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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

#61

Post by ashark »

nickbauman wrote: post #13
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.

The vision of these three posts (tannhaeuser, ashark and JohnStrange) are incompatible. This thread is a tiny (but complete) clinic in why the web is such a mess.

I submit that Tannhaeuser's vision is what can replace the current web in its cross-platform-app-distribution role, leaving the document-browsing side to mine :-)

That addresses the core problem, as I see it, which is that when I want to browse some damn HTML I'm subjected to a ton of actual user-hostile behavior and lots more potential hostile behavior that I have to worry about, all while paying for it in disk space, memory, and processor cycles (so, paying in terms of battery and UX). Mixing the two is why the Web sucks so very much. Separating them into a document-browsing client and a sandboxed-app client is precisely what I wish would happen. I don't want a link in my document-browsing client to maybe open an application without telling me, nor for it to have access to all that capability when I just want to read Wikipedia or whatever, and trust that the links I follow won't lead to some "page" that spies on my every mouse movement, mines Bitcoin, auto-plays video ads, pops up "SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTER" modals, or any crap like that.

I'm pessimistic about strict semantic markup/typing of data being viable as a web replacement, as in JohnStrange's suggestion.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#62

Post by schnable »

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…

A content-based web doesn't solve discovering content.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#63

Post by schnable »

dash2 wrote: post #53

Here’s the problem with IP addresses: there aren’t enough of them.... As a consequence, the Internet has allowed intermediate computers to rule. These are like parasites that have grown too large to remove without killing the host. The technical flaw that favored intermediate computers prefigured a world where middlemen business models thrive. The handwave is the word "prefigure". How did IPv4 and NAT play any role i…

And this is important because the author misses the point as to why people get value from the "middlemen" -- to find stuff. Even with a content-centered web, there will be a need to find content and people, and new discovery engines and aggregators will emerge.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#64

Post by [deleted] »

dash2 wrote: post #53

Here’s the problem with IP addresses: there aren’t enough of them.... As a consequence, the Internet has allowed intermediate computers to rule. These are like parasites that have grown too large to remove without killing the host. The technical flaw that favored intermediate computers prefigured a world where middlemen business models thrive. The handwave is the word "prefigure". How did IPv4 and NAT play any role i…

[deleted]

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#65

Post by jacquesm »

dash2 wrote: post #53

Here’s the problem with IP addresses: there aren’t enough of them.... As a consequence, the Internet has allowed intermediate computers to rule. These are like parasites that have grown too large to remove without killing the host. The technical flaw that favored intermediate computers prefigured a world where middlemen business models thrive. The handwave is the word "prefigure". How did IPv4 and NAT play any role i…

> How did IPv4 and NAT play any role in the dominance of Facebook, Airbnb et cetera? This is an analogy masquerading as an argument.

Because it made peer-to-peer no longer an option. Keep in mind that NAT is a poor man's firewall and once NAT'd systems were common peer-to-peer firewall transition became a real problem.

https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ (2003, still as relevant today as when it was written)

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#66

Post by wvenable »

ashark wrote: post #36
wvenable wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> Ecommerce, Facebook, webmail, all that stuff would be fine without Javascript...

But something as simple as voting on reddit would be tedious.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#67

Post by jacquesm »

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…

Yes, please.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#68

Post by at-fates-hands »

schnable wrote: post #63
dash2 wrote: post #53

Here’s the problem with IP addresses: there aren’t enough of them.... As a consequence, the Internet has allowed intermediate computers to rule. These are like parasites that have grown too large to remove without killing the host. The technical flaw that favored intermediate computers prefigured a world where middlemen business models thrive. The handwave is the word "prefigure". How did IPv4 and NAT play any role i…

And this is important because the author misses the point as to why people get value from the "middlemen" -- to find stuff. Even with a content-centered web, there will be a need to find content and people, and new discovery engines and aggregators will emerge.

I was struck with the same thing.

There is a reason we moved from newsgroups, to HTML and browsers to search engines. Each step became a better, more powerful tool to find content faster, more efficiently.

These days so many of the tools we're using are so entrenched, even with some of the changes the author talks about, it would still be a monumental task for people to change.

I mean, look at how bad FB is (on several levels) and look at all the alternatives which allow you to keep your information private and share what you want like Diaspora or Freenet. I tried (repeatedly) to get friends and family to join my Diaspora pod and tried to convey all the advantages of it being private. Nope, nada, no way. None of them ever joined and many just said FB has such deep roots into their lives, giving it up would have a huge effect on their lives, it was crazy.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#69

Post by blurbleblurble »

mr_spothawk wrote: post #57
pfraze wrote: post #34

I worked on Secure Scuttlebutt and then founded Beaker. Happy to answer questions.

How might search engines work in a DAT enabled web? (beaker's neat... i'll check it out)

I can't answer for pfraze, but I've thought about this a lot.

For one, even right now we badly need better client-side ways of caching, searching and indexing content. I should be able to easily cache, tag and search a wikipedia article, for example, without ever touching a remote server. On the decentralized web, these tools are critical.

As far as search goes, it'd be interesting to find a way of letting peers run anonymous queries on each others' local indices. Maybe you'd still only want trusted peers (e.g. friends of friends) to be able to query your index. Or maybe you'd want to have some privacy settings for who can search what content. Maybe this is a job for zero knowledge proofs? IDK. It's a hard problem for me to wrap my head around. How to balance privacy with fluid information retrieval.

This kind of p2p search system could be a powerful replacement of centralized search, especially in the sense that it gives users the opportunity to index content with humanly meaningful metadata.

Remember back in the day when people had web indexes? You'd visit someone's www page and they'd have a list of cool links? Think about a next level version of that, where peoples' curated indexes are stacked with meaningful metadata and well integrated with the browser.

I could also imagine interesting peer-graph indexing algorithms that worked using gather-apply-scatter kind of techniques.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#70

Post by tannhaeuser »

unit91 wrote: post #31
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…

> 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 orde…

The case of reloading only parts of a page (while retaining boilerplate and other already-received content) could trivially be solved if HTML could make use of entities (a concept from SGML on which HTML is based) in combination with HTTP cache controls. But once Netscape brought us JavaScript, any effort in this direction was doomed because it wasn't essential in an already Turing-complete scripting environmemt. As recently as earlier this year, HTML Imports were removed from the spec I believe (not entirely sure about this).
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