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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

#181

Post by johnny22 »

mastax wrote: post #149
niftich wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something like Google search could possibly work in a decentralized fashion. How? Let's suppose I trust Google to crawl the Web and present a plausibly-accurate result to my query. This works because I communicate with Google using TLS (so I trust that Google is in fact Google), Google is the one performing the crawl, and I put my faith (for purposes of this exercise) in Google's editorial discretion and good judge…

BitTorrent presents a plausible (but not complete) replacement. Most torrents nowadays are disseminated through the DHT. User clients can query the DHT to search for specific content, which is then downloaded via its content hash through trackers. Many websites are also available which provide indexes and other features (comments, virus scans, ratings, etc.) on top of this DHT database. It would be a technical stretc…

but then I'd want somebody to aggregate those competing engine results and sort them for me by relevance and applicability.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#182

Post by superkuh »

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…

Try https://millionshort.com/.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#183

Post by jodrellblank »

barsonme wrote: post #150
gaius wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

without CSS we'll end up with Beige boxed web, all looking the same, behaving the same Designers generally vastly overestimate how much users actually want "design".

And developers vastly overestimate how much users really want bland websites like we had 10+ years ago. Sure, _we_ like it because it can be great for "power users" like _us_, but 99% of the population aren't power users. It reminds me of devs wondering why many people prefer bloated, slow GUIs to CLIs.

What are you saying? That non-power-users like and are good at deciphering different designs and interaction models and layouts for every site, but they can't deal with regular, plain, bland sites because those are scary and confusing?

If anything, shouldn't that be the other way around? Power users wanting javascript experiments, and non-power-users wanting "if it ain't broke, stop messing around with it"?

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#184

Post by acdha »

bane wrote: post #180

For us "old" people who remember the internet before the web -- one of the things that's really different about the modern internet is the very limited set of protocols and applications that the average user interacts with. It really used to be that every different service type mapped to a different protocol and HTTP (and HTTPS) has just sort of subsumed everything. Back in the old days to minimally use the internet…

> There's really nothing preventing some motivated group to just spin up an entirely new kind of service that "fixes" all that's wrong with the web, custom protocol and application stack.

Firewalls and security policy. The internet is a much less trusting place these days[1] and anything too new will have adoption issues once it gets out of a core hacker group.

1. Remember IRIX shopping with telnet and a guest/guest login enabled by default to “foster the spirit of collaboration”?

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#185

Post by romaniv »

jasode wrote: post #153
romaniv wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having watched nearly every talk/interview of Kay I could find on YouTube (which includes the OOPSLA keynote) and having read some of his writings I think I have a reasonably good understanding of what he is advocating for. Here is Kay talking about Internet's resilience in a bit more detail: https://youtu.be/NdSD07U5uBs?t=1472 >His position is strongly aligned with the "mechanism, not policy" philosophy. I don't see…

>and having read some of his writings I think I have a reasonably good understanding of what he is advocating for. In the Dr Dobbs interview[1] that you pulled the quote from, Alan Kay is not talking about protocols for web resilience. Actually, there is no mention of "protocols" in that article at all. Even outside of that particular article, AK doesn't talk much about "protocols" other than the protocol of "message…

Just because Kay criticized the Web for its limits on user participation does not mean he did not criticize it for other reasons.

Here is an entire talk on complexity and robustness in software where the Web is mentioned as one of the worst offenders of design by accretion:

https://youtu.be/QboI_1WJUlM?t=1046

(I'm linking to a specific part, but the entire thing is worth listening to.)

Also, he does talk about protocols. Heck, VPRI implemented a TCP/IP implementation by treating it as a language and using a non-deterministic parser.

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2007008_steps.pdf

Page 17.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#186

Post by codeisawesome »

pfraze wrote: post #94
codeisawesome wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Is there still going to be room for entrepreneurship on this new Web? 2. To what extent will the lack of ability to monopolise, hurt the ability to create large amounts of revenues and profits? 3. Does this community also know about projects like OpenMined which seek to democratise access to data & infra to run ML algorithms on? Any pattern like reason you can think of, for it to have not come up in André’s post?

2. See my reply to 1! 3. I'm not personally familiar with OpenMined but decentralization is a pretty active space. SSB and Dat/Beaker have a few things in common: overlap in the communities, a focus on p2p hypermedia protocols, and not a lot of love for cryptocurrency solutions. That last point may change over time, but currently the usability, performance, and waste of the coins has left us all saying, "can't we do…

Thank you for the insights!

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#187

Post by brokenmachine »

anigbrowl wrote: post #133
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…

If they did not add value, we would still be using newsgroups. I wish we were. Newsgroups were great, but they fell apart under commercial pressure; internally from spam, externally from the pretty graphics that were possible in a web browser. I really wish there were a clear successor to NNTP and a simpler, clearer markup standard - the popularity of FB and Wikipedia shows that people value simple, uncluttered inter…

> the popularity of FB and Wikipedia shows that people value simple, uncluttered interfaces

I agree with Wikipedia, but FB has a horrible interface.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#188

Post by brokenmachine »

snaky wrote: post #128
unit91 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> in a scriptless world, your HN up/down vote can't be done without a full page load In a perfect world, HN wouldn't need any web thing at all, NNTP is better fit for it. With all the features of decent newsreader of your taste.

How does one upvote comments using NNTP?

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#189

Post by brokenmachine »

pjmlp wrote: post #49
unit91 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Users don't have any idea what they want. They weren't the ones creating Ajax to try to fit Outlook into the browser, and everything that came after that.

> Users don't have any idea what they want.

...but they certainly know it when they see it.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#190

Post by brokenmachine »

mastax wrote: post #152
gaius wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

without CSS we'll end up with Beige boxed web, all looking the same, behaving the same Designers generally vastly overestimate how much users actually want "design".

Engineers generally vastly underestimate how much "design" affects purchasing decisions.

You can still have design, custom design even. But it would be so nice to retain the ability to just see the content without all that (IMO) unnecessary "design" rubbish.

Reader View in Firefox is somewhat a step in this direction, but I find it removes images and some other important content.

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