Project 2036: the future of TiddlyWiki

I may not be able to envisage the scope of your aspiration but as a single file TW user who is highly dependent on TW on my tablet, phone and laptop I very much appreciate the current role of the browser.

On my android phones I use Tiddloid and on my Unix laptop I use Tiddly desktop, I have a small keyboard for my tablet which means I can work when I am in transit. I use TW as my central knowledge base which is large and the product of hours of work every day for a number of years.

For me the browser is rarely a fundamental limitation and a lot of problems have a manual work around - what it delivers in return is that the browser is my access to TW on any device, its like a passport that means I float above the OS problems, all in return for very little inconvenience.

There are device issues for sure, for example on Android I need to access my TW on a device local server because of the way the Android security and filing system limits the ability of a browser to access locally stored videos and so on.

In terms of liberating people on different machines and platforms, in principle it might be a great thing, one of the reasons I am on Linux is because I could not tolerate Microsoft updating my machine when ever they felt like it - they always messed up my custom device drivers and thought they knew my needs better than I did and I have already mentioned a limitation of Android and of course there is Apple - the pinnacle of user tie in or coercion depending on your point of view. Against this viewpoint many users out there don’t want to understand their machine or software they just want something that works most of the time (Apple?) - as a linux user I sometimes forget all the fears about viruses and so on. I think a truly open system would have to come up with some new ideas about security balancing open-ness with safety - not an easy balance.

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I think that is right.

Part of the issue is that back-end-geeks, informed users etc. can perfectly well understand the potential issues and address them.

Meanwhile the “let me only do anything safe but stop me otherwise” is the standard browsers’ norm.

There are good reasons both ways!

But, I do think a v. good case can be made to get round browser limits In Cases where the user needs interact with calls to the O/S.

A simple example would be “invoke a local search of all my docs mentioning ‘Ruston’ and build an external tiddler listing them.”

Implementations such as Tiddlydesktop, tiddlywiki-app do this by using a custom (Chrome) browser and do give you access to local resources. Also the antequated and limited hta method.

  • Extending this to internet hosted wikis or through host side instalations (as used in Timimi) just requires the nessasary skills and a champion to make this posible.
    • However we are already having trouble keeping Timimi operational after recent and pending browser changes.
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Wouldn’t it be great if instead of making custom browsers it were possible to configure regular ones to allow certain pages to interact with operating systems in the ways we want.

Could browser producers (roughly MS, Google and Mozilla) be convinced this would be good or can plugins achieve it including for mobile devices ?

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Chrome and Edge (desktop) did implement a native file-api lately. There even is a TW plugin which is a bit clunky to use for security reasons.

Safari and Mozilla did not implement it (probably) for security reasons. They are not even considering it atm.

I think none of the mobile browsers will ever implement it, since mobile phones do not really have a file-system. They have storage, which is heavily sandboxed, for obvious reasons.

-m

PS: I think we should give our TW browser-storage plugin a bit more love, since it works out of the box on all browsers.

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There actually is a proper filesystem on both iOS and Android, it’s just not exposed to users very often. That said, I’m also skeptical at this point that the File System Access API will move beyond Google Chrome Desktop.

Right. I use Chromebook. It’s whole thing/k is wooden.

To the point here: HOW, practically, can we legitimately get TW to act beyond The Standard Browser?