What if the Web was filesystem-accessible? | Hacker News Reader

What if the Web was filesystem-accessible?

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41 pointsazeirah9 comments

old idea: at least as old as https://users.cs.duke.edu/~vahdat/webfs/webfs.html

As I note conspicuously, the idea is not new. The Plan 9 OS 9P protocol dates even earlier, to at least 1992:

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=506413

My objective is not originality. It's utility.

Original author. This remains a project I'm considering, though I'm looking to have a solid understanding both of how we got here, and how dynamics might be changed.

For some long term perspective, I liked Kris' blog post "On cache problems, and what they mean for the future" ending with the following passage:

"That challenges the fundamental abstraction of Unix, though, because in Unix everything is a file, which is a linear array of bytes, and is being accessed through a file handle. Now, with Optane persistent data may be no longer behind a file handle, but a special kind of memory, and data does not have to be crystallized into serialized structures before persistence. In fact, the memory may be so fast that we might not have time to do that. We require a different compute abstraction instead. Which means, when we have it, the result will finally, after five decades, not really Unix any more." http://blog.koehntopp.info/index.php/1960-on-cache-problems-...

next question is what if web was a collection of APIs.

Imagine every website was api-fied so that we could automate complex flows / interactions and orchestrate across multiple websites.

I am contemplating doing a MVP of this as a side-project.

I actually started a project for something like that a while ago; perhaps it might make sense to resurrect it...

That would be wonderful.

I'm not holding my breath...

So, Gopher 2.0?

At least 2.1.

The proposal goes into more depth. If you've any commentary to make on the substance, I'd be interested in hearing it.

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