Hypertext Vector Fidonet

On November 22, 2005, Mikhail Tulupov (2: 5020 / 2015.39), addressing me in the e-conference Ru.Fidonet.Today about my plans for the Hypertext Fidonet, advised :

It is highly desirable to support a standard uncomplicated vector standard as standard (SVG / EMF / EPS as an option). Strongly save traffic.

Indeed, the custom adopted at Fidonet at that time to use pseudographics required much more traffic for its needs than SVG. That is why, since then, I believe that, ideally, Fidonet needs to be not only hypertext , but also vectorial - which I have since reported first in the blog “ Two ideals of the seen, but not yet achieved, ” and then in other places .

What is a hypertext vector Fidonet? - in the narrow sense, it is possible to navigate in Fidonet to a vector file by the URL (that is , the standard address) of this file, for which the URL must either be found as a hyperlink (and click it on the mouse), or you can drive the address into the 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:


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Before you is an animated series of screenshots of today's build of my feed browser, to which I gave the name “ PhiDo ” (or rather, “ φ 道 ”); As you can see, today (having made 245 commits since the day last year I started developing the PhiDo source code) I managed to get very close to the above-mentioned ideal.

You may ask: what is the 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 URL standard , in the name of which the abbreviation FGHI (pronounced “figkh”) means “Fidonet Global Hypertext Interface” (“Fidonet global hypertext interface”, that is, the hypertext Fidonet itself). These four letters follow each other, not only in the alphabet, but also (to a certain extent) and on the keyboard, so that it is extremely convenient to type them; and the combination of the syllables “fig-high” hints at highly illustrated (the abbreviation “fig.” from “figure” is well known). The standard for addressing Fidonet resources exists only in the draft version, since as the Fidonet movement develops, one can expect a lot of improvements to it, and I expect it. The implementation of this standard, written by me in JavaScript for the Node.js engine, is in the same repository; but it also has other implementations written by other fidoshnikov and working in various existing WebBBS and mail editors.

You may ask again: why is it “ Brotherhood of Nod ”? - and this is a play on words; it can mean both the nodes (Fidonet's nodes) (in the genitive case of the plural) and the ancient militarized 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 in order to immediately get rid of (killer on Habrahabr) accusations of politicization, I allow myself to bring a hyperlink to the same SVG file I downloaded in advance to the server of the Russian encyclopedia " 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. The name is composed of two characters, one of which originated from the West, and the other from the East.

The first of these two symbols is the Greek letter “ φ ” (“phi”), a mathematical symbol of the golden section , expressing beauty first of all. In the eyes of cryptoconspirologists and symbolologists, the meaning of this symbol is even deeper (you can recall at least Dan’s role in the “Da Vinci Code”), since the golden ratio has a direct geometric relationship to the proportions of a regular five-pointed star, and pentagrams and pentacles are ancient symbol of both devil worship and protection from the forces of evil, and also related to modern communism (which is important for the non-profit network Fidonet), to the movement of the planet Venus in the celestial vault, 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"), corresponding to the Chinese "dao". The literal meaning of this symbol is “road, path, method”; he is a member of the names of a number of spiritual teachings (for example, jodo and Taoism ), martial arts (for example, kyudo , kendo , aikido , judo , karate-do ), rituals (for example, tiado is one of the names of the Japanese tea ceremony ; or, for example, " ommo " - the name of the Japanese occult practice of Chinese origin, a prominent representative of which Abe-no Seimei used at the same time pentagrams), and so on.

It is clear that the meaning of the compound name is even deeper. In the literal sense (“ Golden Path ”), he can resurrect in the reader’s memory the works of Herbert about Arrakis (Dune) or the yellow brick road leading to the Emerald City of Baum (or rather in the domestic multi-volume retelling and Volkov fanfiction). In the metaphorical meaning (“ the golden section teaching ”), he represents the Fido Network not only as a spiritual and social practice of IT mutual aid and non-market reciprocity (opposed to the business of Internet companies ready to bow to the pressure of the authorities), not as an occult ritual of direct code-programming action, following which able to partly crush shikigami created from the paper of 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 knots (nodes) in the world of Fidonet; besides, the play on words relies precisely on Russian (in the West, the syllable phi in the word Fido and the syllable phi in the word phi are two different syllables; moreover, in English Fido is pronounced something like “ faydou "). The term “PhiDo” in relation to “Fido” can also be viewed as a nod to the tradition of “hacker reading” - like the existing terms “phreaker”, “phishing” and the like - while it refers to the creative, not hacking, side of hacking .

In the Chinese cinematographic tragedy “ Hero ” of 2002, belonging to a special genre “ usya ” (whose name Wikipedia calls the result of the combination of parts of the words “knight” and “wushu”), the action takes place in ancient China, where the art of various calligraphy of hieroglyphs was not perfect forgotten in the name of the subsequent standardization of their style. One of the main characters of this movie silently draws another main character a composite hieroglyph directly on the ground, and this hieroglyph means the unity of China - a very important value in an era of deep feudal fragmentation of the whole country. Having read the composite hieroglyph, the warrior immediately deeply penetrates with the thought presented to 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 realization of this idea. I wanted to create a composite symbol that possesses no less depth of meaning for an IT person — although, quite possibly, much less incentive power.

In terms of software, 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; I composed six of these nine: 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 feedmail databases (but only stored in the popular JAM format), the nodelist module for reading the list of Fidonet nodes, the simteconf module for reading simple configuration files (such as the HPT echo processor or the GoldED + mail editor), and finally, this week , the UUE module , which the SVG file (or any other file) is decoded from Fidonet Yuyukov .

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

It is also clear that the SVG-enabled feed browser is not the end of the journey. If you try to compose the Fidonet technology tree (similar to the civilization achievements tree in the Civilization game or the character skills tree in the Diablo II game), it turns out that now I am at the eighth step out of eighteen; until the end of the road is still far away.

Even the current step is not over yet: PhiDo still does not know much of what every feed browser should be able to do. Even simple things like building a complete tree of answers (and replies to answers) to a message. Or as flipping messages one by one. Moreover, PhiDo is still just a feed browser: you can somehow browse through feed mail, but you cannot create or edit anything at all.

I am sure that many will want to ask: what, then, I show you at Habrahabr a screenshot of a raw product that today is not suitable for everyday use seriously?

First, I advocate immediate publicity in such circumstances: as soon as the memetic phrase “Hypertext Vector Fidonet” has become practical, it is right to admire it - at least only in the screenshot or in an awkward and incomplete program. This hope alone would, I hope, suffice.

Secondly, if we are silent now - who knows, will we be able to speak later? There are only 56 days left until August 1, after which the anti-blogospheric law will take effect, and he (if judged by the letter of the law) under the guise of "registering blogs" aims to register all sites in general. The likely further consequence of it will be the introduction of “white lists” of IP addresses, replenished only by this pre-registration - access to all other Internet addresses will be disabled, which automatically excludes the operation of VPN, TOR, I2P, anonymous proxy servers and similar methods to bypass blocking . Well, and then the well-known bureaucratic mechanism of “refusal of registration for formal reasons” will work, with the result that Russia will have no more allowed IP addresses than allowed meetings or authorized political parties. I’m not sure, for example, that Habrahabr has a future - I admit it quite sincerely. That's why I'm in a hurry.

Thirdly, the popular repressions flywheel never stops so easily (especially if it does not encounter any serious opposition), so it’s not at all difficult for me to suspect that the conditional North Korea is nothing more than an intermediate stop on the way to the conventional Kampuchea (where “White lists” - there will soon be “ Khmer Rouge”); in other words, it can be suspected that the authorities are preparing the large-scale dissociation of IT people and the large-scale destruction of IT-based blogospheric communication tools not the ultimate goal of change in Russia, but just one of the means (and quite logical first step) of state destruction IT specialists and their families in Russia. History teaches us that the most natural second step of such a program is the decapitation of the IT community, so not one of the most read Russian Habrahabr bloggers, in theory, can be quite sure that tomorrow’s dawn will meet.

In any case, the luminary of the World Wide Web certainly is heading for sunset, and the time has come 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 is not possible to get ahead of the coming of darkness.

Good night, gentlemen IT specialists.