@kubikpixel It's sad that SPARQL is a rare thing among web devs. Were that different, then it would be much easier to build things like <https://chaos.social/@chrysn/111974980878165001>.
As it is now, that table is built by a Python script that performs two large SPARQL queries and then manually prints HTML. In my ideal world (which I haven't found the projects to work on since 2016 in <https://gitlab.com/energyharvesting/rdfapp>), you could navigate the edges of the RDF graph in templates just as easy as JSON.
@kubikpixel you should use something like this if you have a reason to think it works better than SQL, OR you're in the mood to try something silly just to see how it works.
Wikipedia says SPARQL is a language for querying RDF data. Do you have a pile of RDF data to query?
The W3C has a track record of writing ivory-tower specifications that aren't very useful in the real world.
@immibis@kubikpixel Definitely. have you seen the overcomplicated nightmare that is JSON-LD, which ActivityPub uses? The whole expansion/compaction/flattening/framing thing is a nightmare to work with.
@NathanClayton@kubikpixel#ActivityPub is certainly an overcomplicated protocol and the only reason we use it is that Mastodon does. Why couldn't we simply poll RSS feeds and receive DMs by email (like #DeltaChat)?
People have a tendency, when they design something new, to design it in a straightforward way that makes it work, but with a few rough edges and odd quirks. When they design the second version, they don't have the mindset to just make it work, since the old design already just works. They try to design something with no rough edges or quirks, which counterproductively always makes it worse than the first version as the complexity to avoid the "natural" quirks always ends up being worse than just accepting them. This happens every. single. time. It's how we got #Wayland and #systemd as well.
@mariusor You're literally writing this from Mastodon and having it published over ActivityPub because Mastodon uses ActivityPub. What are you talking about?
@immibis I mean that I use Mastodon because it uses ActivityPub, not the other way around. Also I'm writing ActivityPub software and that for sure has nothing to do with Mastodon.
@mariusor@immibis I can see arguments to support both perspectives. If Mastodon hadn't adopted ActivityPub prior to the Recommendation being finalized, AP would probably would not exist. The SocialWG had run out of time to develop the Recommendation and they were given an extension because of the interest from the Mastodon team.
@steve I was sure that I started my first ActivityPub project before support for it was added to Mastodon, but apparently not. An initial PR was merged in Mastodon in 2017, and I started my project a year later in 2018. However for sure I created a Mastodon account way after I committed my first contributions (sometime in 2019).
Looking at the commit log for Mastodon, they were still improving things late 2018, so I imagine the support wasn't fully there during those times.
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