Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

#21

Post by hollerith » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 2:08 AM UTC

I would have tried to arrange it so that whatever method comes to the mind of the average person for publishing a document on the internet publishes a static document.

The situation today of course is that the method that usually comes to mind when a person decides that something he or she has written should be put on the internet publishes what is essentially an executable for a very complex execution environment, and (except for a single non-profit with steadily decreasing mind share) the only parties maintaining versions of this execution environment with non-negligible mind share are corporations with stock-market capitalizations in the trillions.

Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

#22

Post by westoque » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 2:10 AM UTC

Personally. I'm targeting the browser. Web applications have evolved so much that we now need access to more hardware to further improve our web apps. Imagine having direct access to GPU and other things, we can then be running full apps in the browser, think Photoshop/Final Cut Pro, even games that required full 3D rendering. To an extent, this also requires us to remove the shackles from only having JavaScript as the only allowed scripting language in the browser.

Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

#23

Post by donatj » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 2:14 AM UTC

nickysielicki wrote: post #9

IPv6 dates back to 1997 and it really should have been adopted more urgently. IPv4 isn’t a huge issue but it sucks that so much of the internet is dependent on cloud providers because it’s the simplest way to get a public IP address. The decentralized web didn’t happen, in part, because of this. Facebook was famously started and hosted in a dorm room. But this was only possible due to the history of Harvard within th…

I mean why not dream bigger. IPv6 is a mess, the absolute definition of second system syndrome.

If I could fix anything, it would be IPv6 itself. The biggest thing preventing it's widespread adoption is it's complicated nature.

An IPv4 with an extra octet or two would have seen complete adoption years ago.

Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

#24

Post by joshu » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 2:15 AM UTC

identity as a core layer. having been in the wrong end of a large service that was relentlessly attacked and spam. i understand the value of anonymity but it probably should not have been the default.

Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

#25

Post by zarzavat » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 2:18 AM UTC

ohCh6zos wrote: post #15

Get rid of most of JS to prevent 'appification' and keep the focus document centered. Edit: I think this would result in protocols over walled gardens. The problem is JS makes HTTP/HTML everything to everyone.

Be careful what you wish for. JS and HTML5 is why we don't have Adobe Flash anymore. There was a whole period in the noughties when web interactivity sucked and so external plugins like Flash, Silverlight and Java applets took up the slack.

The alternative to JS is not "no scripting", it's websites that only function with proprietary plugins installed.

Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

#26

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 2:24 AM UTC

Make the actual protocol for HTTP always be TLS, always port 443. Insecure HTTP is just self-signed.

Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

#27

Post by doctor_eval » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 2:24 AM UTC

I’d make sessions independent of IP addresses. So that as I move between wifi, fixed and mobile networks, my sessions would remain active even as my interface addresses change.

Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

#28

Post by dredmorbius » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 2:27 AM UTC

ohCh6zos wrote: post #15

Get rid of most of JS to prevent 'appification' and keep the focus document centered. Edit: I think this would result in protocols over walled gardens. The problem is JS makes HTTP/HTML everything to everyone.

That seems to be Web-specific, not general to the Internert as a whole.

Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

#29

Post by AussieWog93 » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 2:27 AM UTC

Performance, specifically making requests as parallel as possible.

Does it really need to take 5 seconds to load a website whose contents total 500kB on a 100Mbit/s connection with a 6-core CPU?

Re: Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

#30

Post by anonu » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 2:29 AM UTC

Just a thought experiment: but could we have designed better protocols to not need companies like Google (search) and Facebook (social network)...

For example: a public index service (akin to DNS) where all pages upload all hyperlinks they were using. The end result is a massive graph that you can do PageRank on. You'd have to add some protections to avoid it getting gamed...

Email was the first decentralized social network and with it came bulletin board services and groups. Could these concepts have been developed a bit further or been a bit more user friendly while remaining decentralized?