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Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

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Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

#241

Post by mjevans »

mprovost wrote: post #197
ryeguy_24 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might have read somewhere that the original design of HTTP allowed for transactions to occur. This free point is a big one. Once Apple set the price of 0.99 for an app it really dropped the market price for software. It's funny that there is so little different between enterprise software and consumer apps except for a monstrous difference in price point. Funny thing is, consumer apps are sometimes better.

The 402 HTTP status code is "Payment Required". At one time people envisioned micropayments etc but it never went anywhere.

Transaction fees are what kill this. That and moral police / "fraud" charge-backs caused by insufficient user authentication.

I also don't want to be nickle and dimed to death, given the transaction fees there's a huge push to subscriptions and other models. Where if I could instead just pay exactly what a generic ad I'd _never_ click on anyway pays to get placed (like 0.00001 dollars for all the ads on a webpage stuffed with them) I might actually pay instead of using adblock for all of the security, usability, and bandwidth saving reasons.

Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

#242

Post by breck »

herbst wrote: post #204
breck wrote: post #74

2-D syntax everywhere. It's a 2-dimensional binary. Suddenly the intermediate layers between binary and the higher level langs we work with day in and day out have the same form. For example, 2d langs for HTML, CSS, JSON, others: https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/ A 2D lang that replaces Markdown: http://scroll.pub/ You can have 2D langs for TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, et cetera. A grid is all you need. I figured the ma…

What is making Scrolldown more 2d than markdown? Is it just the extendibility? The intends? I don't think I fully understand your concept I also noticed your example grammar often contains a lot of js code. So it's not intended as different language but as data model with built in JavaScript? Kinda like a more modern XSLT?

> What is making Scrolldown more 2d than markdown? Is it just the extendibility?

You hit the nail on the head. The extendibility is the key thing. In Scrolldown every little piece of content is in its own little scope. It's like every block is it's own little file written in one of many different grammars. These all compose effortlessly. This is the early days, but I expect there to be thousands of little "micro-grammars" for use by people using Scroll. For example, you might have a microgrammar for making flow charts, or making interactive observablehq/worrydream/jupyter like documents, or quick sims, or blueprints, or audio content, or slide shows. It's sort of like web components done right.

> I also noticed your example grammar often contains a lot of js code.

The idea with Grammar is to keep refining the language and hoisting as many patterns into pure 2D/Tree languages as possible. But I have to use resources judiciously, and strike a balance between research and deliverables. Folks have started Tree Notation implementations in languages like Kotlin and Swift, and when/if there turns out to be a need to have something like a Kotlin Grammar interpreter, then at the time it would make sense to iterate on Grammar so the `javascript` blocks are instead a DSL. You can see that is a bit in progress with the `compiler` nodes; but have gone with the hacky `javascript` bits in many places just for pragmatic reasons.

> So it's not intended as different language but as data model with built in JavaScript? Kinda like a more modern XSLT?

Grammar started out as a POC but evolved into something pretty practical. Sort of an ANTLR for 2D languages. But sometimes I still just hard code the parser/compiler for a language from scratch. They are generally pretty simple.

Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

#243

Post by tabtab »

A better DOM. I know this topic is mostly about data transfer, but I'm going to complain about web UI standards. For many uses, a state-ful coordinate-based UI standard is needed. It's why PDF's proliferate: DOM can't faithfully reproduce documents in a WYSIWYG way. It's not practical for every document/content author to become a "semantic auto-flow" layout expert: the learning curve to do semantic right is too damned long. We could have things like interactive flow-charts and ERD diagrams with our favorite GUI widgets in them if we had a decent state-ful coordinate standard (and maybe the "missing" GUI idioms like combo boxes, tabs, editable grids, MDI, drop-down menus, etc. Reinventing them in JavaScript has proven a mess.)

Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

#248

Post by specialist »

re banning ads.

I expected Xanadu. Centralized, omniscient namespace, two-way links, micropayments, etc.

We got The Web. Which eschewed all of that.

Much as I hate The Web (repeating myself), I grudgingly accept that it probably succeeded because it wasn't Xanadu.

Even if Xanadu launched, like a better AOL or Prodigy, I suspect most people wouldn't have grokked it.

Another triumph of Worse Is Better. Like PHP and JavaScript and so many others. Then hot patch it towards something less offensive.

Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

#249

Post by abecedarius »

nonameiguess wrote: post #100
abecedarius wrote: post #4

The most basic problems seem to be: 1. Everything being 'free' by default drives us to ad-supported centralized services. Economics aren't a separable concern. 2. Too few IP addresses. (At least one of the pioneers, I forget which, said he pushed for longer addresses but was overruled. So the technical constraints probably did not force this.) I'm not sure how to fix #1, but here's an approach from the 90s: https://c…

I think this is a problem with the World Wide Web, not the Internet. At the network level, per-user cost accounting and quality of service is implemented quite well, to the point of being able to pay per byte if you really want to. And access to any network beyond your own LAN is not free. The problem of how to fund actual web application development is not much different from the problem of how to fund media develop…

In the alternate history I'm imagining, with network-layer accounting and payments from the beginning, flooding and spam were never much of a problem -- they were at most a "nice problem to have". Endpoint security became a priority from the beginning, because failures that cost money (even if not much per computer) get treated that way. Participating in the network as a full peer, e.g. running the equivalent of a webserver on your home PC, was considerably more practical and normalized. (The bigger address space of course went into this too.) And this history made other peer-to-peer software easier to develop and more practical and economically sustainable, in a virtuous cycle.

This doesn't mean it'd kill advertising. It wouldn't even kill all of the forces encouraging me to put my 'content' on centralized services even though I'm nothing like a media corp. But I suspect the right changes could've helped a lot towards a healthier computational ecosystem now.

This early architectural decision that costs are out of band didn't fundamentally make anything impossible. But when you see a lower-level problem addressed by higher-level workarounds, and you're getting to redesign the system, isn't that exactly what constitutes an opportunity?

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