More useful html with dag-cbor

[anjor]

I have been working with @linuskendall on onboarding solana blockchain data to filecoin. The data is encoded with dag-cbor.

We are thinking of supporting retrievals (backed by Saturn) in an IPFS gateway. The intended UX was similar to what a user gets with a unixfs dag in ipfs gateway — they see directories that they can click into till they get to a file, at which point they can decide to download it.

Unfortunately this doesn’t work with dag-cbor — relevant slack thread . With Kubo 0.18, it recognises the block as dag-cbor and gives the user a helpful message, however, the user still has to download the block and then decode it themselves.

A user should be able to start at the epoch level, and go down the dag to the point where they want to start downloading, and then download everything under — similar to unixfs.

[anjor]

Chatted with @lidel @BigLep and @magik6k about this over slack as well, so tagging them in.

[lidel]

Thanks for filling this, discussed internally, team has hands full,
but we will try to make a stab at basic traversal UI next week
(start with something basic, but enough to enable end users to browse the DAG like they can UnixFS directory listings).

[anjor]

https://www.notion.so/ecosystem-wg/Triton-Solana-Retrieval-Plan-88bc96f73f9c4693b5d333cc653ca085

[anjor]

// copy pasting @magik6k 's comment here:

simply dumping ipld-prime datamodel tree - https://github.com/lotus-web3/dagparts/blob/main/cmd/dataexpl/hnd_view_ipld.go#L77-L235 might work.

@lidel @hacdias i tried looking into this but got a bit stuck.

Will it be as simple as adding Magik's code here -- https://github.com/ipfs/boxo/blob/main/gateway/handler_codec.go ?

(sorry i am not a frontend dev, and am struggling a bit with the go <> html interface here and could use help)

[lidel]

@anjor thanks for trying! I think @hacdias can take this over for now:

• There is wip refactoring of HTML templates happening feat(gateway): improved templates, user friendly errors #298
  • GUI for browsing CBOR needs to happen on top of that, so makes sense @hacdias does both
• MVP will be a basic UI that allows for traversing links inside DAG-JSON and DAG-CBOR
  • Once this is in place, defining user interface could be iterated on without touching low level stuff