4 ms·

I am sharing this link because I think it is interesting how close many of the things said here, in 1992, are to what ended up happening. > What is really nee

I am sharing this link because I think it is interesting how close many of the things said here, in 1992, are to what ended up happening. > What is really needed is a platform on which distributed applications can be built without concern for the problems of distribution, user buy-in, and heterogeneous interaction environment. > […] > One solution is to "piggyback" the engine on top of a technology that is already at the fingertips of most computer users today, electronic mail. This is more or less exactly what happened. Except it ended up happening not on top of email but on top of www.

lisper 4y ago
One of the things that the world doesn't seem to have realized yet even thought it should be glaringly obvious by now is that when designing protocols for electronic interactions one must choose carefully when to push and when to pull. Email is push-only. HTTP is pull-only (or at least it was when it started out). To really do the Right Thing you need both working together. And there are two rules that should guide the design: 1. Push should only be used when it is necessary to draw the user's attention to something in a timely manner. 2. Push should never transfer large quantities of data. Large quantities of data should always be pulled, never pushed. Email violates both of these principles, and HTTP doesn't have push at all. The real problem is that email is the only push standard that is both open and widely deployed. Everything else is either proprietary (Twitter, iMessage, SMS) or niche (mastodon) or both.
- zwieback 4y ago
  I would argue that SMS is the other popular standardized push protocol.
  - lisper 4y ago
    Yes, I mentioned that in my OP. It's standard, but not open. You can neither send nor receive SMS over the internet without paying a third party.
    - zwieback 4y ago
      Oh, I didn't know that. So those services where you send an email to an address and it shows up as an SMS are not generally open? Yeah, I guess that would move it into the proprietary column.
      - lisper 4y ago
        Nope, those are all run by the cell carriers. If you change carriers, your SMS email gateway address changes too. (There are some services that try to be carrier-independent but they eventually have to interface with the carriers somehow. There is no way to send an SMS that doesn't eventually end up in the (proprietary) cell network.)
        codetrotter 4y ago
        But is the cell network ultimately different from the Internet? You have to pay an ISP too, to connect to the Internet.
        actionfromafar 4y ago
        I can't formulate a technical reason why there is difference. I guess I have to go with culture... there are very few if any systems which talk to each other over SMS. Definitely not in a standardised manner, if so. Custom SCADA systems, maybe. (SMS is more like how modems were back in the day, re automated systems.) So there are very few apps on SMS today. Almost all communication is either machine system > human. (Spam, 2FA, etc.) Or human <-> human. Edit: in a parallel reality where we were stuck on SMS for some reason (alien invasion in 1989, successfully repelled but much of value was lost, for instance) and SMS messages were to become cheap or free (as they often are today) I could definitely see an "internet" growing up with SMS as the transfer backbone. Much of the basics could be done over SMS, status updates, "email", news and so on. Heck, Twitter ran on sms I'm told. (It was a US thing, right?)
        lisper 4y ago
        The cell network is radically different from the internet. 1. You need a SIM card to connect to the cell network. There is no cell-network equivalent of "free wifi". 2. If you have a (paid) internet connection you can net anyone connect to it with their own hardware. You can't share a cell network connection that way. 3. The internet is packet-switched. The cell network is (mostly) connection-based. 4. The cell network lacks broadcast and multicast protocols. 5. Cell network connections are always peer-to-peer. You can't have a "server" on the cell network. The concept doesn't even make sense. I could go on and on.

lisper 4y ago

One of the things that the world doesn't seem to have realized yet even thought it should be glaringly obvious by now is that when designing protocols for electronic interactions one must choose carefully when to push and when to pull. Email is push-only. HTTP is pull-only (or at least it was when it started out). To really do the Right Thing you need both working together. And there are two rules that should guide the design: 1. Push should only be used when it is necessary to draw the user's attention to something in a timely manner. 2. Push should never transfer large quantities of data. Large quantities of data should always be pulled, never pushed. Email violates both of these principles, and HTTP doesn't have push at all. The real problem is that email is the only push standard that is both open and widely deployed. Everything else is either proprietary (Twitter, iMessage, SMS) or niche (mastodon) or both.

zwieback 4y ago
I would argue that SMS is the other popular standardized push protocol.
- lisper 4y ago
  Yes, I mentioned that in my OP. It's standard, but not open. You can neither send nor receive SMS over the internet without paying a third party.
  - zwieback 4y ago
    Oh, I didn't know that. So those services where you send an email to an address and it shows up as an SMS are not generally open? Yeah, I guess that would move it into the proprietary column.
    - lisper 4y ago
      Nope, those are all run by the cell carriers. If you change carriers, your SMS email gateway address changes too. (There are some services that try to be carrier-independent but they eventually have to interface with the carriers somehow. There is no way to send an SMS that doesn't eventually end up in the (proprietary) cell network.)
      - codetrotter 4y ago
        But is the cell network ultimately different from the Internet? You have to pay an ISP too, to connect to the Internet.
        actionfromafar 4y ago
        I can't formulate a technical reason why there is difference. I guess I have to go with culture... there are very few if any systems which talk to each other over SMS. Definitely not in a standardised manner, if so. Custom SCADA systems, maybe. (SMS is more like how modems were back in the day, re automated systems.) So there are very few apps on SMS today. Almost all communication is either machine system > human. (Spam, 2FA, etc.) Or human <-> human. Edit: in a parallel reality where we were stuck on SMS for some reason (alien invasion in 1989, successfully repelled but much of value was lost, for instance) and SMS messages were to become cheap or free (as they often are today) I could definitely see an "internet" growing up with SMS as the transfer backbone. Much of the basics could be done over SMS, status updates, "email", news and so on. Heck, Twitter ran on sms I'm told. (It was a US thing, right?)
        lisper 4y ago
        The cell network is radically different from the internet. 1. You need a SIM card to connect to the cell network. There is no cell-network equivalent of "free wifi". 2. If you have a (paid) internet connection you can net anyone connect to it with their own hardware. You can't share a cell network connection that way. 3. The internet is packet-switched. The cell network is (mostly) connection-based. 4. The cell network lacks broadcast and multicast protocols. 5. Cell network connections are always peer-to-peer. You can't have a "server" on the cell network. The concept doesn't even make sense. I could go on and on.