More About Browsing and Linking Sites

Don Park asks how to understand browsing and linking in the federation. We've added this discussion to Frequently Asked Questions.

Don says, I'm taking another end-user look at Ward Cunningham's smallest federated wiki. I mostly can understand:

1. viewing a page

2. editing/moving a paragraph

3. creating a link to a new page

4. following that link and therefore creating the page

What I'm confused on is where the pages live. I understand the pages can live on a) the server I'm visiting with my browser b) the localStorage of the browser itself and c) a "remote" server.

How do I tell where a page is located? How do I create page that lives somewhere besides the server being visited?

If you click on the flag (favicon) of any federated wiki page you go to the Welcome Visitors for that page's site AND reload the javascript core and plugins from that server so you are sure to see the page as the author intended. That site becomes the "origin".

By convention Welcome Visitors links to pages for the site's owner and links to content that the owner curates on your behalf.

Details: You can have different origins in different browser tabs. You may or may not own the origin in any tab. (Login to prove you own it.) When you fork content, it is pulled toward you. If you own the origin, it saves there. If you don't own the origin, it saves in browser local storage.

More Details: If you find a site you like in one tab, and have a site you own in another tab, you can drag the tab for the site you like into a page on the site you own. Now there is a permanent link between the two sites. With that link you get to the pages you like without leaving the site that you own.

We will find many more ways to work the federation.

A common mistake is to forget to login to your origin server before pulling content toward it. Your edits end up in browser local storage. Nothing has been lost except for a simple mechanism to login and push local edits to the server that you now clearly own.

This GitHub issue suggests a mechanism that would make local storage permanent and public through the good will of an origin site that chooses to cooperate.