

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


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pavlov
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
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/AOL)

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

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe)

------
pdiddy
No //

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8306631.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8306631.stm)

~~~
frou_dh
That's some ken-style soul-searching

[http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/10893/what-did-
ken-t...](http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/10893/what-did-ken-thompson-
mean-when-he-said-id-spell-create-with-an-e)

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tbl2point0
\- 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)

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jdmoreira
Web would be done over udp?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC)

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VOYD
They are being reinvented.

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whostolemyhat
CSS might be almost sane.

