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HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

ipfs.io

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Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#91

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Jasper_ wrote: post #71
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if we said that about web sites at the begining. The Web needs to decide what it want to be? A plaftorm to sell stuff? Contact people? Write? Listen to music?

But the web wasn't about listening to music at the start! It started with organizing documents on a network, at CERN. And it took over existing document platforms by adding a simple point-and-click browser user interface to them, inspired by HyperCard (where do you think the "hyperlink" got its name?) The modern, more economic web, wouldn't come until Netscape added form fields and cookies, at the behest of some of t…

> inspired by HyperCard (where do you think the "hyperlink" got its name?)

I'm as much of a HyperCard fan as (almost) anyone else, but that is almost certainly not where the term "hyperlink" comes from. Ted Nelson used the word "link" back in the mid 1960s, in the context of another coinage of his, "hypertext". The historical record is already a little unclear about whether or not he was using hyperlink that early, but by the time HyperCard came to be, the term was already differentiated from a "simple link", with some level of implication caused by the "hyper" prefix that it was most likely on another computer/server. The most HyperCard could offer was a link into a different stack.

The "hyper" prefix predated Hypercard, and it's meaning in the context of information processing/retrieval/presentation meant more than the majority of links that HyperCard offered (even though they were also great). Yes, I know that the wikipedia page on the word "hyperlink" claims that HyperCard "may have been the first use", but the cited reference for that claim offers no evidence for it whatsoever.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#92

Post by bshipp »

corndoge wrote: post #75
Jasper_ wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the web wasn't about listening to music at the start! It started with organizing documents on a network, at CERN. And it took over existing document platforms by adding a simple point-and-click browser user interface to them, inspired by HyperCard (where do you think the "hyperlink" got its name?) The modern, more economic web, wouldn't come until Netscape added form fields and cookies, at the behest of some of t…

I don't see how the first two paragraphs support your conclusion here

The first two paragraphs reiterate that the early web was very much a reflection of the hypertext transfer protocol and hypertext markup language in that it literally just handled text pages with links in them. and it did it pretty well. It wasn't designed to handle streaming video or client-side processing/page rendering via Javascript or any of the innumerable other elements added on to it later. It was designed to do one thing well.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#93

Post by echelon »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #62
adfrhgeaq5hy wrote: post #58

IPFS needs to decide what it wants to be. Is it about being a decentralized caching layer? Is it about permanently storing content? Is it about replacing my web server? Is it about replacing DNS? Is it about censorship resistance? Right now it does none of those things well. The client chews through CPU and memory when seemingly doing nothing. If I try to download content, it is far slower than BitTorrent unless I go…

Imagine if we said that about web sites at the begining. The Web needs to decide what it want to be? A plaftorm to sell stuff? Contact people? Write? Listen to music?

> Imagine if we said that about web sites at the begining.

The web was fast (for documents on 56k) and extremely useful almost immediately. It was obvious to everyone watching that the technology was going to change everything.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#95

Post by z3c0 »

wly_cdgr wrote: post #82
noman-land wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love IPFS. It's one of my favorite recent technologies, but I think people have unrealistic expectations about such a young idea. Decentralized tech doesn't work well until the network effects build up. IPFS has the interesting quality that the more popular a piece of content is, the easier it is to get ahold of. If millions of people were using IPFS, the most popular content would be being served by many thousands…

> IPFS has the interesting quality that the more popular a piece of content is, the easier it is to get ahold of. That sounds like the worst of the current internet, but even worse

Or, you know, BitTorrent, which works perfectly fine.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#96

Post by adfrhgeaq5hy »

noman-land wrote: post #50
jeroenhd wrote: post #3

I like IPFS, I really do, but whenever I try to use it, it's either too slow to become usable or sometimes it plain doesn't work. I pinned a whole bunch of files on IPFS a while back to experiment with it and the system seems to work, but every time I try to fetch those resources from a location that hasn't cached the content yet, it takes several seconds to show me the HTML/JSON/PNG files. HTTP may be inefficient fo…

I love IPFS. It's one of my favorite recent technologies, but I think people have unrealistic expectations about such a young idea. Decentralized tech doesn't work well until the network effects build up. IPFS has the interesting quality that the more popular a piece of content is, the easier it is to get ahold of. If millions of people were using IPFS, the most popular content would be being served by many thousands…

It isn't that early. They have a stupendous amount of money and have been around since 2014. By now they should have something to show for their work.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#97

Post by vangelis »

z3c0 wrote: post #95
wly_cdgr wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IPFS has the interesting quality that the more popular a piece of content is, the easier it is to get ahold of. That sounds like the worst of the current internet, but even worse

Or, you know, BitTorrent, which works perfectly fine.

There's a reason private trackers have to incentivize keeping the long tail alive.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#98

Post by noman-land »

vangelis wrote: post #97
z3c0 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, you know, BitTorrent, which works perfectly fine.

There's a reason private trackers have to incentivize keeping the long tail alive.

Look at any public tracker and you'll find torrents that are very old, swarming strong.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#99

Post by nivertech »

enz wrote: post #2

> “With HTTP, you search for locations. With IPFS, you search for content.” Well, that's the difference between an URL and an URI, right? HTTP seems URL-oriented while IPFS seems URI-oriented.

  URL - Uniform Resource Locator
  URN - Uniform Resource Name
  URI - Uniform Resource Identifier
URI is too generic, "I" in URI means "Identifier", which can be either a semantic/natural or a technical/surrogate key. And in many case it's the same Locator is in URL.

IPFS is a CAS (Content Addressable Storage), so an "Identifier" there is a semantic key (i.e. hash of the content).

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#100

Post by zinodaur »

jeroenhd wrote: post #67
zinodaur wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much were you paying for your IPFS pin? E.g., if you are getting something via HTTP, there's a server somewhere with that content just waiting for you to request it, typically stored on an SSD, etc. V.s. IPFS pins which are typically packed on to massive disks shared with lots of other people IDK a whole lot about IPFS though. Maybe it was the metadata resolving / DHT lookup or whatever that was super slow. BitTo…

My IPFS pin was just one or two of my servers running an IPFS daemon. Since that daemon was running on Oracle's free VPS's, the answer is probably "a small fraction of what it costs for Oracle to have you in their database". Paying for pinning sounds like something that could work but it would introduce some of the same problems that the real web suffers from back into IPFS. The idea "a web for the people, by the peo…

if it was slow running on a dedicated vps, not super encouraging.

The thing I liked about the idea of IPFS pinning is that you are paying per byte stored, v.s. per byte accessed, as long as the p2p sharing works. I.e. hosting-via-pinning a website only you read would cost the same as hosting a website that the whole internet reads.

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