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The case for "forking the web"? What if we just released a new browser that flat out refused to load any resource outside this definition? Would sort of be li

The case for "forking the web"? 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.

WClayFerguson 7y ago
IPFS and blockchains are the technological solution here. 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'!
- FooHentai 7y ago
  >decentralized and 'uncensorable'! Is it full of insane people blogs and illegal pornography like all the other technologies with these characteristics?
- progval 7y ago
  IPFS is not uncensorable. The protocol is based on a DHT that allows anyone to find what IP addresses are hosting a particular content, so it's possible to take them down. 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)
  - WClayFerguson 7y ago
    You're claiming that if a piece of information has an identity that makes it reachable, then that makes it censorable too, but you left out what would be required to make that censorship happen. The gov't would have to require the IPFS codebase to support a 'blacklist table' of hashes, and then make it illegal for a server to run a codebase without using the 'updated' latest table. The the gov't would have to come up with a mechanism where they maintain and update this blacklist and disseminate it. 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.
    - progval 7y ago
      > You're claiming that if a piece of information has an identity that makes it reachable, then that makes it censorable too, but you left out what would be required to make that censorship happen. The gov't would have to require the IPFS codebase to support a 'blacklist table' of hashes 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.
      - WClayFerguson 7y ago
        1) Regarding the gov't taking down servers publishing hashes it doesn't like, yes that's exactly what I said they'd have to do, if you go back and re-read my prior post. Glad you agree. But like BitTorrent or Bitcoin, they'd have to basically shut off the whole internet to disable it. Not gonna happen. 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.)
qznc 7y ago
Open Firefox, disable JavaScript, disable Cookies. Done.
- EvgenyB 7y ago
  Interestingly. I tried this. As expected, some sites work, and some do not. 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?
  - mindcrime 7y ago
    One problem is that the line of demarcation between "document" and "application" isn't always totally clear cut. I think most of us intuit that something like Gmail is an "application", whereas something like https://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html https://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.h... is a "document". But as soon as you introduce something as trivial as user login, now you need forms, cookies, etc. And Javascript can be used to make "rich documents" (I'm thinking of things like Tangle.js based docs, for example) that blur the line between "document" and "application". 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.
    - krapp 7y ago
      Having seen this argument come up many times on HN, I've come to the conclusion that the line between "document" and "application" on the web is more emotional than technical. 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.
scottmotte 7y ago
I wonder if it could be even more effective to release a new search engine that searched only pages inside this definition?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I think so. 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.
eitland 7y ago
I think I've suggested before that someone (Mozilla comes to mind) could use this as an opportunity in the same way they did with asm.js, roughly along the lines of: - 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.
- krapp 7y ago
  >add a meta tag or something to indicate that the browser should attempt to read this page based on these rules 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.)

WClayFerguson 7y ago

IPFS and blockchains are the technological solution here. 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'!

FooHentai 7y ago
>decentralized and 'uncensorable'! Is it full of insane people blogs and illegal pornography like all the other technologies with these characteristics?
progval 7y ago
IPFS is not uncensorable. The protocol is based on a DHT that allows anyone to find what IP addresses are hosting a particular content, so it's possible to take them down. 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)
- WClayFerguson 7y ago
  You're claiming that if a piece of information has an identity that makes it reachable, then that makes it censorable too, but you left out what would be required to make that censorship happen. The gov't would have to require the IPFS codebase to support a 'blacklist table' of hashes, and then make it illegal for a server to run a codebase without using the 'updated' latest table. The the gov't would have to come up with a mechanism where they maintain and update this blacklist and disseminate it. 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.
  - progval 7y ago
    > You're claiming that if a piece of information has an identity that makes it reachable, then that makes it censorable too, but you left out what would be required to make that censorship happen. The gov't would have to require the IPFS codebase to support a 'blacklist table' of hashes 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.
    - WClayFerguson 7y ago
      1) Regarding the gov't taking down servers publishing hashes it doesn't like, yes that's exactly what I said they'd have to do, if you go back and re-read my prior post. Glad you agree. But like BitTorrent or Bitcoin, they'd have to basically shut off the whole internet to disable it. Not gonna happen. 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.)

qznc 7y ago

Open Firefox, disable JavaScript, disable Cookies. Done.

EvgenyB 7y ago
Interestingly. I tried this. As expected, some sites work, and some do not. 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?
- mindcrime 7y ago
  One problem is that the line of demarcation between "document" and "application" isn't always totally clear cut. I think most of us intuit that something like Gmail is an "application", whereas something like https://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html https://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.h... is a "document". But as soon as you introduce something as trivial as user login, now you need forms, cookies, etc. And Javascript can be used to make "rich documents" (I'm thinking of things like Tangle.js based docs, for example) that blur the line between "document" and "application". 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.
  - krapp 7y ago
    Having seen this argument come up many times on HN, I've come to the conclusion that the line between "document" and "application" on the web is more emotional than technical. 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.

scottmotte 7y ago

I wonder if it could be even more effective to release a new search engine that searched only pages inside this definition?

TeMPOraL 7y ago
I think so. 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.

eitland 7y ago

I think I've suggested before that someone (Mozilla comes to mind) could use this as an opportunity in the same way they did with asm.js, roughly along the lines of: - 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.

krapp 7y ago
>add a meta tag or something to indicate that the browser should attempt to read this page based on these rules 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.)