Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

staltz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 220 posts

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#111

Post by mort96 »

ssalazar wrote: post #91
dTal wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How did IPv4 and NAT play any role in the dominance of Facebook, Airbnb et cetera? Very directly, I would say, by making the barrier to running your own low-traffic website too high. Modern social media is all about hosting content - microblogs, photos, etc. Geocities was an early workaround to an inability to host things, and it's worth remembering that MySpace was originally positioned as a kind of evolution of th…

The barrier is from the tools, not NAT. Maintaining your own server is prohibitively difficult for pretty much anyone besides niche technology enthusiasts or IT professionals. > Were it not for NAT, I would have expected an explosion in tiny self-hosted personal sites around the time that dialup was replaced by always-on cable connections NAT never stopped you from port forwarding 80 to your local server and many peo…

Some (many?) ISPs block forwarding of port 80 specifically. I have a third party router as my main router, with the ISP provided modem/router/wireless AP box in bridge mode, because I can't forward port 80 through the web interface of my ISP's router.

Also, port forwarding is _hard_. It might not seem like it to us more experienced people, but it's a problem that's not very googlable because there's a billion different admin interfaces for routers, and they all do it differently enough that you have to understand what you're doing, not just follow a guide, to port forward.

In contrast, if it was possible to make some simple software which regular people could install on their personal PC, and then they got a WYSIWYG website editor, and that software handled all hosting gave the user a link (ip address) to their website which they could send to friends, I imagine a lot more people would experiment with web publishing. Obviously, in order to run a site 24/7 on a dedicated server with its own domain would still be prohibitively hard for many people, but people would've at least been able to experiment and play with hosting their own simple website which they can share with friends.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#112

Post by workthrowaway27 »

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've had a few experiences recently where I was searching for a webpage that I knew existed (because I'd been to it previously), but that was fairly niche and couldn't find it through Google even after trying several different sets of search terms and even fragments of text I remembered from the site.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#113

Post by wvenable »

ashark wrote: post #102
wvenable wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd have way no indicate that your upvote succeeded with a 204 status code. Going back to my original point, and what you're arguing for me here, is that do this properly you'd have to imagine and implement every possible use case. In 1993, nobody envisioned web pages like Reddit. And yes, without JavaScript the web would be much faster and much safer but also much less interesting and powerful. It's hard to imagin…

We had working voting systems before AJAX (source: I have a high-but-now-considered-lowish Slashdot ID) so we can do it. Besides, visited link state seems like it'd resolve the problem, and it's been in HTML approximately forever. I still don't see the problem. The rest of what's possible can go on the current web, which would hopefully optimize (even more) for delivering apps if that happened. I want a content reade…

I have a site that delivers content, forums, and maybe even a few application-like features all in one. Why have two systems when one system can do all that? It'll simply never happen. The web killed gopher. The web killed NNTP. The web has almost killed email. What you described has existed and been killed off a half-dozen times already.

I'm not against having more user-protection features (heck, I have a number of plugins installed to do just that) but limiting usability and creativity is the wrong approach. It's been done and it always fails.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#114

Post by workthrowaway27 »

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…

I would love it if the internet worked like this, but I don't see how we could ever get there from where we are now. Too much is invested in the status quo and people are too used to it.

Gopher is cool. I bet if Gopher made it easier to link to other documents it would have really taken off.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#115

Post by ashark »

NoGravitas wrote: post #108
ashark wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think you're quite right. Browsers would need to add quite a few capabilities in order to support the world you envision, but those capabilities would be simpler and less generic than javascript support.

HTML built-in elements—especially forms and tables—have atrophied badly, I guess because the Javascript crutch is right there. That's gotta be why things like the file picker are still awful, there's nothing like native UI date/time pickers that any sane native UI kit includes, tables don't have (re)sorting built in, and so on.

So the work would be, 1) delete like 80-85% of Gecko or Servo or whatever, 2) add back about 5% of that to patch in better form elements and such, 3) write some default styles that don't suck and a system for editing them or loading themes, maybe even per-site (nice, but not needed in the MVP), including user-submitted styles, and 4) overcoming the chicken/egg problem of getting content on it to attract users, or vice/versa (there's the tricky bit).

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#116

Post by [deleted] »

mr_spothawk wrote: post #50
whimful wrote: post #2

scuttlebutt is my main social media these days... oh and in case you're looking for git that's not wedded to github via your comments and issues, scuttlebutt plays really well with git - you push comments and code into your gossip-cloud together

likewise, scuttlebutt is my primary digital social resource, and the #solarpunk community generally is incredibly inspiring to me.

[deleted]

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#117

Post by ashark »

wvenable wrote: post #113
ashark wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had working voting systems before AJAX (source: I have a high-but-now-considered-lowish Slashdot ID) so we can do it. Besides, visited link state seems like it'd resolve the problem, and it's been in HTML approximately forever. I still don't see the problem. The rest of what's possible can go on the current web, which would hopefully optimize (even more) for delivering apps if that happened. I want a content reade…

I have a site that delivers content, forums, and maybe even a few application-like features all in one. Why have two systems when one system can do all that? It'll simply never happen. The web killed gopher. The web killed NNTP. The web has almost killed email. What you described has existed and been killed off a half-dozen times already. I'm not against having more user-protection features (heck, I have a number of…

I'd be OK with keeping both in the same client, with warnings when transitioning from one to the other (say, you follow a link on a web page to a web app), if that's what it took. It'd be like the HTTPS lock and content-origin policies and such but for guaranteeing the page you're visiting isn't actually a "page" that's spying on you and doing all kinds of other nasty stuff, or that the link you're following may go to a page that's a god-awful pain in the ass to read and burns your battery up ("modern" designed web articles). Like a not-shit version of Google's AMP, kinda.

It'd be better separate if that worked out—if all the things that work just fine without JS and advanced CSS went to the New Web I'd be able to arrange things so I rarely need anything else. Web apps blow and I try to avoid them when possible, or, increasingly, they're better off in Electron for reasons including that it's quicker to get to them to murder them mercilessly when they go rogue, than it is with some tab somewhere. But a unified client for both that kept them strictly separate would at least be a lot better than what we have now.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#119

Post by tobbyb »

The first choke point is the ISP. You are completely dependent on the ISP or mobile provider to get on the network. Once on the network there are multiple choke points around IP addresses, dns, ca authorities, registries and more.

As long as you are dependent on anyone to get on the network it by definition can't be decentralized. Consumer wireless tech is heavily regulated and governments are extremely paranoid about communication channels they don't control and can't monitor.

This is unlikely to change because there are no incentives to develop technology that truly empowers individuals, there is no profit in it, it's a social good. If developed it will be demonized and made illegal, and limited to minority dissenters, the general population is unlikely to go through hoops to get on a network.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#120

Post by hunter2_ »

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…

Indeed, decentralizing the algorithms that power things like Uber Pool (Lyft Line) seems like a monumental task. But, not impossible I guess.
Post reply on HN