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Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

solid.inrupt.com

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Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#51

Post by kstenerud »

I don't get it...

What is a pod and what's so great about it? Something about controlling your data... Storage space... Secure USB stick for the web? So I can mount it and add/remove files from it? Like dropbox or something?

I clicked "Get a solid pod" and it asked me to register, which I did, after which it dumped me into some kind of "home page". Clicking "get started with solid and data browser" brings up instructions for creating notes and calendars and text files in a very primitive interface. There's no link to get back to the "home page" and the back button doesn't work because it's force-forwarding from an interim url.

So is it like a primitive owncloud? What's it supposed to do that's valuable? What am I even looking at?

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#52

Post by SkyMarshal »

chongli wrote: post #8

applications :( 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…

Even in the very early days of the web, technologists were talking about the browser as a potential platform for applications. This was pretty much always the vision for browsers, it just took a while to figure out exactly how to do it.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#53

Post by jackfraser »

bass3l wrote: post #38
takeurr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tim Berners-Lee is as finished as Woz. We should stop giving him air time because he's just embarrasing himself. Reminds me of this recent story with Michael Atiyah.

Ain't we all fed up with the current status of the web? At least there's someone sticking to his vision, and maybe (maybe) his work could inspire others to come up with a real solution.

Were it not so esoteric, I'd be all in favour of something like Urbit that builds a whole new layer on top of the existing foundation with a real push for _personal computing_, not just application services.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#54

Post by jackfraser »

chongli wrote: post #8

applications :( 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 miss aspects of it, for sure. What I think you're getting at here is that we used to have a cleaner separation of protocol, data format, and client application - enabling us to have multiple ways of combining the above. Tons of email clients, tons of formats, but ultimately just one email namespace - the DNS. That's much more idiomatically Internet than webapps are, which rely on my browser very carefully executing instructions provided by a site with very little control on my part as to what they do with the chunk of screen real-estate they've been afforded.

There's also something about the snappiness of desktop apps on hardware 1/100th the speed of what we're running now that I dearly miss.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#55

Post by jackfraser »

nerdponx wrote: post #50
darepublic wrote: post #41

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.

Hm sounds reasonable. There can be a standardized markup language, maybe like a simplified SGML or something?

Hahaha, right? You're just going to rediscover the same path that lead us here to start with.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#56

Post by thefounder »

This sounds good but in practice is hard to implement. Even for email clients we started to display generic/html pages to handle the authentication because we couldn't agree on a standard api/protocol. I doubt we will move into semantic web anytime soon.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#57

Post by WiseWeasel »

The (initial) killer app for this has to be warez. Messaging and publishing seem like compelling uses, but to get people to bust out the credit card to some pod host each month before there's a sufficient network built up to make those attractive, there's going to have to be a lot of pirated content available somehow.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#58

Post by michaelmrose »

jackfraser wrote: post #53
bass3l wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ain't we all fed up with the current status of the web? At least there's someone sticking to his vision, and maybe (maybe) his work could inspire others to come up with a real solution.

Were it not so esoteric, I'd be all in favour of something like Urbit that builds a whole new layer on top of the existing foundation with a real push for _personal computing_, not just application services.

Since a real computer costs jack all anymore and gigabit will be increasingly common routers should have an app store. P2P via other peoples routers could handle load beyond what the individual router could handle.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#59

Post by osrec »

On a basic level, it seems to be the same old web, but rather than Facebook or some other company storing your data, you store it on a pod, and give the app access to it. Which is fine, until one day you share a bit too much, or you 'create' personal data in connected apps, which the app obviously has access to anyway. Not sure what this solves. Also, I can imagine lots of "pods as a service" popping up, which is kinda scary, because now it's not just your social life that's stored in one place, but ALL your personal data, including medical records and whatnot. Perhaps I've missed something, but they need to elaborate more on the underlying concepts driving this idea, as, like others, I'm not convinced of its validity.
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