What if we just released a new browser that flat out refused to load any resource outside this definition?
Would sort of be like the parallel worlds of gopher and the web for a while. I think it would be interesting to have a "web fork" that was just for documents not apps.
Ultimately, there's nothing that says a saner web couldn't exist side-by-side with the modern one. We don't have to fork the browser, we just need to create a subgraph in the larger link network - a connected, searchable subgraph of sites that are document-oriented, machine-readable, that don't track or abuse you. A search engine limited to a certain criteria and perhaps some amount of curation would work as a way to define this subgraph.
No, this won't solve the web problem for everyone, but I think this is too tall a goal to have. Instead of trying to fix everything for the world at large, I feel we should be creating our own better subspace, and slowly let those who care come over.
- specify a strict subset of html and css (no scripts, or maybe a set of well-known scripts for things like autocomplete etc, avoiding layouts that are known to be problematic)
- add a meta tag or something to indicate that the browser should attempt to read this page based on these rules.
- fall back if the page doesn't follow the spec exactly.
I guess this could result in lightening fast pages. Now get one or two organizations on board (Wikipedia? Other non-profits? etc.) and suddenly people will notice.
This seems kind of like XHTML. No one liked that because people preferred having a webpage fail gracefully and still display something, rather than throw an error (ironically, the "worse" solution of non-strict HTML in that case making the web act more like documents than applications, because sloppily written documents are still readable.)
Many applications are already being developed to create this new Web3.0 document-centric world (I'm creating one of them!) which will provide a "way" to have the original Tim Berners Lee web once again be possible.
...and not only that but it'll also be decentralized and 'uncensorable'!
Is it full of insane people blogs and illegal pornography like all the other technologies with these characteristics?
It only appears uncensorable because it's not (yet?) popular enough for states to care about it.
And for blockchains to be uncensorable, you need the content to be on-chain, which doesn't scale. (because, if the content is off-chain, then you need an external solution to host the content, so the blockchain didn't solve the problem)
Meanwhile, if I want to make a blacklisted doc 'available again' all I'd have to do is add one bit or byte to the end of it, and the hash would change completely.
Right now one single person at one single tech company (like a Twitter employee) can literally ban someone for life, for perfectly legit political speech.
IPFS is the best-in-class effort to solve all that, and I'm actually a guy building a node that will go on the IPFS network.
No, it only has to take down servers hosting its content.
> all I'd have to do is add one bit or byte to the end of it, and the hash would change completely.
This is unrelated to my point, but a nitpick: IPFS uses a rolling/chunking hash, so one could blacklist chunks of a file; so it's not as easy as adding a byte at the end.
2) Regarding chunking in IPFS, the fact that files are chunked actually increases the burden on any authority attempting to implement a blacklist of hashes, and so that's in agreement with my points.
Also if someone truly wants to fight censorship you'd just symmetric encrypt the data using a publicly available key so that it DOES change all hashes of ALL chunks every time you encrypt with a different key.
And encrypting the same data under many different keys (creating different copies of whole file, is also my proposed solution to the problem of "Proof of Replication" in the IPFS system.)
I can view wiki, yc, and even some news websites. I can search through google, but can't use my account. Of course FB, LinkedIn also doesn't work. And I also can't login to HN and consequently can't leave a comment here.
It rises a question: is it possible to decouple our personalization needs from Web of Application to get properly working and convenient Web of Documents? Or it will be like a huge library of everything?
For that matter, where does HN fall on the spectrum? It's not as "application'y" as some sites, but it's certainly not a static document either.
Although the definition in the article would seem to be that "documents" are static, non-interactive (excluding even forms and possibly any kind of server-side rendering), non-scriptable HTML pages which simulate paper documents as much as possible, with perhaps the sole exception of allowing hypertext, and "applications" are everything else.
If so, that seems far more restrictive than even the web in its infancy, at least at the point where most people became aware of it.