[0xbadcafebee]

Do we really want to continue having "a web" ? Remember, "the web" was never designed for what we do with it today. If you're thinking of overhauling "the web", I think it makes sense to start from first principles, and build something that meets today's needs with the least amount of unnecessary bullshit.

You have to start from the user's experience, because nothing else matters about a computer other than what you use it for. What do people actually want to do with a computer? It's going to be very hard to throw away all your assumptions. Don't assume that they want or need what we have today. They may not need the internet, or even a visual interface.

After you understand the problems the user wants solved, then you can go about building products that address those needs. You may think technology is clay that we can shape to fit a user's needs; but what if what they were best served by was metal, or glass, or paper? We must look through all technological mediums and components to provide the best solution.

Many of the developers today literally have never lived their lives in a world without certain inherent technological expectations and limitations. We need to open their minds and show them that they really can make literally anything with technology, and that it doesn't have to resemble anything that we have today. If you think "oh but we can't make change too radical, it wouldn't work", that's what they said before we ended up with the technology of today! The only box you're limited to is the one you put yourself in.

[rektide]

What feels unique about the web, that nothing else remotely resembles that makes it so much more compelling to me versus everything which came before, is urls. The web is a network of online resources.

There's HTML, an ok, fairly adaptable hyper-media markup- and CSS, and scripts, all fair or better- but the premise turns everything else we do in computing on it's head: servers send us resources, and we have a (imo pretty great) engine to render & execute our hypermedia.

I see endless torrents of anti-web attitude, from people who want more content-centric systems, from people who want applications. But almost never can the critics identify & mark out what makes the web better, different, & so flexible as to have arisen into all-pervading ubiquitous. By all means, consider first principles. I think you all have a lot of very important & enabling concepts you'll need to recreate along the way. The web's idea of urls & resources is one I think we'll have a hard time replacing.

[zzo38computer]

While there are some good ideas, there are also many bad ones. (URLs are one good idea.) It could be designed better. Perhaps I can mention this quotation (which wasn't about HTML, although some of the bad things happen with HTML for similar reasons):

The sad fact of the matter is that people play politics with standards to gain commercial advantage, and the result is that end users suffer the consequences. This is the case with character encoding for computer systems, and it is even more the case with HDTV.

[rektide]

It mostly works pretty great. It's immensely popular to hate on.

[EddieDante]

> Do we really want to continue having "a web"?

Speaking only for myself, I'm not at all invested in having a website. Yes, I want a publicly accessible site of my own on the internet with which to share documents, and I currently do so over HTTP, but I would equally happy to share them over Gopher or even anonymous FTP.

However, I'd rather pay NearlyFreeSpeech.net for hosting than run my own VPS or self-host on a machine in my basement because I'm lazy, so I'm stuck with HTTP because they explicitly don't support anonymous FTP (and by implication don't support Gopher or Gemini).

[zzo38computer]

I dislike FTP and think that it is not a very good protocol. (There is one advantage of FTP over HTTP, which is that it has directory listings, although you could also do with HTTP possibly by a new file format (e.g. application/httpdirlist) for directory listings.)

You can serve other file formats (including text/gemini) over HTTP. Although I could manage to make the web browser I have to support text/gemini files over HTTP (and local files), this isn't commonly done, and the protocol does not support file format polyfills (although I have a proposal that can make it work).

However, that isn't good enough if you want to serve NNTP or IRC or Telnet or something else like that. If I want to serve discussion forums, I will want NNTP. If I want fast communications, I will want IRC. There may be other possible protocols too. We shouldn't force everything into HTTP(S); it doesn't fit properly. (I do have a NNTP server, as well as HTTP and Gopher.)

[account42]

> the protocol does not support file format polyfills

It does hover support file format negotiation so you can fall back to a different format where it makes sense.

[zzo38computer]

Yes, you can use the Accept header; however, there are some problems with this:

- The default values are often not very useful; they might not list all supported file formats, and may have wildcards for formats that are not supported, too.

- The Accept header (and other headers) are often misused, which also makes it inaccurate. And sometimes if it is a picture, video, etc, the Accept header might make it difficult to load directly.

- The Accept header cannot distinguish if JavaScripts are enabled or disabled.

- If the end user wishes to save to disk (whether using the browser's save function, or using an external program such as curl or wget) or view source of the original file, this will not work. (Of course there is also possibility that you might want to view/download the alternate file instead, so that still will need to be handled, too. But if you want to view the resulting HTML tree then you can use the web developer tools, but that doesn't do all of the things.)

- See https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Why_not_conneg for some more comments. I do not agree with everything mentioned there, but there are many good points too (some of which are similar to the ones that I had mentioned above). (Another note about video codecs: there are differences other than the codec too that a end user may want, such as the picture size.)

My idea is adding a Interpreter header; I wrote a document with my ideas of how I would intend it to work. (This can be used both for server-side and client-side interpretation, and also allows interpreter caching (and possibly also caching the internal representations) if the optional hash has been included in this header value.)

Also note that the HTML <link> command is also available in HTTP, and can be used with a response of any file format. (I have seen it used in one case for applying stylesheets to plain text files; I do not know what other uses work in what web browsers.) (I also have my own ideas about additional links, such as rel="data" to link to underlying data of a web app in case the end user will use their own software (e.g. SQLite) to query it. These can be used even without changing the web browser, but the Interpreter header requires the web browser to support it)

[bruce511]

You want a publically accessible place for your public persona. You have got that. Why do you care about the protocol it uses? Why would you prefer a protocol that no one else uses? That no one has a client for?

[EddieDante]

The fact that I want to is reason enough for me. Why does that bother you? Am I somehow harming you?

[brabel]

> If you think "oh but we can't make change too radical, it wouldn't work", that's what they said before we ended up with the technology of today!

No, the technology of today developed extremely slowly for the most part, it evolved in tiny, tiny steps, sometimes taking centuries.