I have had a similar idea about the future of the Web. Instead of navigating to websites that give you both data and presentation, how about sites that only give you data adhering to a defined convention. Then you can consume this data in a common ui and visualization platform that can merge data from various sources for you and answer questions and visualize info on the fly.
Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
41–50 of 263 posts
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#42Maybe I am just naive, but this all seems terrible. There are paragraphs of ideology everywhere for every aspect of this and nothing boils down to any understandable description of what engineering mechanisms I can use or how it solves the problems laid out. I really want to like this, but if I spend 15 minutes clicking the guides, the “build a solid app on your lunch break” link, and going all over the site, and I s…
> Maybe I am just naive, but this all seems terrible. I do have most respect for TBH and I would consider everything he thinks and writes about, but this does not sound too good to me either. The idea of linked data and semantic web has been around for almost two decades now and I have yet to see an application, technique or site that amazes me. On the contrary, most of the things in this space I have seen are bloate…
Maybe I'm missing something, but what does this have to do with the semantic web and why is everyone discussing that? Solid appears to be a decentralized identity platform.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#43Something like Solid probably needs a strongly inforced GDPR in place. Otherwise big actors can just access all the private pods and cache them in their own big data stores, and we are back to square one.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#44I have had a similar idea about the future of the Web. Instead of navigating to websites that give you both data and presentation, how about sites that only give you data adhering to a defined convention. Then you can consume this data in a common ui and visualization platform that can merge data from various sources for you and answer questions and visualize info on the fly.
What convention did you have in mind?
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#45I have had a similar idea about the future of the Web. Instead of navigating to websites that give you both data and presentation, how about sites that only give you data adhering to a defined convention. Then you can consume this data in a common ui and visualization platform that can merge data from various sources for you and answer questions and visualize info on the fly.
How could you build advertising into the data?
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#46applications :( Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest. The browser was an application for navigating hyperlinked information. Other applications include email clients, news readers, FTP clients, and IRC clients. You never had to download a megabyte of minified JavaScript just to re…
I do not. Geocities was a miserable collection of weird text that was almost completely unusable. FTP and IRC were great for the people who used them, but the community was small and still exists. For all the people lamenting the loss of the old internet, most of it is still there(irc,ftp,rss,ncurses email clients) -- you can still use it. You should probably ask yourself why you aren't.
I use it. And people keep working hard to replace the standards it is built on with unimplementable complex, insecure, poorly thought out crap.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#47Interesting idea, but I'm interested in the security implications. Now I have a Pod that has all my data in it, and I can host this pod anywhere I want. Great, but its now the single target for getting all data on me. I get that its great when its working and secure, and I can control it. But exploits happen, and now all my data is in one place.
I believe (from scanning the website quickly) that you can host your own pod, but you can also put your data with third party. Currently, it offers 2 free options from a commercial provider and a community provider. So in terms of security, you can choose to trust a 3rd party with hosting your data, keeping the apps etc up to day or you can host it yourself. I'm not sure what's better!
You are correct, but in this world I'm choosing a SINGLE third party to host ALL of my data. There's no distribution of risk, my data portfolio is undiversified, etc. They get hit, its all over.
In fairness, I guess I could have a bunch of pods like financial, social, pictures... or even a pod for each service: facebook_pod, bank1_pod, etc...and host them all with different third parties to try to minimize risk. But this gets incredibly cumbersome.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#48applications :( Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest. The browser was an application for navigating hyperlinked information. Other applications include email clients, news readers, FTP clients, and IRC clients. You never had to download a megabyte of minified JavaScript just to re…
Like a lot of people on HN, you appear to be conflating "download a megabyte of minified JavaScript just to read a 500-word article" with the concept of a web application, and implying that embedded applications are somehow a violation of the web's intended purpose. But hypertext is an application, and the web was always about hyperlinked text as well as embedded content. The and tags and now defunct concepts like VR…
> And webrings were fun, but modern social media offers a much bigger and more varied set of communities than the old web ever had
Most of it is undiscoverable, private, or short form. There are very few people putting up public multi page tutorials or project summaries in the way that they used to.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#49I like the spirit of this, but expecting average internet users to buy fancy hard-drives to store their data for apps that don't exist yet, simply to be free of the cloud, is way optimistic.
Also, having a Solid pod does not prevent the worst kinds of personal data abuse, such as identity tracking and brokering of tracked data. I don't care that Facebook stores my photos, but I do care that they've built a profile around the contents of them.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#50I have had a similar idea about the future of the Web. Instead of navigating to websites that give you both data and presentation, how about sites that only give you data adhering to a defined convention. Then you can consume this data in a common ui and visualization platform that can merge data from various sources for you and answer questions and visualize info on the fly.
Hm sounds reasonable. There can be a standardized markup language, maybe like a simplified SGML or something?