Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 327 posts

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

#231

Post by jeroenhd »

zarzavat wrote: post #25
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.

In my opinion, HTML5 and Flash have always served different audiences.

Flash got axed because the way it was implemented into clients was wasteful, insecure and a bad user experience in general. Same with Java; you can't make the same tools that Java applets once provided through the browser because of the browser's security model, so I'd say the two never competed.

Making a quick interactive animation that works across all kinds of resolutions and sizes was trivial in Flash, but in HTML5 this is a challenge. HTML5 and friends fixed the problems that made web developers grasp at Flash for, like file uploads, animations and predictable interaction with the mouse and keyboard. These features were often already possible in browsers, but Flash was the only tool that made them appear the same in every browser available. They didn't replace the flash scene for games, interactive simulations and other online experiences. The Flash game scene pretty much died when Flash started getting blocked by Chrome, with only a small subset of the community fragmenting and finding their way to frameworks like Unity Web and its then plentiful competitors with high learning curves because they were designed for the "real deal" game developers rather than self-taught animators that turned game dev.

I think JS is a necessity for the web to exist today, but we need an alternative for what once was Flash, Java, Shockwave and more. Too many features have been shoved into HTML and Javascript that have no business there, left to be abused by trackers and hackers alike.

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

#232

Post by Macha »

donatj wrote: post #23
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.

Once you make the addresses longer you need to replace all the same hardware and come up with 80% of the same problems of the IPv6 migration

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

#233

Post by throwawaylinux »

jeroenhd wrote: post #226
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…

God, IPv6 got the shaft hard. People complain that it's too complex and that it solves too many problems at once, but that's because they've become used to the ancient stack of random protocols that make IPv4 work. There are also a lot of people who have it out for IPv6 because their ISPs aren't handing out static addresses, somehow equating IPv6's problems with the shittiness of their ISP. It's not widely implemente…

> DHCP is a stupid protocol for assigning addresses that shouldn't have been necessary,

Why?

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

#234

Post by EvanAnderson »

jiggunjer wrote: post #221
jjav wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a student (or visitor), when you joined the network (wired or Wi-Fi) you weren’t allocated some internal IP behind a router but a PUBLIC As an interesting detail, which seems alien today, is that this was also true at my various employers throughout the 90s. My desktops at work all had public IP addresses and were directly on the Internet, no firewall or anything. I ran mail and web servers, fully internet acces…

so the modem was just connected to a switch?

The router on the OP's network was probably just being a router. No fancy NAT junk, and probably no ACLs / fireballing. It was pretty common to have something like a T1 circuit, a CSU/DSU that connected to the T1 and presented a serial connection, and a PPP or SDLC connection to your upstream ISP over that serial connection. The router's Ethernet interface is connected to your switch (or hub) and all the hosts have IP addresses in the subnet your ISP assigned. Fancier shops might have a proxy server or dedicated firewall box between the LAN and the router.

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

#235

Post by amelius »

KeepFlying wrote: post #215
amelius wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are trademarks registered? Why not use the same procedure for domain names?

Except trademarks are only unique within a specific industry in a specific country. In the case of Delta Airlines and Delta Faucets for example who would get to have "delta.com"? Then what about all the other countries with independent trademark rules and authorities? I like the idea, but it would end up being way more complex than it seems.

We could have delta.airlines and delta.faucets; and apple.computer and apple.groceries for example.

You can append the country domain name, e.g. .us or .de, if you want.

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

#236

Post by CuriousSkeptic »

dredmorbius wrote: post #33

DNS itself is certainly problematic. Incorporating a time dimension to domains, such that it's explicitly recognised, and greatly restricting transfers, would be one element. Ownership of domains should sit with the registrant, not the registrar. Characterspace should be explicitly restricted to 7-byte ASCII to avoid homoglyph attacks. It's not a shrine to cultural affirmation, it's a globally-utilised indexing syste…

On the domain name issues. Perhaps identity shouldn’t hinge on a mnemonic globally unique identifier at all. Instead something like local mnemonics linking to authenticated reputation based identities. I guess a web of trust kind of approach.

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

#238

Post by slightwinder »

I would switch DNS to a pure tree and add discoverability as also locality-aspects. By which I mean, put the TLD at the front, not xyz.com, but /com/xyz. And in the first levels you would automatically get a listing of all valid entries back. Similar I would add local entries, like postal codes and states. So people could do something like /usa/texas/ and get a list of all cities, or /usa/postalcode/90210/ and you would get a list of all companies and websites in the area.

I would also change HTTP to be modular, allowing to add new sub-protocols which would be automatically compatible with old clients. So we could do something like http/imap or http/ftp on top of http, and unprepared clients would still be somewhat compatible to this, but adapted clients could fully utilize those protocols. Thing is, http is not the most perfect protocol, but it's a very pragmatic and straight forward one, which IMHO is the main reason why it succeeded, where other protocols failed. SO instead of adding another batch of protocols that barely anyone will use and support, it would be better to high jack the existing solution, and slowly extend it.

Also, I would make it Illegal to have proprietary protocols, data formats and obfuscated apps. Give the people the power they deserve. You can't open the cloud and business, but at least networks should be balanced for all involved sides.

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

#239

Post by magicalhippo »

jeroenhd wrote: post #226
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…

God, IPv6 got the shaft hard. People complain that it's too complex and that it solves too many problems at once, but that's because they've become used to the ancient stack of random protocols that make IPv4 work. There are also a lot of people who have it out for IPv6 because their ISPs aren't handing out static addresses, somehow equating IPv6's problems with the shittiness of their ISP. It's not widely implemente…

> There are also a lot of people who have it out for IPv6 because their ISPs aren't handing out static addresses, somehow equating IPv6's problems with the shittiness of their ISP.

My ISP isn't handing out static IPv4 nor IPv6. However IPv4 works just fine while for IPv6 it's a giant pain.

The world isn't static though, so maybe IPv6 is the problem here? Or do you seriously suggest I should manually change all my device IPs just because I switched ISP? Why should I care about which prefix I get?

> In my opinion, DHCP is a stupid protocol for assigning addresses that shouldn't have been necessary, but we've managed to staple some kind of management ideals on top of it (as if someone couldn't just set a static IP on their device)

Even for my puny LAN I've managed to create address conflicts when doing static IP assignments. If I need to keep track of my devices in an Excel sheet, why not just use the DHCP server? I need something ala the DHCP server to hand out DNS and NTP servers etc anyway.

> when people encounter IPv6 in the real world they're scared and confused by concepts

When I went to school and learned about IPv4, IPv6 was just getting started. I'm not scared. Slightly confused yes, it's a non-trivial change from IPv4 after all. But the main issue is missing support, from hardware to software to ISP's.

Post reply on HN