Ask HN: If web technologies were reinvented, what would be done differently?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9507298

by orbifold • 11 years ago

10 8 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

pavlov• 11 years ago

Any reinvention today would probably be authored either by a single large company or a committee consisting of representatives of large companies. The first option would produce a spec that addresses some specific pressing needs within the organization and provides vague architectural lip service for everything else. The second option would produce an ever-evolving compromise that's never actually finished.

The reason why we have the web today is that it was invented mostly by an unknown European scientist who just wanted to experiment with some hypertext stuff using the text APIs on his shiny new NeXT computer. No pressure, no money, no committees.

Before Berners-Lee, others tried for decades to make rich networked hypertext happen. It wasn't for a lack of rich sponsors; for example Autodesk poured money into the (in)famous Xanadu during the late '80s, but it was just too ambitious.

World Wide Web didn't have those ambitions. Reinventing it is a process that would only get initiated by a Xanadu-style overarching ambition, and it wouldn't work this time either.

mathgeek• 11 years ago

You've basically described how online services started before the web came into mass usage. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe

jdmoreira• 11 years ago

Web would be done over udp?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC

pdiddy• 11 years ago

No //

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8306631.stm

frou_dh• 11 years ago

That's some ken-style soul-searching

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/10893/what-did-ken-t...

tbl2point0• 11 years ago

- We'd put in streaming over TCP as a core DOM component.

- ditto crypto, streams/pipes, and micro payments

- CORS would be based on (integrated into and emerge from) a robust conceptual framework for resources access control, browsing context isolation, and authentication

- frames, webviews, video, plugin and object embedding would all be superclassed by a single interface to unify cross context messaging

- extensions and apps would be standards based (so cross browser)

whostolemyhat• 11 years ago

CSS might be almost sane.

VOYD• 11 years ago

They are being reinvented.

Ask HN: If web technologies were reinvented, what would be done differently?

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