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braid-org
braid-spec
Web Development2019–2024
braid-org / braid-spec

braid-spec

Working area for Braid extensions to HTTP

Web DevelopmentSystems & InfrastructureNetworking
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6Distinct people
11Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
259GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

Working area for Braid extensions to HTTP

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year11 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2019-11-20 20:23:39 UTC to 2024-05-28 00:14:05 UTC.

01232019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303

What Hacker News says

11 sources
toomim·May 28, 2024
I'm not convinced on 209, either. There might be a better response code. See the discussion at https://github.com/braid-org/braid-spec/issues/16 Braid is not trying to be "application logic" or "transport protocol" -- it is a State Synchronization Protocol. If you can think of a more elegant method to support all of state synchronization within SSE, we're all ears! But AFAICS you end up having to embed base64-encoded HTTP responses within SSE events within HTTP responses, which is gross pile of russian dolls, where both the innermost and outermost dolls are the same type of doll -- an HTTP response! So why all the intermediate dolls? It's more elegant and simpler to extend HTTP at the root level, and say: "Instead of returning 1 HTTP response, a Braid server can return N HTTP responses, concatenated together with optional newline sepa
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rators."
In Braid: Synchronization for HTTP
toomim·May 27, 2024
Cool! We have been building feeds on braid, too! It would be very interesting to support FeedAPI with Braid -- you would get much faster pushed updates than you currently do with client-pulled updates! See our current work on the "feed" spec in Braidmail: https://braid.org/apps/braidmail/spec2. To support event-sourcing, you could replace those {link: ...} objects with event objects, and just treat each event as data. Then you'd have a url like /event-stream that peers would subscribe to. Or, you could go deeper, and come up with a custom `Patch-Type:` for your events, which could make your events first-class HTTP citizens that could also be applied to a server using the PATCH method. Then your url might be /system-state, and represent the state for the whole system. Braid supports such custom events, but be aware that this model is l
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imited in a few ways: - It's less interoperable, because all peers must know and implement the custom event types (aka patch-type) in order to read or write state. - You don't get to re-use the beautiful and complicated merge algorithms that support eventual consistency with multiple writers (the OT/CRDT algorithms). - It doesn't allow summarization of history. It's hard to prune history when each peer needs to know all events in order to do anything. You might also be interested in PREP, which is a pure event-update protocol being worked on by my colleague Rahul Gupta: https://github.com/CxRes/prep We're trying to merge our work together, if we can. You might also be interested in our deliberation on the pros/cons of "events" vs. "state updates" here: https://github.com/braid-org/braid-spec/issues/102#issuecomm...
In Braid: Synchronization for HTTP
toomim·May 10, 2022
That doesn't work, because DELETE is defined to delete the entire resource. PUT is defined to replace the resource with the body, which would replace the resource with the patch. Only PATCH is defined to accept a patch and do something special with it. Another option, though, is to use the Range-Patch spec from: https://github.com/braid-org/braid-spec
In What Is JSON Patch?
josephg·Apr 4, 2022
Very cool! This looks very similar to what we're doing with the braid spec[1], though I really like how clear and concise your examples are! This is a great little website. Some differences between our approaches: - I think its a good idea to support arbitrary patch formats via a content-type style field, just like we have different formats for images. This lets you use the same protocol for things like collaborative editors. - For some data sets (like CRDTs), you want each change to be able to refer to multiple "parents". - Your protocol is very JSON-y and not very HTTP-y. It looks like you're basically using JSON to express HTTP. Why not just use HTTP? One big downside of the JSON approach is that it makes it awkward to transmit binary patches. (Eg, 'patching' an image) Feel free to reach out if you're up for a chat! Looks like we're wo
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rking on the same problem. [1] https://github.com/braid-org/braid-spec/blob/master/draft-to...
In HTTP Feeds
josephg·Feb 20, 2022
In case people don't know, Mark Nottingham (the author) is the chair of the HTTP working group at the IETF. He isn't just some guy with opinions on the internet. (Sorry mnot!) I've never found pub/sub quite the right abstraction, because almost every implementation I've seen has race conditions or issues on reconnect. Usually its possible to lose messages during reconnection, and there's often other issues too. I usually want an event queue abstraction, not pub/sub. I met mnot a few years ago when we (the braid group) took a stab at writing a spec for HTTP based streaming updates[1]. Our proposal is to do state syncronization around a shared objects (the URL). Each event on the channel is (explicitly or implicitly) an update for some resource. So: - The document (resource) has a version header (ETag?). - Each event sent on the stream is a
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patch which changes the version from X to Y. Patches can either be incremental ("insert A at position 5") or if its small, just contain a new copy of the document. - You can reconnect at any time, and specify a known version of the document. The server can bring you up to date by sending the patches you missed. If the server doesn't store historical changes, it should be able to just send you a fresh copy of the document. After that, the subscription should drip feed events as they come in. One nice thing about this is that CDNs can do highly efficient fan-out of changes. A cache could also use braid to subscribe to resources which change a lot on the origin server, in order to keep the cached values hot. [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-toomim-httpbis-b... We've done some revisions since then but have been working on getting more running code before pushing forward more with the approach. Most recent draft & issues: https://github.com/braid-org/braid-spec/blob/master/draft-to...
In Server-sent events, WebSockets, and HTTP
AriaMinaei·Aug 31, 2020
A few ideas to put out there: 1. Emphasize synchronization over imperative API calls. Imperative APIs encourage data silos. They are the underlying technical part of the problem that Zapier and ITTT try to solve. See [0] and [1] for some ideas. 2. Allow users to submit "agents" rather than "requests." An agent is a small program given extremely limited resources (limited process/memory/runtime budget) that you can safely run on your server. It is a possible answer to many of the standards/protocols that wouldn't exist if frontends were running on the same machines as backends. [2] 3. Emphasize composition over integration. Functions compose (nest, recurse). Event emitters don't. As long as APIs are built to be integrated rather than composed, making them work together is a full-time or full-company job (eg. Zapier). 4. Make things immutab
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le. Immutability allows APIs to "play" with one another without fear of setting off the nukes (ie. side effects). It's possible that this approach would make it so that integrating two APIs becomes a job for ML/AI rather than humans. [0] https://github.com/braid-work/braid-spec [1] https://writings.quilt.org/2014/05/12/distributed-systems-an... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23900749
In How should we build the APIs of tomorrow?
brynb·Nov 20, 2019
I've been working for a few months on a database called Redwood that's intended to make it easier to build this kind of software. Having spent much of the past couple of years working with libp2p, IPFS, Dat, and similar technologies, I was curious to see what would result if I started from the ground up. https://github.com/brynbellomy/redwood So far, the model seems promising. It's fully peer-to-peer, and supports decentralized identity, configurable conflict resolution, read/write access, asset storage, and currently is running across 3 different transports: - HTTP (augmented with extensions proposed by the Braid project [1][2]) - Libp2p - WebRTC I've included two simple demos, a collaborative document editor (well, it's just a textarea at the moment), and a chat app. Would appreciate any feedback or participation that folks are willi
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ng to give. [1] https://github.com/braid-work/braid-spec [2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/braid-http
In Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

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