[progman]

> To make web pipes work, just to even get started, you first have to solve authentication and data format/transfer standards.

Unix pipes have already solved the authentication problem. For instance, to stream a compressed harddisk copy safely between two hosts you can use the following statement:

  dd if=/dev/harddisk | gzip -9 | ssh user@xyz dd of=hdcopy.gz

Data format standards could be implemented right now using encrypted JSON or something like that. I would prefer Lisp s-expr by the way because they could be handled immediately in client/server lisp without any transformation.