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A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

staltz.com

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Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#211

Post by mrec »

rev_bird wrote: post #130
tzs wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). I don't see why it would have to change the state of the world on your page. Sites like HN in a scriptless client wo…

That's true, but it would still need to reload , rather than just sending the little request in the background as you keep scrolling along.

Why does it need to reload? Why not just have the votey button hyperlink to a dummy fragment URI like "#upvote_comment_1234", and something like a ping attribute [1] to send a request in the background, and a CSS rule like

  a.votey:visited { visibility:hidden; }
to hide the button once you've clicked it?

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/a#...

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#212

Post by jstimpfle »

carussell wrote: post #134
romaniv wrote: post #10

The reason the Web needs rescuing is because it's not a particularly well-designed system that has been patched over and over again for the last quarter century. And now it has been degraded to a delivery layer for JavaScript apps, a poor RPC protocol and an overly complex UI rendering toolkit. It should have had protocol-level technologies for preserving historic data, for search, for offline use, for authoring and…

> It should have had protocol-level technologies for preserving historic data, for search, for offline use, for authoring and publishing. [...] He was talking about the lack of protocol-level solutions for resilience of the Web. That's completely at odds with what Kay actually advocates for. His position is strongly aligned with the "mechanism, not policy" philosophy. That is, what he advocates for is less of what yo…

This I think is the most important question in search of a better web architecture. You could say it's the HTML vs LaTeX question. I don't mean the "hard to develop with macros and mountains of documentation and ungraspable errors and imcompatible packages" aspect to LaTeX. But rather the question of introspection. (Think also of bibtex and how to compile a document relying on it)

IMHO both approaches are crap and barely work. I don't actually think HTML supports web searches or semantics very well, and obviously it is painful to develop interactive applications in, as well. Same goes for LaTeX, even though it's coming from the other side.

I think we should have containers instead, with in-band data (somewhere linked in a for-the-web assembly language) and out-of-band metadata (in various formats, to support search engines or other enterprises).. Granted, site providers could play tricks by serving disagreeing data over these channels, but in a way that's possible even now with HTML.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#213

Post by hateduser2 »

rdiddly wrote: post #200
hateduser2 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t forget that we WANT to eliminate all the middlemen if we can, because middle men = bloat. It IS undeniably cheaper to interact directly than it is through a middle man. Don’t forget that! This is analogous to function pointers (or vtables or dynamic dispatch) in programming. It’s a really tight analog actually, almost literal. It’s slower (more expensive) to go through a cranks. You only do it for external reas…

There's no way there's any "right and wrong" or any "should" about this. Also, middlemen save me money all the time. Without my grocery & retail middlemen I'd be out there trying to find an apple orchard, a dairy, a tailor, all by myself, and hassling them to sell me quantities too small to make any money on. And that's just the first dumb example I thought of. There is value in aggregation and in making connections…

No right or wrong? Why not?

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#214

Post by nickbauman »

ashark wrote: post #61
nickbauman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spac…

My own personal vainglorious idea about the opportunity missed with the web is much more radical yet.

Semantic markup (remember, TBL originally designed HTML this way) failed already once for a reason. Markup language was a bad choice to begin with.

Instead of an SGML-derived markup, we should have had a set of primitive s-expressions that were supported in a standard allowing people to extend the behavior of browsers by implementing renderers based on any kind of s-expression. Wanna extend your browser? Just implement a renderer. Wanna distribute a renderer? Fine; the interface of renderers are part of the standard. You can distribute the renderer along with your page.

There would never have been JS to begin with: that gets handled right out of the box with s-expressions.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#215

Post by gregknicholson »

freeflight wrote: post #210
gregknicholson wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scuttlebutt is designed deliberately so that you don't see the whole network, only the bits you care about. Partly this is view-filtering, but also your user agent only requests and stores data if it might be relevant to you, i.e. friends of friends and replies to their messages. It's not really one network, but a group of potentially-overlapping networks.

> It's not really one network, but a group of potentially-overlapping networks. That might hold true for the technical implementation, but it doesn't hold true for the actual user experience. If you are from the US and looking to befriend somebody from France, then you don't have to join "Facebook.fr" to make that connection, it all works through Facebook.com. Not too long ago the same process looked pretty much like…

> > It's not really one network, but a group of potentially-overlapping networks.

> That might hold true for the technical implementation, but it doesn't hold true for the actual user experience.

Talking about Scuttlebutt here, it's actually the other way round. It's one protocol and any two people on it could connect, but in practice you won't see everyone, because you only have a social connection to certain people.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#216

Post by rdiddly »

hateduser2 wrote: post #213
rdiddly wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no way there's any "right and wrong" or any "should" about this. Also, middlemen save me money all the time. Without my grocery & retail middlemen I'd be out there trying to find an apple orchard, a dairy, a tailor, all by myself, and hassling them to sell me quantities too small to make any money on. And that's just the first dumb example I thought of. There is value in aggregation and in making connections…

No right or wrong? Why not?

Well it's not always inefficient to have a middleman (sometimes it's more efficient, like in my example above), so you can't say categorically either "with a middleman" or "without a middleman" is always better, i.e. "right."

Also, let's say we're looking at one of the times when the middleman is less efficient. Even if a customer wants to take on those inefficiencies on purpose, we can't judge that person as being "wrong" because they might have other reasons. It's more complicated, is all I was really trying to say.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#217

Post by anigbrowl »

brokenmachine wrote: post #187
anigbrowl wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's full of dark patterns and I don't like the news feed algorithm. What I mean is that it relies on a small number of font sizes, styles and colors and is heavily standardized. Like, you could render FB in a text-based BBS software without losing much.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#218

Post by mnzaki »

pfraze wrote: post #92
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?

1. Yes. Economic models are challenging, especially if ads don't work well anymore. (One thing I'd point out is that most ad revenue is sucked up by Google and Facebook, and they're the entities most ripe for disruption.) A core motivation for Beaker is to explore new political systems which control information, software, and Web communities. If you view the existing Web as a political system, you might say that clie…

Ad based revenue models are based on selling user data. I think in the p2p world these services would start charging money for the actual service instead. For example, one would pay for access to the world's best search engine that has indexed all there is to index in the public parts of the p2p world; as opposed to accessing it for "free" (in which case the user is actually what is being "sold", to the advertisers)

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#219

Post by mnzaki »

staltz wrote: post #9
pavel_lishin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it?

If you asked about the GitHub alternative, it's this: https://git.scuttlebot.io/%25RPKzL382v2fAia5HuDNHD5kkFdlP7bG...

The bit about being permissionless is kind of unclear.

"This seems to work well: the SSB network thrives off of being a group of kind, respectful folks who don't push to each other's master branch. :)"

Will this hold if the community expands to 10x or 100x the size? Surely conflicts of interest will arise, or just plain assholery/trolling.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#220

Post by rev_bird »

mrec wrote: post #211
rev_bird wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but it would still need to reload , rather than just sending the little request in the background as you keep scrolling along.

Why does it need to reload? Why not just have the votey button hyperlink to a dummy fragment URI like "#upvote_comment_1234", and something like a ping attribute [1] to send a request in the background, and a CSS rule like a.votey:visited { visibility:hidden; } to hide the button once you've clicked it? [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/a#...

I honestly didn't know about "PING," thank you. I have no idea how I missed such a fundamental feature, even if it is relatively new.
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