[veddox]

I am a great fan of the Unix philosophy and can sympathize with the author and his points, but I really don't know how realistic the whole "make the Internet a new Unix"-scheme is.

As others have pointed out, there are great practical difficulties in integrating different web services. Unix has pipes built into the core of the OS - anything analogous would have to be "bolted on" to the Internet, and thus probably turn out to be not as powerful or simple to use. And how about the UI and user friendliness? On Unix, every program has more or less the same UI - a couple of lines of text on a black background. The Internet? Everybody has a different fancy graphic layout. If you can do everything within the same "walled garden", that reduces confusion on this count.

For these (and other reasons, such as the aforementioned capitalism), I do not think that the mainstream Internet is ever going to behave the way the author envisions. What I could imagine, however, is a sort of parallel Internet that displays this property to some extent - a range of services explicitly targeting technical users (who are more likely to value the "do one thing well" approach and less likely to care if the GUI isn't quite as snazzy). These services would never grow big, but they could build up a loyal following. Kind of like HN, really...

[dkarapetyan]

The internet already has a very simple interoperable protocol, HTTP. There is nothing to bolt on really since the pipe is just a channel for text and sockets on port 80 can just as easily act as those channel.

[dragonwriter]

The thing about the pipe isn't, as I see it, a protocol issue, but a UI issue: that is, a simple method of telling your shell (browser, for an OS) to compose tools rather than requiring you to interact with each of them interactively.

To be fair, I don't think we have a good way to do that with graphical OS shells even on Unix, just CLIs, so its probably not surprising that we don't have it in web browsers.

[copperx]

But HTTP is one-directional (disregarding Websockets which is a client thing).

[dragonwriter]

HTTP is asymmetric (the two sides are not interchangeable), but the information flow is bidirectional. I don't see how that it prevents something like Unix piping from being implemented between web services using it. Seems to be mostly a UX design issue.