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A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

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Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#31

Post by unit91 »

ashark wrote: post #8
tannhaeuser wrote: post #4

I'm all for p2p (really), but how about taking back control (sorry) of the Web by actually developing and enforcing declarative/markup technologies and standards instead of praising JavaScript because "it's not half bad" and adding procedural features to the Web (APIs, WASM)? With the current state of affairs wrt privacy and self-proclaimed standardization bodies, I'm not sure the Web is worth preserving.

HTML with great default styles and better built-in form and interactive elements (date picker, sortable tables) would be ideal. Screw CSS, it slows everything down, just have good defaults and don't let pages mess with them much. If we must have CSS at least jettison the complex parts with animation and such. Make it very, very simple and weak. No Javascript. Can't be trusted if it has the ability to initiate connect…

> it'd feel lightning fast compared to what we have now

I disagree with this completely. So much of what JS does is increase the (perceived) speed and sanity of the user experience. For example, in a scriptless world, your HN up/down vote can't be done without a full page load, which would come with the added headache of changing the state of the world on your page because stories and comments have changed their ordering. Solution? Return of the chronological thread (no thanks).

And there are a lot of other applications in this same boat. I don't know if you are old enough to remember webmail when the refresh button was how you checked for new mail. I'd greatly prefer what we have now, where mail just appears over a socket. Online drawing/CAD apps or games without CSS and JS? Forget it. Or go back to Flash.

Bottom line, we have the ecosystem we do today because the users demand it. For us as devs, it could be better, more consistent, etc. but we need the capability.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#33

Post by soared »

quickben wrote: post #28

Funny. Before DRM, spam, i-have-to-monetize daily 5 minute of bloging into a full time pay, unskipable 30s YouTube ads, profiling every possible user behavior and other shady shit like that: We wondered how can we improve the web. Now, we wonder how to save it.

Spam, scams, and bad ads have been around since the start, what internet were you using?

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#35

Post by coding123 »

My wife gets increasingly pissed off when she searches for various materials she wants to purchase. A specific site keeps coming up for her that she absolutely hates and starts with an E. And there's nothing special about the links, and likely nothing important about the specific products other than the domain name that starts with E has billions of cross-links all over the web. It makes the random long-tail search terms (that mind you are so freaking obscure) all go to this same site. It's driving her nuts.

At this point SEO has been totally gamed and search is totally useless now. We NEED an alternative.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#36

Post by ashark »

wvenable wrote: post #18
ashark wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML with great default styles and better built-in form and interactive elements (date picker, sortable tables) would be ideal. Screw CSS, it slows everything down, just have good defaults and don't let pages mess with them much. If we must have CSS at least jettison the complex parts with animation and such. Make it very, very simple and weak. No Javascript. Can't be trusted if it has the ability to initiate connect…

The problem with that approach is that you have to define all your possible use-cases up front. If the web had stayed as a simple document format, it wouldn't even be worth talking about now. A much more flexible and future-proof approach is a fully programmable environment without any declarative features at all. No HTML. No CSS. Just a clean API in a tight sandbox.

> The problem with that approach is that you have to define all your possible use-cases up front. If the web had stayed as a simple document format, it wouldn't even be worth talking about now.

Everything but web apps and spy-vertising would be better (for the user) without Javascript, overall. I submit that those can live on some other platform (the current Web could keep going) while most of the rest could switch to the low-footprint client that cannot spy on you or do user-hostile crap with its interface (popups, hilariously bad layouts/styling [see: Medium] that "look cool", and so on). Keeping low-trust scumbag code strictly separate from safe sites that don't try to screw with me because they cannot would be very useful.

Ecommerce, Facebook, webmail, all that stuff would be fine without Javascript, if anyone cared to do that on this hypothetical Web alternative that treats the user with respect. Tried basic-HTML Gmail lately? It's faster, with its full-page loads on every interaction, than Ajax gmail and way faster than Inbox, and many of the most useful features it lacks from those could be added server-side with no more, or even less, difficulty than adding them client side (Inbox's categories, for example). Its worse layout issues, especially on mobile, would disappear entirely if we had sensible defaults (user overridable) for each platform's browser to which pages were forced to defer.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#37

Post by jerkstate »

coding123 wrote: post #35

My wife gets increasingly pissed off when she searches for various materials she wants to purchase. A specific site keeps coming up for her that she absolutely hates and starts with an E. And there's nothing special about the links, and likely nothing important about the specific products other than the domain name that starts with E has billions of cross-links all over the web. It makes the random long-tail search t…

I have a similar problem with SEO for recipes. There are tons of recipes SEO'd to a certain site that has a registration/paywall that frequently appear at the top of search results. Luckily they are relatively easy to avoid in the search results.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#38

Post by gregknicholson »

niftich wrote: post #23

Content-addressed overlay networks work pretty well over the Internet, and they could work equally well on mesh networks (as the article posits), if not two rather awkward problems: storage at rest, and liveliness of a storage node. These two factors even interact to make the situation worse. Because at any point, nodes can drop off and you never know if this condition is temporary or permanent, a distributed datasto…

> a distributed datastore has to redundantly store everything

Scuttlebutt gets around this: you only store and rebroadcast your friends' stuff (and anything else relevant to you).

You're actually seeing content from your local storage — which is why Scuttlebutt works seamlessly offline — so there's no need for altruism.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#39

Post by jerkstate »

niftich wrote: post #23

Content-addressed overlay networks work pretty well over the Internet, and they could work equally well on mesh networks (as the article posits), if not two rather awkward problems: storage at rest, and liveliness of a storage node. These two factors even interact to make the situation worse. Because at any point, nodes can drop off and you never know if this condition is temporary or permanent, a distributed datasto…

The modern CDN web stores content at hundreds of locations, but the locations are all sponsored (paid for) by the original content provider, presumably that payment is subsidized either monetarily by the end-user or by advertisers. So there's really no difference. There are a couple of cryptocurrencies aimed at settling the bill for hosting activity like this that may improve the reliability situation (by creating a monetary incentive to do that hosting)

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#40

Post by throwaway2048 »

niftich wrote: post #15

The IPv4 perspective is a red herring. NATting was indeed necessitated by IP address scarcity, but a domestic installation that does NAT comes with ancillary benefits, like giving you, the home user, a single place to control access to your network. In IPv6 it's nice that you have an address space that's not only big enough to accommodate every device, but large enough to even burn through addresses and treat them as…

firewalling on a router/gateway gives you the same ability, and none of the downsides of NAT.

Nat is in no way a requirement for this.

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