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A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

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Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#191

Post by [deleted] »

anigbrowl wrote: post #140
ashark wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML built-in elements—especially forms and tables—have atrophied badly, I guess because the Javascript crutch is right there. That's gotta be why things like the file picker are still awful, there's nothing like native UI date/time pickers that any sane native UI kit includes, tables don't have (re)sorting built in, and so on. So the work would be, 1) delete like 80-85% of Gecko or Servo or whatever, 2) add back abo…

For 4), what if you started with clean versions of Wikipedia and things that could be built from public datasets? That would be enough content to provide a meaningful comparison experience, and if you had good content creation tools the smart set could migrate over to HyperNet or whatever this brave new world is called, originate content there, and dump it to the web as a secondary option, recruiting people through t…

[deleted]

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#192

Post by Kadin »

romaniv wrote: post #138
niftich wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> protocol-level technologies for preserving historic data, for search, for offline use, for authoring and publishing It does [1][2][3]. It's not the most elegant, it's not without flaws, but it's there, and enough to build against. Proprietary services weren't bound by having to code against a standard, so they cranked out something quick (and mutually incompatible), skinned an attractive interface, offered it for f…

Saying that WebDAV lost to Facebook is a bit like saying HTTP POST and DELETE actions lost to Facebook. I was thinking of publishing and versioning of a different kind. For example, right now the only way to see how some website looked 10 years ago is to go to webarchive.org. 5% of all links on the web get broken every year. Isn't that something worth solving more systematically? In this respect content-addressable W…

It's interesting, but the average web publisher doesn't care, and might actually see being able to retrieve past versions of a page as a bug rather than a feature. So it's not clear why they would implement it, or store old versions of page data on their server, or make that data available to users even if it was stored.

The web exists because it's a bunch of 90% solutions glued together. It's New Jersey style. And that's what works and survives. And we should be incredibly suspicious of attempts to do ground-up rewrites, because such things almost never end well, and typically fail spectacularly.

There were lots of other proposed protocols besides HTTP that had more functionality and features, but were more complex to implement, such that they never caught on. E.g. all those OSI-stack protocols, the majority of which were basically DOA because they tried to do too much. (CMIS could in theory do some sort of versioned document storage and retrieval, although I'm sure OSI probably had its own protocol for that, which I've just never had to work with.)

WebDAV is the right approach, in that it builds on an established, working, well-tested and thoroughly implemented protocol and doesn't attempt some sort of crazy forklift upgrade. It's evolutionary, it's backwards-compatible, and it's probably extensible enough to do document versioning if someone really wanted that.

The problem is that there's a three-part chicken-and-egg-type problem between protocols and client software and content. The protocols need to exist before client software can implement them, client software has to implement them before content can be created that uses them, but client-software developers are often reluctant to implement protocols unless there's user demand, which only comes if there's content available. So we tend to only get protocol improvements when a whole bunch of people agree that "hey this would be really beneficial" and everyone leans in to get it done. AFAIK, there's not that consensus on something like versioned web to make it work yet.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#193

Post by [deleted] »

workthrowaway27 wrote: post #112
coding123 wrote: post #35

My wife gets increasingly pissed off when she searches for various materials she wants to purchase. A specific site keeps coming up for her that she absolutely hates and starts with an E. And there's nothing special about the links, and likely nothing important about the specific products other than the domain name that starts with E has billions of cross-links all over the web. It makes the random long-tail search t…

I've had a few experiences recently where I was searching for a webpage that I knew existed (because I'd been to it previously), but that was fairly niche and couldn't find it through Google even after trying several different sets of search terms and even fragments of text I remembered from the site.

[deleted]

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#194

Post by jacquesm »

unexistance wrote: post #173
jacquesm wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How did IPv4 and NAT play any role in the dominance of Facebook, Airbnb et cetera? This is an analogy masquerading as an argument. Because it made peer-to-peer no longer an option. Keep in mind that NAT is a poor man's firewall and once NAT'd systems were common peer-to-peer firewall transition became a real problem. https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ (2003, still as relevant today as when it wa…

so, that means going with IPv6 will bring back p2p networking? or do you see it's already too late? p/s: it's more than relevant, it's eerily accurate in predicting our current situation

> so, that means going with IPv6 will bring back p2p networking?

It just might, but Cisco, Juniper and other vendors are already implementing NAT on IPv6.

https://www.juniper.net/documentation/en_US/junos/topics/con...

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/ip/network-addres...

So what you'll see is IPv6 on the web with the LAN stuck on IPv4 because too many dumb devices don't do IPv6 and IPv4 is enough for local traffic.

That alleviates the need for more addresses on the net while keeping things roughly the same locally.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#196

Post by barsonme »

jodrellblank wrote: post #183
barsonme wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And developers vastly overestimate how much users really want bland websites like we had 10+ years ago. Sure, _we_ like it because it can be great for "power users" like _us_, but 99% of the population aren't power users. It reminds me of devs wondering why many people prefer bloated, slow GUIs to CLIs.

What are you saying? That non-power-users like and are good at deciphering different designs and interaction models and layouts for every site, but they can't deal with regular, plain, bland sites because those are scary and confusing? If anything, shouldn't that be the other way around? Power users wanting javascript experiments, and non-power-users wanting "if it ain't broke, stop messing around with it"?

No, not scary and confusing. Users (meaning non-power-users, generally) aren't always stupid. (In fact, given how well they can break our stuff, I'd say they're often smarter. But I digress...)

What I'm saying is while we might be comfortable looking at plain HTML with #000 text on a #FFF background, a user isn't going to enjoy it very much.

While we might use ctrl+f to hop around a page, a user will probably prefer a search bar with instant results that doesn't cause them to lose their place on the page.

Consider: my mother (not picking on her!) definitely notices when websites run slowly. She hates it. (I got my lack of patience from her :-) However, I'm confident she would trade "slightly slow" Facebook for "have to refresh the page after each action" Facebook.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#197

Post by adamcw »

jcrites wrote: post #176
austincheney wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web is heavily abused because many developers are not aware of its misguided history or even what the web is for. To be extremely clear the web is a document (markup) delivery/rendering application. The design goal of the web is to deliver documents that contain hyperlinks, where those hyperlinks address content extension. The web had no intention to be anything else. That said the web was hijacked, for lack of a…

> That said the web was hijacked, for lack of a better term, by early web browsers that intended to do things that the web was never intended to do. This is how we got JavaScript. I'm not sure that this is accurate. Tim Berners-Lee in his 1989 proposal for the World Wide Web [1] contemplates usage that is compatible (or at least not incompatible) with the JavaScript we have today. Excerpts from his proposal: > "Hyper…

This is not a response to your post in general, however it is "Berners-Lee" not "Burners-Lee" as your own sources will confirm.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#199

Post by jcrites »

adamcw wrote: post #197
jcrites wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That said the web was hijacked, for lack of a better term, by early web browsers that intended to do things that the web was never intended to do. This is how we got JavaScript. I'm not sure that this is accurate. Tim Berners-Lee in his 1989 proposal for the World Wide Web [1] contemplates usage that is compatible (or at least not incompatible) with the JavaScript we have today. Excerpts from his proposal: > "Hyper…

This is not a response to your post in general, however it is "Berners-Lee" not "Burners-Lee" as your own sources will confirm.

Thank you for the correction! My, how copy/paste can amplify a typo. Looks like I wrote it correctly only in the first instance.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#200

Post by rdiddly »

hateduser2 wrote: post #75
at-fates-hands wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was struck with the same thing. There is a reason we moved from newsgroups, to HTML and browsers to search engines. Each step became a better, more powerful tool to find content faster, more efficiently. These days so many of the tools we're using are so entrenched, even with some of the changes the author talks about, it would still be a monumental task for people to change. I mean, look at how bad FB is (on sever…

Don’t forget that we WANT to eliminate all the middlemen if we can, because middle men = bloat. It IS undeniably cheaper to interact directly than it is through a middle man. Don’t forget that! This is analogous to function pointers (or vtables or dynamic dispatch) in programming. It’s a really tight analog actually, almost literal. It’s slower (more expensive) to go through a cranks. You only do it for external reas…

There's no way there's any "right and wrong" or any "should" about this. Also, middlemen save me money all the time. Without my grocery & retail middlemen I'd be out there trying to find an apple orchard, a dairy, a tailor, all by myself, and hassling them to sell me quantities too small to make any money on. And that's just the first dumb example I thought of. There is value in aggregation and in making connections and in brokering. My middlemen make me richer by me paying them. That's why middlemen have been around since there's been commerce and why you can't engineer them away. Engineering them away is just doing it cheaper, beating them in the "middleman services" market and becoming the new middleman.

Facebook is a shit middleman that doesn't provide enough value to me, so they're not included in this.

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