Hypertext Vector Fidonet

November 22, 2005 Michael Tulupov (2: 5020 / 2015.39), addressing me in Ru.Fidonet.Today ekhokonferentsii about my plans hypertext Fidonet, so prisovetoval :

It is very desirable to standardly support a thread with a simple vector standard (SVG / EMF / EPS as an option). It will save a lot of traffic.

И действительно, принятый в Фидонете в ту пору обычай использовать псевдографику требовал заметно больше траффика под свои нужды, чем SVG. Вот почему с тех пор я считаю, что в идеале Фидонету необходимо быть не только гипертекстовым, но также и векторным — о чём я с тех пор сообщал сперва во блогозаписи «Два идеала прозреваемых, но покамест не достигнутых», а затем и в других местах.

Что такое гипертекстовый векторный Фидонет? — в узком смысле это возможность перейти в Фидонете к векторному файлу по URLу (то естьto the standard address) of this file, for which the URL will either have to be found in the form of a hyperlink (and click it with the mouse), or drive into the address bar in the feed browser manually. A vector image will open, the size of which can be arbitrarily changed along with the size of the browser window in which the image is contained - that is, exactly the same as on the Internet:



Here is an animated series of screenshots of today's assembly of my feed browser, which I called “ PhiDo " (More precisely, " φ 道 "); as you can see, today (after making 245 commits from the day last year we started developing the PhiDo source code), I managed to get close to the above ideal.

You may ask: what is this URL scheme(“ Area: // ”) that appears in the address bar in the browser? What standard is it defined in? - and it is defined in my FGHI standard URL , in the name of which the abbreviation FGHI (pronounced “fighay”) means “Fidonet Global Hypertext Interface” (“Fidonet Global Hypertext Interface”, that is, in fact, hypertext Fidonet). These four letters follow each other not only in the alphabet, but also (to a certain extent) on the keyboard, so typing them is extremely convenient; and the combination of fig-high syllables alludes to highly illustrated (abbreviated fig. from figurewell known). The Fidonet resource addressing standard exists only in the draft version, since as the Fidonet engine develops, many improvements to it can be expected, and I expect. The implementation of this standard, which I wrote in JavaScript for the Node.js engine, lies in the same repository; but it also has other implementations composed by other feeders and working in various existing WebBBS and mail editors.

You may also ask: why is the Brotherhood of Nodes exactly ? - and this is a pun; it can mean both nodes (nodes) of Fidonet (in the genitive plural) and the ancient paramilitary sect-corporation "Brotherhood of Nod" from the computer game "Command &Conquer. " And today (June 5, 2014) it can also mean the Donbass People’s Militia - and to immediately get rid of the (murderous on Habrahabr) accusations of politicization, I allow myself to bring a hyperlink to the same SVG file that I uploaded to the Russian encyclopedia’s server in advance Tradition ”in 2007, that is, even before my registration on Habrahabr (and long before the current political events).

The question is also natural: what does the name “PhiDo” (“φ 道”) mean ? - and here is another, more extensive, pun. This name is made up of two characters, one of which came from the West, and the other from the East.

The first of these two characters is the Greek letter “ φ"(" Fi "), the mathematical symbol of the golden ratio , expressing primarily beauty. In the eyes of cryptoconspirologists and symbolologists, the meaning of this symbol is even deeper (you can even recall Dan Brown’s role in the work “Da Vinci Code”), since the golden ratio has a direct geometric relation to the proportions of a regular five-pointed star, and pentagrams and pentacles are an ancient symbol of both worship of the devil and protection from the forces of evil, and are also related to modern communism (which is important for the nonprofit Fidonet Network), to the movement of the planet Venus through the heavens, to the Chinese symbol of five lementov ( y-sin ), and so on; it is believed that the golden ratio is often found in wildlife.

The second character is the Japanese character “ 道 ” (“before”), which corresponds to the Chinese “Tao”. The literal meaning of this symbol is “road, path, way”; it is part of the names of a number of spiritual teachings (for example, judo and Taoism ), martial arts (for example, kyudo , kendo , aikido , judo , karate-do ), rituals (for example, "chado" - one of the names of the Japanese tea ceremony ; or, for example, " ommedo " -the name of Japanese occult practice of Chinese origin, a prominent representative of which Abe-no Seimei also used pentagrams), and so on.

It is clear that the meaning of the composite name is even deeper. In the literal meaning (“ Golden Way ”), it can recall in the reader’s memory the works of Herbert about Arrakis (Dune) or the yellow brick road leading to the Emerald City of Baum (but rather in Volkov’s domestic multi-volume retelling and fanfiction). In a metaphorical sense (“the doctrine of the golden section ”), he represents the Fido Network not only as a spiritual and social practice of IT mutual assistance and non-market reciprocation(opposed to the business of Internet companies, ready to bow to pressure from the authorities), it's not like an occult ritual of direct code-program action, the following of which can partially crush the shikigami created from paper anti-Internet laws (not literally related to Fidonet). And although this word does not contain a single Russian letter, it was possible to compose it only in Russia, located between the West (represented by Greece) and the East (represented by Japan and China), in the country with the largest number of Fidonet nodes (nodes) in the world ; moreover, this play on words relies precisely on the Russian language (in the West, the syllable “fi” in the word “Fido” and the syllable “fi” in the word “phi” are two different syllables; moreover,in English, "Fido" and pronounced something like "fidow"). The term “PhiDo” in relation to “Fido” can also be regarded as a curtsy towards the tradition of “hacker reading” - like the existing terms “phreaker”, “phishing” and the like - despite the fact that it refers to the creative, and not cracking, side of hacking .

In the Chinese cinematic tragedy " Hero " of 2002, which belongs to the special genre of " wuxia " (the name of which Wikipedia calls the result of a combination of parts of the words "knight" and "wushu"),the action takes place in ancient China, where the art of diverse calligraphy of hieroglyphs has not yet been completely forgotten in the name of the subsequent standardization of their style. One of the main characters in this movie silently draws the other main character a composite character directly on the ground, and this character means the unity of China - a very important value in the era of deep feudal fragmentation of the whole country. After reading the composite hieroglyph, the warrior immediately deeply penetrates the thought that appeared before him in the form of this symbol, after which he goes to the capital of the state and without hesitation sacrifices his life in the name of the practical implementation of this idea. I wanted to create a composite symbol that has for the IT specialist not less depth of meaningfulness - although, quite possibly, much less motivating power.

In software terms, the PhiDo browser is built on the Intel node-webkit engine , which is the result of a harmonious combination of two other engines - Node.js and Chromium. The modular nature of Node.js allows me to use nine other modules, for Node.js composed, to help PhiDo; of these nine, I composed six: the FGHI URL module for processing Fidonet URLs, the Fidonet HTML module for converting feedmail to HTML5 (for later display by the browser), the Fidonet JAM module for reading feedbase databases (but only stored in the popular JAM format), the nodelist module for reading the list of Fidonet nodes, simteconf moduleto read simple configuration files (such as the HPT echo processor or the GoldED + mail editor), and, finally, this week - the UUE module , which decodes the SVG file (or any other file) from Fidonet’s jujukas .

It is clear that each (or almost every) of these modules can be useful not only in the feed browser. Reading feed and converting it to HTML5 will also work for RSS feeds ; a mailer may also be guided by a nodelist; a sufficiently developed echo processor can read yuyuki and configs. So all this can be reused.

It’s also clear that the SVG-enabled feed browser isэто ещё не конец пути. Если попробовать сочинить дерево технологий Фидонета (подобное дереву достижений цивилизации в игре «Civilization» или дереву навыков персонажа в игре «Diablo II»), то получится, что сейчас я нахожусь примерно на восьмом шаге из восемнадцати; до конца пути ещё далеко.

Даже нынешний шаг ещё не окончен: PhiDo не умеет ещё многое из того, что должен уметь каждый фидобраузер. Даже такие простые вещи, как построение полного дерева ответов (и ответов на ответы) на некоторое сообщение. Или как перелистывание сообщений по одному. Притом PhiDo — это пока ещё просто фидобраузер: просматривать-то фидопочту худо-бедноwill be able to, but to create or edit - not at all yet.

I am sure that many will want to ask: why then do I show you on Habrahabr a screenshot of a raw product that is not yet suitable for daily serious use?

Firstly, I am in favor of immediate publicity in such circumstances: as soon as the memetic phrase “hypertext vector Fidonet” has found the flesh of practical implementation, it is immediately and appropriate to admire it - even if only in a screenshot or in a clumsy and incomplete program. This reason alone would, I hope, suffice.

Secondly, if you are silent now - who knows whether they will be able to speak later. Only 56 days leftuntil August 1, after which the anti-blogospheric law will start to operate, and yet (judging by the letter of the law) under the guise of “blogging” it is aimed at registering all sites in general. A likely further consequence of this will be the introduction of “white lists” of IP addresses replenished only by this preliminary registration - access to all other Internet addresses will be disabled, which automatically excludes the functionality of VPN, TOR, I2P, anonymous proxy servers and the like ways to bypass blocking . Well, then the well-known bureaucratic mechanism of “refusal of registration on formal grounds” will work, resulting in allowed IP addressesRussia will have no more than authorized rallies or permitted political parties. I’m not sure, for example, that Habrahabr has a future — I admit it completely sincerely. That is why I am in a hurry.

Thirdly, the untwisted flywheel of repression never stops so easily (especially if it does not encounter any serious opposition), so it’s not hard for me to suspect that the conditional “North Korea” is nothing more than an intermediate stop on the way to the conditional “Kampuchea” (where “White lists” - soon there are “red lists”Khmer "); in other words, it can be suspected that the large-scale disunion of IT specialists and the large-scale destruction of the blogospheric means of communication among IT specialists that are being prepared by the authorities is not the ultimate goal of change in Russia, but only one of the means (and a completely logical first step) in some (for the time being secret) program of state destruction IT specialists and their families in Russia. History teaches us that the most natural second step of such a program is to decapitate the IT community, so not one of the  Russian readers of Habrahabr who can be read by any idea can even be absolutely sure that tomorrow will dawn.

In any case, the luminary of the World Wide Web is certainly declining, and it is high time for Fidonet to do the same work that Sir Berners-Lee did for the Internet; it’s good that now it can be done both easier and faster; but it’s impossible to get ahead of the coming of darkness.

Good night, gentlemen IT specialists.