7 ms·

Ask HN: If you had a chance to rebuild the internet, what would you change?

13 points by c1sc0 19y ago

True anonymity at the lowest level of the stack? No ads? Standard runtime environment to target instead of the 'mess' of ((DOM + CSS + JS) * browsers) we have now? Built-in state?

ionfish 19y ago
Do you mean the internet, or the web?
- c1sc0 19y ago
  I meant internet but most people seem to focus on web these days. For example I miss the old usenet days.
tomjen 19y ago
Strong Crypto from the ground up. Binary standards instead of HTML, so if anything is broken even the least it cannot be displayed. JS goes out the window and is replaced by a scheme like language that can process HBML as if it was native list. But those are minor points when you compare it to the first.
mark_ellul 19y ago
reverse domain name resolution... eg. org.reprap
- ericwaller 19y ago
  I'm sure you're not being facetious, but I can't figure it out. What's the advantage of this?
  - c1sc0 19y ago
    I think he points to the fact that reverse domains look a lot more like tree structures which humans are inherently very capable of understanding. With the current system the human url decoding process goes something like this: * "Find the third forward slash in this string ..." * "Read backwards & split on dot, there ya go: the tree path of the organization giving me this information ..." * "Now, skip forward to that slash again ..." * "From here on, split on the slash & that will be the tree path leading to the data this organization wants to give me" We're probably all conditioned to it now, but it's not exactly beautiful ...
    - mark_ellul 19y ago
      yes we are conditioned to it now... but imagine I want to find a retailer in spain, I would look up es.* or es.com. it just makes life easier... But its too late for that one...
    - ericwaller 19y ago
      Ok yeah, com.google.mail/inbox preserves the tree hierarchy
      - jimbokun 19y ago
        So, instead of the dot com bust, we would have had a com dot bust?
asenchi 19y ago
I agree with mark_ellul, reverse domain name resolution. com.google.maps etc... I'd also like to see more crypto.
bsaunder 19y ago
I think IP and TCP/UDP work pretty well... seems like they messed up a bit on the size of the address space. That's what I would call the "internet" (along with some general services, e.g. DNS). Sounds like you are talking more about HTTP/HTML. True anonymity seems a bit hard (when you make a request, the reply has to go somewhere). With regards to the "standard runtime environment"... I'd add true bidirectional communication, and a built in local storage mechanism (though Google gearbox and the flash hack seem to have mitigated this). UPDATE: (fixed some cases).
beng 19y ago
an extra level of indirection in all protocols for redundancy. the MX records in dns for mail are a good example. it's currently rather tricky to get good redundancy (fault tolerance) in software.
brentr 19y ago
(1) No ads (2) If your markup is not syntactically correct, the browser won't display your site.
mattjung 19y ago
Usage, technology, resources, bottlenecks - all have been changing all along the time and further will change. The ideal solution of today will not be a good solution for tomorrow. What you call mess, is the result of an evolutionary development that will be replaced by something appropriate when the time has come. Although your question is surely mind-challenging, it assumes that a bright from-scratch design would beat the outcome of the competition of different technologies. I don't believe in that.
- c1sc0 19y ago
  edited the original to add quotes around 'mess' ... guess I'm just cranky from the javascript nightmares I've been having lately. I agree with letting evolution & competition do its work, so let me rephrase: "Given the opportunity to re-arrange the basic conditions out of which the internet evolved (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, HTML, ...) what would you change." The choices encoded in these standards are as much ethical/philosophical as technical. Do we value security? Openness? Speed? I agree with IPv6 & getting rid of NAT on a technical level. What else?
  - LogicHoleFlaw 19y ago
    Get the technical level right and the rest will come. Mechanism, not policy.
- dennykmiu 19y ago
  That's exactly what Vint Cerf said, the men who invented the Internet. http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2008/04/vint_cerf.html http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2008/04/vint_cerf.html
TunaFish 19y ago
Kill, maim and murder the insanity of "be liberal on what you accept and conservative on what you emit.". Instead, have a standard dtd, and if any site deviates even a bit from it, render flashing red text on the site that says "The developer of this site is an incompetent moron. You really shouldn't trust him or do business with him." Make implementing this feature required part of every web browser.
- deleted 19y ago
  [deleted]
newtoncorp 19y ago
How can you have innovation if you get a standard runtime environment ? If I would do something I wouldn't display the pages if the markup isn't correct.
deleted 19y ago
[deleted]
izak30 19y ago
I would change almost nothing on the web side of things. Having no ads would seriously change the business of the internet today. Who would foot the bill for everything that we use now? End-users? HTML is a leveler for a lot of people, and it helps designers and developers actually work together, instead of being limited (VS.NET), it also allows for quick (albeit not always concurrent) innovation, and competition. TCP/IP Is so well generalized that you can do anything with it. Redundancy is not well executed, but it doesn't have to be if the pipes get bigger. Doing things like calling new developers "incompetent morons" stifles innovation. I certainly would have quit a long time ago, if when I started there was no room for mistakes. HTML and Javascript were the 'gateway language' for me for all sorts of things.
- indiejade 19y ago
  "HTML is a leveler for a lot of people, and it helps designers and developers actually work together, instead of being limited . . . " Precisely. It used to annoy me when people would ask me what language I "program in". I've since learned to just explain that I write code that can be rendered, downloaded, executed, or otherwise modified (locally and remotely) through a browser or IDE and without (necessarily) having to be connected to the Internet. But anyway. I think if I had the chance to rebuild the Internet, I'd build in an all-inclusive productivity-meter. This productivity meter would gauge, record and reward people as both content producers and consumers/participants of media. This question reminds me. . . there's actually an interesting piece in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fUHtc37MC8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fUHtc37MC8 about that concept of ripping down the barriers between producers and consumers of media.
  - c1sc0 19y ago
    Such a productivity meter (mind if I rephrase it as 'contribution-meter'?) assumes strong identity, the lack of which I think has greatly contributed to the rise of the internet. At the same time strong identity is at the core of the whole OpenID / OpenSocial /Social Graph debate. Are we trying to build something that should have been included in the first place?
axod 19y ago
Why do some people want anonymity? Bad idea IMHO Privacy? Yes of course. Anonymity? Definitely not - just means people can do what they want without any come back.
- c1sc0 19y ago
  Tell that to people in some more oppressive regimes, or in places where the alignment between what is legal and what makes sense is out of sync. True anonymity is hard to implement, but it certainly has its virtues.
  - phaedrus 19y ago
    Interestingly though my college professors were talking about Internet2 and they seem to think the problem is too much anonymity; they want the US government to be able to track down any communications, you know, to catch "teh terrists" Edit: Not saying that's what internet2 is for, just what my CS professors were speculating it needs to do.
    - axod 19y ago
      For me, it's more a question of responsibility. If everyone is anonymous, there is no accountability. There's no reason to be responsible. No reason to be well behaved. On an anonymous internet, you can just attack websites you don't like, post incorrect claims, abuse people and be a complete pain in the neck.
      - LogicHoleFlaw 19y ago
        On an anonymous internet, you can just attack websites you don't like, post incorrect claims, abuse people and be a complete pain in the neck. You can do that already. On the other hand, if you have anonymity you can still choose to give yourself a name and identity. With strong identity you can even prove that it's you. Or at least that it's the same person each time. There are lots of good reasons to allow anonymity.
kashif 19y ago
No concept of bandwidth
- kashif 19y ago
  Why did I get down modded!
  - Hexstream 19y ago
    Because it doesn't make any sense? How can you possibly have internet "without the concept of bandwidth"? Do you mean you want infinite bandwidth at no cost? That's not a very mind-expanding proposition.
ropiku 19y ago
IPv6 instead of IPv4. No NAT and enough IP's for all your network devices (pda, laptop, printer, etc.)
- wanorris 19y ago
  Well, I think the IPv6 switch is finally going to have to happen anyway within a few years. So hopefully, you'll get your wish.
  - ropiku 19y ago
    I'm hoping too but currently no ISP I know has IPv6 support for customers (they may have on their backbone).
- delano 19y ago
  And all your grains of sand.
brlewis 19y ago
S-expression syntax for markup, Scheme in place of JavaScript, and I'd like HTTP to have a header that sets modification times or other cache information for resources other than the one being sent in the current response.
maw 19y ago
1) A better mail transfer protocol. I don't view spam as inherently inevitable, but with SMTP it seems to be. 2) Internationalization from the ground up. Domain names are still effectively limited to 7 bit ASCII (even though "dots" are represented by '\0's in the DNS, which doesn't rule out UTF-8, in practice it doesn't work well). I also still get mail I can't read, even when it's in a language I can, because of encoding issues (increasingly rare, but it still happens).
- diego 19y ago
  Spam makes its way into anything (search engines, social networks, blogs, twitter, you name it). In essence it's just low-quality advertising at an extremely low cost. Whatever makes it possible for people to communicate cheaply also enables spam. A "better" mail protocol would still have to be free, or very cheap. Snail mail is not free and you still get junk mail.
  - cturner 19y ago
    How does spam make its way into twitter?
    - thaumaturgy 19y ago
      Spammers set up account and then mass-follow other accounts. See also http://mashable.com/2008/04/14/twitter-spam-out-of-control/ http://mashable.com/2008/04/14/twitter-spam-out-of-control/ and http://www.twitterspam.com/ http://www.twitterspam.com/ . I've never used Twitter, I just found those two links by Googling for "Twitter spam".
      - cturner 19y ago
        Thanks. I've been thinking about these problems recently (http://cratuki.blogspot.com/2008/04/blogs-as-email-replacement-mechanism.html http://cratuki.blogspot.com/2008/04/blogs-as-email-replaceme...), and twitter is the foremost model I've had in mind as an example of a spam-proof system! I still think the model is good. The follower spam problem described in those links (this too: http://www.stoptwitterspam.com/blog/about/ http://www.stoptwitterspam.com/blog/about/) is indeed spam but could be could be fixed without it breaking the essence of the twitter approach. I'm convinced that spam is a result of weaknesses in the model of the email system and not inevitable as you suggest. If we had our time again we would be able to standardise on a better model and for this reason was a bit surprised that you just accepted spam as part of life. The blog link at the top describes some of my thoughts. Models that involve variable payments work as well because they directly price on how much you want to be paid by people who waste your time. In such a world I'd love it for people to spam me.
attack 19y ago
Kill NAT!
aneesh 19y ago
Build in semantics from the ground up.
- c1sc0 19y ago
  if & when we figure out the semantics in the first place, but I agree: some mechanism for adding metadata at a low level would be great. (Ya, I know, microformats)
volida 19y ago
if you think something is wrong with the Internet, then build a startup around the problem.
- jimbokun 19y ago
  Heh, what do you suppose the intent of the question was? He's fishing for startup ideas!
deleted 19y ago
[deleted]
b3n 19y ago
I would remove extensions from domains, e.g., "news.ycombinator.com" would just be "news.ycombinator", and "google.com" would just be "google".
yariv 19y ago
Persistent connections to the server from Javascript.
LogicHoleFlaw 19y ago
Man, a lot of people here are violently opposed to allowing invalid markup. I think that the lenience web browsers afford site creators is a boon. It is one of the key factors in the democratization of the web. Low barriers to entry have been a critical factor in the success and organic growth of the web. Requiring perfect syntax and markup as a method of keeping out the plebes is the kind of self-righteous cult-of-the-machine which drives out the very people who provide content and value to the web. Now, if you do have correct markup and the browser developers still screw it up... off with their heads! Shame on you, you should know better.
- ken 19y ago
  Shouldn't we "democratize" other programs, then? How about making GCC or CLISP accept incorrect syntax? That would allow more people to provide content and value. We might end up with a lot of programs that only compiled correctly on one platform (gcc quirks mode!), but it would lower the barrier-to-entry for new programmers.
sah 19y ago
Standard runtime environment to target instead of the 'mess' of ((DOM + CSS + JS) x browsers) we have now? This is what I've always wanted. When the web first took off, I was constantly whining about how remote application UIs were going to get shoehorned into the model of document layout, of all things. It seemed short-sighted and dumb. In retrospect, I'm not sure the web could have become what it is with something more like java applets, flash, or AJAX in the forefront. Document layout isn't what we're really doing, but it's a simple starting point that everyone can get behind.
vegai 19y ago
Luckily, people smarter than any of us thought about this a lot already. Unfortunately, with that sort of brain power comes craziness. Check out the articles and books by Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart and Vannevar Bush.
Kaizyn 19y ago
If we were to rebuild the Internet today, we should remake it using a fully decentralized model instead of a distributed one. By turning it into a mesh network, it would make it a lot more robust.
juansequeda 19y ago
Would of created the Semantic Web initially.. would of solved data integration problems on the way too!
bayareaguy 19y ago
DNS. I don't know exactly what I'd change, but I'd look for a way to make it impractical for the whole domain/certificate "industry" to get where it is today. ICANN, Verisign, Network Solutions and the like are all just scams.

13 points by c1sc0 19y ago

True anonymity at the lowest level of the stack? No ads? Standard runtime environment to target instead of the 'mess' of ((DOM + CSS + JS) * browsers) we have now? Built-in state?

ionfish 19y ago

Do you mean the internet, or the web?

c1sc0 19y ago
I meant internet but most people seem to focus on web these days. For example I miss the old usenet days.

tomjen 19y ago

Strong Crypto from the ground up. Binary standards instead of HTML, so if anything is broken even the least it cannot be displayed. JS goes out the window and is replaced by a scheme like language that can process HBML as if it was native list. But those are minor points when you compare it to the first.

mark_ellul 19y ago

reverse domain name resolution... eg. org.reprap

ericwaller 19y ago
I'm sure you're not being facetious, but I can't figure it out. What's the advantage of this?
- c1sc0 19y ago
  I think he points to the fact that reverse domains look a lot more like tree structures which humans are inherently very capable of understanding. With the current system the human url decoding process goes something like this: * "Find the third forward slash in this string ..." * "Read backwards & split on dot, there ya go: the tree path of the organization giving me this information ..." * "Now, skip forward to that slash again ..." * "From here on, split on the slash & that will be the tree path leading to the data this organization wants to give me" We're probably all conditioned to it now, but it's not exactly beautiful ...
  - mark_ellul 19y ago
    yes we are conditioned to it now... but imagine I want to find a retailer in spain, I would look up es.* or es.com. it just makes life easier... But its too late for that one...
  - ericwaller 19y ago
    Ok yeah, com.google.mail/inbox preserves the tree hierarchy
    - jimbokun 19y ago
      So, instead of the dot com bust, we would have had a com dot bust?

asenchi 19y ago

I agree with mark_ellul, reverse domain name resolution. com.google.maps etc... I'd also like to see more crypto.

bsaunder 19y ago

I think IP and TCP/UDP work pretty well... seems like they messed up a bit on the size of the address space. That's what I would call the "internet" (along with some general services, e.g. DNS). Sounds like you are talking more about HTTP/HTML. True anonymity seems a bit hard (when you make a request, the reply has to go somewhere). With regards to the "standard runtime environment"... I'd add true bidirectional communication, and a built in local storage mechanism (though Google gearbox and the flash hack seem to have mitigated this). UPDATE: (fixed some cases).

beng 19y ago

an extra level of indirection in all protocols for redundancy. the MX records in dns for mail are a good example. it's currently rather tricky to get good redundancy (fault tolerance) in software.

brentr 19y ago

(1) No ads (2) If your markup is not syntactically correct, the browser won't display your site.

mattjung 19y ago

Usage, technology, resources, bottlenecks - all have been changing all along the time and further will change. The ideal solution of today will not be a good solution for tomorrow. What you call mess, is the result of an evolutionary development that will be replaced by something appropriate when the time has come. Although your question is surely mind-challenging, it assumes that a bright from-scratch design would beat the outcome of the competition of different technologies. I don't believe in that.

c1sc0 19y ago
edited the original to add quotes around 'mess' ... guess I'm just cranky from the javascript nightmares I've been having lately. I agree with letting evolution & competition do its work, so let me rephrase: "Given the opportunity to re-arrange the basic conditions out of which the internet evolved (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, HTML, ...) what would you change." The choices encoded in these standards are as much ethical/philosophical as technical. Do we value security? Openness? Speed? I agree with IPv6 & getting rid of NAT on a technical level. What else?
- LogicHoleFlaw 19y ago
  Get the technical level right and the rest will come. Mechanism, not policy.
dennykmiu 19y ago
That's exactly what Vint Cerf said, the men who invented the Internet. http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2008/04/vint_cerf.html http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2008/04/vint_cerf.html

TunaFish 19y ago

Kill, maim and murder the insanity of "be liberal on what you accept and conservative on what you emit.". Instead, have a standard dtd, and if any site deviates even a bit from it, render flashing red text on the site that says "The developer of this site is an incompetent moron. You really shouldn't trust him or do business with him." Make implementing this feature required part of every web browser.

deleted 19y ago
[deleted]

newtoncorp 19y ago

How can you have innovation if you get a standard runtime environment ? If I would do something I wouldn't display the pages if the markup isn't correct.

deleted 19y ago

[deleted]

izak30 19y ago

I would change almost nothing on the web side of things. Having no ads would seriously change the business of the internet today. Who would foot the bill for everything that we use now? End-users? HTML is a leveler for a lot of people, and it helps designers and developers actually work together, instead of being limited (VS.NET), it also allows for quick (albeit not always concurrent) innovation, and competition. TCP/IP Is so well generalized that you can do anything with it. Redundancy is not well executed, but it doesn't have to be if the pipes get bigger. Doing things like calling new developers "incompetent morons" stifles innovation. I certainly would have quit a long time ago, if when I started there was no room for mistakes. HTML and Javascript were the 'gateway language' for me for all sorts of things.

indiejade 19y ago
"HTML is a leveler for a lot of people, and it helps designers and developers actually work together, instead of being limited . . . " Precisely. It used to annoy me when people would ask me what language I "program in". I've since learned to just explain that I write code that can be rendered, downloaded, executed, or otherwise modified (locally and remotely) through a browser or IDE and without (necessarily) having to be connected to the Internet. But anyway. I think if I had the chance to rebuild the Internet, I'd build in an all-inclusive productivity-meter. This productivity meter would gauge, record and reward people as both content producers and consumers/participants of media. This question reminds me. . . there's actually an interesting piece in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fUHtc37MC8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fUHtc37MC8 about that concept of ripping down the barriers between producers and consumers of media.
- c1sc0 19y ago
  Such a productivity meter (mind if I rephrase it as 'contribution-meter'?) assumes strong identity, the lack of which I think has greatly contributed to the rise of the internet. At the same time strong identity is at the core of the whole OpenID / OpenSocial /Social Graph debate. Are we trying to build something that should have been included in the first place?

axod 19y ago

Why do some people want anonymity? Bad idea IMHO Privacy? Yes of course. Anonymity? Definitely not - just means people can do what they want without any come back.

c1sc0 19y ago
Tell that to people in some more oppressive regimes, or in places where the alignment between what is legal and what makes sense is out of sync. True anonymity is hard to implement, but it certainly has its virtues.
- phaedrus 19y ago
  Interestingly though my college professors were talking about Internet2 and they seem to think the problem is too much anonymity; they want the US government to be able to track down any communications, you know, to catch "teh terrists" Edit: Not saying that's what internet2 is for, just what my CS professors were speculating it needs to do.
  - axod 19y ago
    For me, it's more a question of responsibility. If everyone is anonymous, there is no accountability. There's no reason to be responsible. No reason to be well behaved. On an anonymous internet, you can just attack websites you don't like, post incorrect claims, abuse people and be a complete pain in the neck.
    - LogicHoleFlaw 19y ago
      On an anonymous internet, you can just attack websites you don't like, post incorrect claims, abuse people and be a complete pain in the neck. You can do that already. On the other hand, if you have anonymity you can still choose to give yourself a name and identity. With strong identity you can even prove that it's you. Or at least that it's the same person each time. There are lots of good reasons to allow anonymity.

kashif 19y ago

No concept of bandwidth

kashif 19y ago
Why did I get down modded!
- Hexstream 19y ago
  Because it doesn't make any sense? How can you possibly have internet "without the concept of bandwidth"? Do you mean you want infinite bandwidth at no cost? That's not a very mind-expanding proposition.

ropiku 19y ago

IPv6 instead of IPv4. No NAT and enough IP's for all your network devices (pda, laptop, printer, etc.)

wanorris 19y ago
Well, I think the IPv6 switch is finally going to have to happen anyway within a few years. So hopefully, you'll get your wish.
- ropiku 19y ago
  I'm hoping too but currently no ISP I know has IPv6 support for customers (they may have on their backbone).
delano 19y ago
And all your grains of sand.

brlewis 19y ago

S-expression syntax for markup, Scheme in place of JavaScript, and I'd like HTTP to have a header that sets modification times or other cache information for resources other than the one being sent in the current response.

maw 19y ago

1) A better mail transfer protocol. I don't view spam as inherently inevitable, but with SMTP it seems to be. 2) Internationalization from the ground up. Domain names are still effectively limited to 7 bit ASCII (even though "dots" are represented by '\0's in the DNS, which doesn't rule out UTF-8, in practice it doesn't work well). I also still get mail I can't read, even when it's in a language I can, because of encoding issues (increasingly rare, but it still happens).

diego 19y ago
Spam makes its way into anything (search engines, social networks, blogs, twitter, you name it). In essence it's just low-quality advertising at an extremely low cost. Whatever makes it possible for people to communicate cheaply also enables spam. A "better" mail protocol would still have to be free, or very cheap. Snail mail is not free and you still get junk mail.
- cturner 19y ago
  How does spam make its way into twitter?
  - thaumaturgy 19y ago
    Spammers set up account and then mass-follow other accounts. See also http://mashable.com/2008/04/14/twitter-spam-out-of-control/ http://mashable.com/2008/04/14/twitter-spam-out-of-control/ and http://www.twitterspam.com/ http://www.twitterspam.com/ . I've never used Twitter, I just found those two links by Googling for "Twitter spam".
    - cturner 19y ago
      Thanks. I've been thinking about these problems recently (http://cratuki.blogspot.com/2008/04/blogs-as-email-replacement-mechanism.html http://cratuki.blogspot.com/2008/04/blogs-as-email-replaceme...), and twitter is the foremost model I've had in mind as an example of a spam-proof system! I still think the model is good. The follower spam problem described in those links (this too: http://www.stoptwitterspam.com/blog/about/ http://www.stoptwitterspam.com/blog/about/) is indeed spam but could be could be fixed without it breaking the essence of the twitter approach. I'm convinced that spam is a result of weaknesses in the model of the email system and not inevitable as you suggest. If we had our time again we would be able to standardise on a better model and for this reason was a bit surprised that you just accepted spam as part of life. The blog link at the top describes some of my thoughts. Models that involve variable payments work as well because they directly price on how much you want to be paid by people who waste your time. In such a world I'd love it for people to spam me.

attack 19y ago

Kill NAT!

aneesh 19y ago

Build in semantics from the ground up.

c1sc0 19y ago
if & when we figure out the semantics in the first place, but I agree: some mechanism for adding metadata at a low level would be great. (Ya, I know, microformats)

volida 19y ago

if you think something is wrong with the Internet, then build a startup around the problem.

jimbokun 19y ago
Heh, what do you suppose the intent of the question was? He's fishing for startup ideas!

deleted 19y ago

[deleted]

b3n 19y ago

I would remove extensions from domains, e.g., "news.ycombinator.com" would just be "news.ycombinator", and "google.com" would just be "google".

yariv 19y ago

Persistent connections to the server from Javascript.

LogicHoleFlaw 19y ago

Man, a lot of people here are violently opposed to allowing invalid markup. I think that the lenience web browsers afford site creators is a boon. It is one of the key factors in the democratization of the web. Low barriers to entry have been a critical factor in the success and organic growth of the web. Requiring perfect syntax and markup as a method of keeping out the plebes is the kind of self-righteous cult-of-the-machine which drives out the very people who provide content and value to the web. Now, if you do have correct markup and the browser developers still screw it up... off with their heads! Shame on you, you should know better.

ken 19y ago
Shouldn't we "democratize" other programs, then? How about making GCC or CLISP accept incorrect syntax? That would allow more people to provide content and value. We might end up with a lot of programs that only compiled correctly on one platform (gcc quirks mode!), but it would lower the barrier-to-entry for new programmers.

sah 19y ago

Standard runtime environment to target instead of the 'mess' of ((DOM + CSS + JS) x browsers) we have now? This is what I've always wanted. When the web first took off, I was constantly whining about how remote application UIs were going to get shoehorned into the model of document layout, of all things. It seemed short-sighted and dumb. In retrospect, I'm not sure the web could have become what it is with something more like java applets, flash, or AJAX in the forefront. Document layout isn't what we're really doing, but it's a simple starting point that everyone can get behind.

vegai 19y ago

Luckily, people smarter than any of us thought about this a lot already. Unfortunately, with that sort of brain power comes craziness. Check out the articles and books by Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart and Vannevar Bush.

Kaizyn 19y ago

If we were to rebuild the Internet today, we should remake it using a fully decentralized model instead of a distributed one. By turning it into a mesh network, it would make it a lot more robust.

juansequeda 19y ago

Would of created the Semantic Web initially.. would of solved data integration problems on the way too!

bayareaguy 19y ago

DNS. I don't know exactly what I'd change, but I'd look for a way to make it impractical for the whole domain/certificate "industry" to get where it is today. ICANN, Verisign, Network Solutions and the like are all just scams.