Ask HN: If you had a chance to rebuild the internet, what would you change?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=164014

by c1sc0 • 18 years ago

13 56 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

True anonymity at the lowest level of the stack? No ads? Standard runtime environment to target instead of the 'mess' of ((DOM + CSS + JS) * browsers) we have now? Built-in state?

ionfish• 18 years ago

Do you mean the internet, or the web?

c1sc06• 18 years ago

I meant internet but most people seem to focus on web these days. For example I miss the old usenet days.

tomjen• 18 years ago

Strong Crypto from the ground up. Binary standards instead of HTML, so if anything is broken even the least it cannot be displayed.

JS goes out the window and is replaced by a scheme like language that can process HBML as if it was native list.

But those are minor points when you compare it to the first.

mark_ellul2• 18 years ago

reverse domain name resolution... eg. org.reprap

ericwaller2• 18 years ago

I'm sure you're not being facetious, but I can't figure it out. What's the advantage of this?

c1sc06• 18 years ago

I think he points to the fact that reverse domains look a lot more like tree structures which humans are inherently very capable of understanding. With the current system the human url decoding process goes something like this:

* "Find the third forward slash in this string ..." * "Read backwards & split on dot, there ya go: the tree path of the organization giving me this information ..." * "Now, skip forward to that slash again ..." * "From here on, split on the slash & that will be the tree path leading to the data this organization wants to give me"

We're probably all conditioned to it now, but it's not exactly beautiful ...

asenchi• 18 years ago

I agree with mark_ellul, reverse domain name resolution.

com.google.maps etc...

I'd also like to see more crypto.

bsaunder• 18 years ago

I think IP and TCP/UDP work pretty well... seems like they messed up a bit on the size of the address space. That's what I would call the "internet" (along with some general services, e.g. DNS). Sounds like you are talking more about HTTP/HTML.

True anonymity seems a bit hard (when you make a request, the reply has to go somewhere).

With regards to the "standard runtime environment"... I'd add true bidirectional communication, and a built in local storage mechanism (though Google gearbox and the flash hack seem to have mitigated this).

UPDATE: (fixed some cases).

beng• 18 years ago

an extra level of indirection in all protocols for redundancy. the MX records in dns for mail are a good example. it's currently rather tricky to get good redundancy (fault tolerance) in software.

brentr• 18 years ago

(1) No ads

(2) If your markup is not syntactically correct, the browser won't display your site.

mattjung• 18 years ago

Usage, technology, resources, bottlenecks - all have been changing all along the time and further will change. The ideal solution of today will not be a good solution for tomorrow. What you call mess, is the result of an evolutionary development that will be replaced by something appropriate when the time has come. Although your question is surely mind-challenging, it assumes that a bright from-scratch design would beat the outcome of the competition of different technologies. I don't believe in that.

c1sc06• 18 years ago

edited the original to add quotes around 'mess' ... guess I'm just cranky from the javascript nightmares I've been having lately.

I agree with letting evolution & competition do its work, so let me rephrase: "Given the opportunity to re-arrange the basic conditions out of which the internet evolved (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, HTML, ...) what would you change." The choices encoded in these standards are as much ethical/philosophical as technical. Do we value security? Openness? Speed?

I agree with IPv6 & getting rid of NAT on a technical level. What else?

LogicHoleFlaw3• 18 years ago

Get the technical level right and the rest will come.

Mechanism, not policy.

dennykmiu• 18 years ago

That's exactly what Vint Cerf said, the men who invented the Internet.

http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2008/04/vint_cerf.html

TunaFish• 18 years ago

Kill, maim and murder the insanity of "be liberal on what you accept and conservative on what you emit.". Instead, have a standard dtd, and if any site deviates even a bit from it, render flashing red text on the site that says "The developer of this site is an incompetent moron. You really shouldn't trust him or do business with him." Make implementing this feature required part of every web browser.

newtoncorp• 18 years ago

How can you have innovation if you get a standard runtime environment ?

If I would do something I wouldn't display the pages if the markup isn't correct.

izak30• 18 years ago

I would change almost nothing on the web side of things. Having no ads would seriously change the business of the internet today. Who would foot the bill for everything that we use now? End-users?

HTML is a leveler for a lot of people, and it helps designers and developers actually work together, instead of being limited (VS.NET), it also allows for quick (albeit not always concurrent) innovation, and competition. TCP/IP Is so well generalized that you can do anything with it. Redundancy is not well executed, but it doesn't have to be if the pipes get bigger.

Doing things like calling new developers "incompetent morons" stifles innovation. I certainly would have quit a long time ago, if when I started there was no room for mistakes.

HTML and Javascript were the 'gateway language' for me for all sorts of things.

indiejade2• 18 years ago

"HTML is a leveler for a lot of people, and it helps designers and developers actually work together, instead of being limited . . . "

Precisely. It used to annoy me when people would ask me what language I "program in". I've since learned to just explain that I write code that can be rendered, downloaded, executed, or otherwise modified (locally and remotely) through a browser or IDE and without (necessarily) having to be connected to the Internet.

But anyway. I think if I had the chance to rebuild the Internet, I'd build in an all-inclusive productivity-meter. This productivity meter would gauge, record and reward people as both content producers and consumers/participants of media. This question reminds me. . . there's actually an interesting piece in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fUHtc37MC8

about that concept of ripping down the barriers between producers and consumers of media.

c1sc06• 18 years ago

Such a productivity meter (mind if I rephrase it as 'contribution-meter'?) assumes strong identity, the lack of which I think has greatly contributed to the rise of the internet.

At the same time strong identity is at the core of the whole OpenID / OpenSocial /Social Graph debate. Are we trying to build something that should have been included in the first place?

axod2• 18 years ago

Why do some people want anonymity? Bad idea IMHO

Privacy? Yes of course. Anonymity? Definitely not - just means people can do what they want without any come back.

c1sc06• 18 years ago

Tell that to people in some more oppressive regimes, or in places where the alignment between what is legal and what makes sense is out of sync. True anonymity is hard to implement, but it certainly has its virtues.

phaedrus• 18 years ago

Interestingly though my college professors were talking about Internet2 and they seem to think the problem is too much anonymity; they want the US government to be able to track down any communications, you know, to catch "teh terrists"

Edit: Not saying that's what internet2 is for, just what my CS professors were speculating it needs to do.

kashif2• 18 years ago

No concept of bandwidth

kashif2• 18 years ago

Why did I get down modded!

Hexstream• 18 years ago

Because it doesn't make any sense? How can you possibly have internet "without the concept of bandwidth"? Do you mean you want infinite bandwidth at no cost? That's not a very mind-expanding proposition.

ropiku2• 18 years ago

IPv6 instead of IPv4. No NAT and enough IP's for all your network devices (pda, laptop, printer, etc.)

wanorris• 18 years ago

Well, I think the IPv6 switch is finally going to have to happen anyway within a few years. So hopefully, you'll get your wish.

ropiku2• 18 years ago

I'm hoping too but currently no ISP I know has IPv6 support for customers (they may have on their backbone).

delano• 18 years ago

And all your grains of sand.

brlewis• 18 years ago

S-expression syntax for markup, Scheme in place of JavaScript, and I'd like HTTP to have a header that sets modification times or other cache information for resources other than the one being sent in the current response.

maw• 18 years ago

1) A better mail transfer protocol. I don't view spam as inherently inevitable, but with SMTP it seems to be.

2) Internationalization from the ground up. Domain names are still effectively limited to 7 bit ASCII (even though "dots" are represented by '\0's in the DNS, which doesn't rule out UTF-8, in practice it doesn't work well). I also still get mail I can't read, even when it's in a language I can, because of encoding issues (increasingly rare, but it still happens).

diego• 18 years ago

Spam makes its way into anything (search engines, social networks, blogs, twitter, you name it). In essence it's just low-quality advertising at an extremely low cost. Whatever makes it possible for people to communicate cheaply also enables spam.

A "better" mail protocol would still have to be free, or very cheap. Snail mail is not free and you still get junk mail.

cturner2• 18 years ago

How does spam make its way into twitter?

attack• 18 years ago

Kill NAT!

aneesh• 18 years ago

Build in semantics from the ground up.

c1sc06• 18 years ago

if & when we figure out the semantics in the first place, but I agree: some mechanism for adding metadata at a low level would be great. (Ya, I know, microformats)

volida• 18 years ago

if you think something is wrong with the Internet, then build a startup around the problem.

jimbokun2• 18 years ago

Heh, what do you suppose the intent of the question was? He's fishing for startup ideas!

b3n• 18 years ago

I would remove extensions from domains, e.g., "news.ycombinator.com" would just be "news.ycombinator", and "google.com" would just be "google".

yariv• 18 years ago

Persistent connections to the server from Javascript.

LogicHoleFlaw3• 18 years ago

Man, a lot of people here are violently opposed to allowing invalid markup. I think that the lenience web browsers afford site creators is a boon. It is one of the key factors in the democratization of the web. Low barriers to entry have been a critical factor in the success and organic growth of the web. Requiring perfect syntax and markup as a method of keeping out the plebes is the kind of self-righteous cult-of-the-machine which drives out the very people who provide content and value to the web.

Now, if you do have correct markup and the browser developers still screw it up... off with their heads! Shame on you, you should know better.

ken• 18 years ago

Shouldn't we "democratize" other programs, then? How about making GCC or CLISP accept incorrect syntax? That would allow more people to provide content and value.

We might end up with a lot of programs that only compiled correctly on one platform (gcc quirks mode!), but it would lower the barrier-to-entry for new programmers.

sah• 18 years ago

Standard runtime environment to target instead of the 'mess' of ((DOM + CSS + JS) x browsers) we have now?

This is what I've always wanted. When the web first took off, I was constantly whining about how remote application UIs were going to get shoehorned into the model of document layout, of all things. It seemed short-sighted and dumb.

In retrospect, I'm not sure the web could have become what it is with something more like java applets, flash, or AJAX in the forefront. Document layout isn't what we're really doing, but it's a simple starting point that everyone can get behind.

vegai• 18 years ago

Luckily, people smarter than any of us thought about this a lot already. Unfortunately, with that sort of brain power comes craziness.

Check out the articles and books by Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart and Vannevar Bush.

Kaizyn• 18 years ago

If we were to rebuild the Internet today, we should remake it using a fully decentralized model instead of a distributed one. By turning it into a mesh network, it would make it a lot more robust.

juansequeda• 18 years ago

Would of created the Semantic Web initially.. would of solved data integration problems on the way too!

bayareaguy• 18 years ago

DNS.

I don't know exactly what I'd change, but I'd look for a way to make it impractical for the whole domain/certificate "industry" to get where it is today. ICANN, Verisign, Network Solutions and the like are all just scams.

Ask HN: If you had a chance to rebuild the internet, what would you change?

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