Ben Halpern
Posted on
If the World Wide Web were re-created today with no legacy dependencies, how would it be different?
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Latest comments (45)
Two-way hyperlinks. 😉
If I were to make it from the ground up, there would be no such thing as a browser. The whole OS is the browser. You can "add it to your home screen" or search it in the "appstore" kinda like a PWA. But one thing that will stay are different search engines to index the data and display relievet info similar to the Android slices API. Since there is no browser there will be no single language that the "sites" will have to be made in. So you can use what ever the hell you want, and all those languages and runtime will be updated at the OS level and will have a "manifest.json" to check for compatibility.
I know this is related to the network side not the WWW components but it is everything in the end, Make all IP addresses
IPv6soIPv4had never existed (I'd Tweak how IPv6 is implemented but that is besides the point).JavaScript would be much better language and CSS might be Turing complete.
I hope by default it would be more secure and everything would just be HTTPS be default.
But really, take what everyone wants it to be and then add 10 years, and we are asking this question again. There will always be supporting legacy dependencies. It's just the nature of our industry and how it evolves. I know of technologies today were new around 10 years ago that are now supporting legacy dependencies.
A federated Google Wave would be my wish.
We should draw inspiration from Google Wave for future DEV directions
By the time the web was built, it would have fallen behind already.
Markdown-based:-)If www was rebuilt from scratch today, it wouldn't be very different to what we're moving toward since 10 years: a more and more centralized network owned by big compagnies controlling everything.
Gotta say - almost every one of these responses is looking at the web from a purely front end perspective.
The web as a platform - REST - is a vital part of the internet. If you're proposing to change the web to fit only with your vision of the front end, recognise that you'll be losing a lot of its power and expressiveness for the backend, which was a part of what made it so successful in the first place.
Dear JavaScript developer: the web isn't just about you 🔥🔥🔥
Serverless?
we would start building dependencies for the next generations.
The only reached this point because we had 20+ years to fool around with it. It will continue to grow, change, be better (or worse). There is nothing we can do about it
No multiple Javascript engine, only different approach to the user experience around using a web browser. A single entity helped by the GAFAM to improve the engine, no more compatibility issues, workforce not splitted, features focused on security and developer experience.
Ah man... If only...
It's hard to imagine. So many of the conventions we use now are because of the early implementations. Maybe if we were more advanced the possibility of more centralization could have happened. Luckily it all fell apart and we have a more centralized web.
It'd probably be worse, since I assume it'd be some mega-corporate committee who sets about with the task of recreating it.
Look at HTML, CSS, and JS. All of these have had numerous opportunities to add clearer constructs and make things easier. Yet at every iteration they also add a bunch of nonsense and fail to address critical errors. This effect would be magnified if the same people were to recreate the entire web.
I actually don't see the problem with just deprecating old standards. Our world is changing so fast that any active service/content provider needs to make changes frequently anyway. If we wish to access old content, then we can use special legacy browsers. It's not like a Blu-Ray player can read VHS tapes, so why should a browser be able to browse content from 20 years ago.
Evolutionary design is by far the best approach, but we do need to drop compatibility with old crap. It'll also help a lot for learning, by thinning out the garbage.
But no, redesigning would be a failure. I'm pretty much against up-front designs, since they tend to fail. Everything must be evolutionary to work.
I think you mean iterative design. AFAIK 'evolutionary' would involve having a population of solutions, that are selected based on fitness, mutated and combinated to create a new generation of solutions. Rinse & repeat. You might argue that is how human populations/companies work but it seems a bit of a stretch.