the window.history updates late and the URIs are designed in a way that makes them difficult to share. The code is hosted on an ethically-dubious commercial site. The wiki has lost all the old data.
I'm doubtful of the author's claim that this will last 20 years except at his own behest - I don't see how this is an improvement?