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

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101–110 of 327 posts

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

#102
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So glad I'm not the only one that has thought this. Every time an IPv6 discussion comes up I think to myself "why couldn't we just make IPv4 addresses longer". IPv6 tried to solve too many problems at once. We should've just focused on solving the address exhaustion issue. Instead, we have a very slow roll out of IPv6, and awful stuff like CG-NAT taking permanent hold.

This is a fairly common opinion, FWIW, though sadly not one widespread enough to be zeitgeist. There were some really great article explanations of this that I am not finding right now as I am not allocating enough time to it, but like here is some other commentary from Hacker News saying the same thing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17344911

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

#103
Several responses have mentioned removing anonymity from the equation to enforce good behavior.

I think we could accomplish something similar just by having a global SSO that works for any website, totally decoupled from your actual identity or location. The only information it reveals might be some sort of quantifiable social standing based on how you interact with others on forums.

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

#104
Security by design. Old internet protocols have been built with the mind of "we're all friends here, we won't make each other's life hard, right?" Well, that didn't exactly work out. That's why we have spam, DNS hijacking, DDoS, botnets, etc. If some prophet could have convinced people that built early internet that security is as much of a concern as, say, availability and fault-tolerance - I am sure we would have much less of these problems.

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

#106
post #64
post #3

Maybe make the DNS less US-centric (e.g. .com vs. .co.uk) and replace the PKI with DANE. We should have had DHCP prefix delegation for IPv4 so people wouldn't need NAT.

DHCP-PD for IPv4 would eat up all the addresses on day one. It only makes sense to automatically delegate prefixes when those prefixes are an abundant resource.

Yes, and then the motivation for IPv6 would have arrived sooner.

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

#107
post #57

I'm not sure how this can be done, but remove location association from IP. It annoys me to no end that google changes the language based on my location rather than my preference (sometimes with no obvious way to fix it). It would also stop the annoying country restrictions on websites.

Geolocation of IP blocks is basically all Google et al's fault. Once you go around wardriving to map all the infrastructure.... Well.. you get what they paid for.

GeoIP stuff existed long before Google Maps. It doesn't help that ISPs put tons of geographical info in reverse DNS. (Once upon a time my ISP's first-hop router had my street name in it!)

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

#108
Use whatever technology is required to make it decentralized so tyrants and other evil do'ers have no chance of stopping free speech. The future of the world depends on it vs. the future of a relatively few self-annointed, banal, vile, narcissistic, wealth stealers.

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

#109

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.

Encourage (coerce) writers of blog-like content to use a simplified format closer to RSS embedded articles or Gemini, making reader mode Just Work instead of relying on hacks to identify the portion of a deeply nested table/div/CSS soup that corresponds to an article. And replace CSS's hierarchical ruleset with a declarative format with a finite number of "axes of customization" (page background/foreground, font, size, spacing, header font and size, code bg/fg color, font, and size) which can be individually overriden or turned off altogether to create a "reader mode" experience.

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

#110
post #94
post #90

I've thought about this a lot. I'd throw away HTML/CSS and start over with a client centric rendering protocol that is based on presentation first and semantics second. The language would be run-time compiled to describe exactly what needs to be rendered on the page and would be streamable to prevent rendering locks. Typical page size would go from 1M typical to 64K-128K being typical. Images would stream in after in…

Could you explain how this is different from SVG?

That’s a cool side project! Build a modern site in svg. I guess you’d need JS to make it responsive
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