Quirks of History

Nature invents new things by reapplying old things. Evolving software is no different. Some baggage comes along.

View: 'view' was first used as the route to client-side rendering. It then distinguished origin from remote references. Later 'origin' and 'local' joined 'view' to be more specific leaving view to mean search 'local' => 'origin'.

Remote: An orignal thought was that the server would be a caching proxy to the rest of the federation. Hence the proxy route: /remote. This put some ruby servers into deadlock. Yikes. I fell back to webrick. Yuck. We started using CORS which works fine. Now to root out the last references to /remote.

Resolution Context: The concept emerged slowly and first as an experiment to see if it could be computed reliably. This was hacked into the refresh code and reported as hover text over links. Later, when a link is clicked, the hover text is retrieved from the dom and parsed back into an array.

Domain Name: When filling out the "whois" info for your domain, put yourself in as "Administrative Contact" and make the hosting service only the "Technical Contact". That way you are the one who has to approve any change in ownership of the domain.

Plugin Menu: is saved in window.catalog because of the obscure way we once tacked this server-generated information on to the factory.js file.