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The deployment procedure is too complex. Have we learned nothing in the past 30 years? One of the major shortcomings of the WWW is that it requires technical s

by imiric 2y ago

The deployment procedure is too complex. Have we learned nothing in the past 30 years? One of the major shortcomings of the WWW is that it requires technical skills to publish content. If this was as simple as consuming it, and we had the equivalent UX as the web browser, the centralization we got and all its associated problems would've been minimized, if not avoided altogether. Maintaining the P2P distributed nature of the internet is crucial in protocols of this type. Otherwise once (if) it ever gains traction, the alternative will have the same problems. Gemini doesn't address these issues directly, other than by being very niche and deliberately brutalist. This means it was never designed to be popular, so this article will not appeal to anyone who doesn't already have an interest in it. Let alone entice anyone to escape the current web. Yes, the current web is deeply broken beyond repair. Using it is a hostile and frustrating experience. I'm not sure what the solution to these problems is, but it's certainly not Gemini.

spc476 2y ago
We've forgotten. Back in the mid-90s, most ISPs gave space to users to host a website. There were produts like Dreamweaver and (although I hate mentioning it) Microsoft FrontPage that provided WYSIWYG editing of HTML and used FTP to upload the pages to the server (although using FTP was usually an implementation detail, I think FrontPage had its own way of uploading). Easy. > Yes, the current web is deeply broken beyond repair. Which web are you referring to? The document web from the 90s to early 2000s, or the now app-centric web we have now? If TBL's view of the web emerged, you wouldn't need a separate tool to author web pages, the browser could do it, and use PUT to store new pages on a web site. But alas, we don't have browsers capable of editing (but we can always download a gig of Javascript to do it! Yeah! That'll work!)
- hnbear 2y ago
  > But alas, we don't have browsers capable of editing Don’t anymore. Didn’t Netscape Navigator have a full editor in it? The big bloated one that begat Firefox as the slimmed down one. But like you said, WYSIWYG HTML editors were common in those days.
- imiric 2y ago
  > Back in the mid-90s, most ISPs gave space to users to host a website. There were produts like Dreamweaver [...] Those tools and services were still too limiting and complicated. Why would I need to use a separate protocol to upload my content to someone else's machine which will then serve it for me? My domain name and server configuration would still be controlled by someone else. These solutions were made in response to something the web was missing, but they were far from ideal, and would later become the cause of the major problems we deal with today. The limited upload bandwidth and network infrastructure are often brought up as reasons in this discussion, but ISPs only offered what users demanded, which in turn was driven by what was technically possible. Had there been demand for symmetric connections and home servers, we would've standardized on that much earlier. > Which web are you referring to? The document web from the 90s to early 2000s, or the now app-centric web we have now? The current web TFA criticizes. But the design of the early document web is what allowed it to get to this point. > If TBL's view of the web emerged, you wouldn't need a separate tool to author web pages, the browser could do it, and use PUT to store new pages on a web site. I don't think that vision was ever developed in detail. The original proposal[1] mentions a phase 2 of the project where "authorship becomes universal", but that was never implemented AFAIA. The entire concept is very vaguely described. I imagine that the complexity of that phase far exceeded phase 1, which pushed it back, and eventually sites like GeoCities and Tripod appeared to fill the void. By that time the momentum was gaining ground, and any web-native solution would've been difficult to launch. I think this was a major misstep which led to hyper centralization, provided a huge opportunity for advertisers, and the rest is history. TBL is only recently trying to fix this with his Solid project, but it's too little, too late. Over the years we've also had several attempts at something similar, like Opera's Unite, but none of them gained traction. And now we have the fediverse, and all kinds of decentralized protocols, but they're all focused on the technology rather than the user experience, so I'm not hopeful that they will succeed. [1] : http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Proposal.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Proposal.html
  - spc476 2y ago
    I don't think Dreamweaver was "too complicated" [1] and I recall seeing tons of sites in the 90s, some managed by hand, some by program (whether custom written or commercial). Yes, that might have been early adapters of technology, but I recall seeing web sites from as many non-technical people as technical (and I'm not talking about GeoCites either). Hindsight is always 20/20. I don't think it was centralization via GeoCities and Tripod was a major misstep. Yes, possibly a misstep, but there were several along the way (Javascript and Active-X are two that come to mind). [1] Just how stupid do we need to assume a user is? A person who has never seen a phone would still need training on how to use it, and that's not a hard thing to use at all.

by imiric 2y ago

spc476 2y ago

We've forgotten. Back in the mid-90s, most ISPs gave space to users to host a website. There were produts like Dreamweaver and (although I hate mentioning it) Microsoft FrontPage that provided WYSIWYG editing of HTML and used FTP to upload the pages to the server (although using FTP was usually an implementation detail, I think FrontPage had its own way of uploading). Easy. > Yes, the current web is deeply broken beyond repair. Which web are you referring to? The document web from the 90s to early 2000s, or the now app-centric web we have now? If TBL's view of the web emerged, you wouldn't need a separate tool to author web pages, the browser could do it, and use PUT to store new pages on a web site. But alas, we don't have browsers capable of editing (but we can always download a gig of Javascript to do it! Yeah! That'll work!)

hnbear 2y ago
> But alas, we don't have browsers capable of editing Don’t anymore. Didn’t Netscape Navigator have a full editor in it? The big bloated one that begat Firefox as the slimmed down one. But like you said, WYSIWYG HTML editors were common in those days.
imiric 2y ago
> Back in the mid-90s, most ISPs gave space to users to host a website. There were produts like Dreamweaver [...] Those tools and services were still too limiting and complicated. Why would I need to use a separate protocol to upload my content to someone else's machine which will then serve it for me? My domain name and server configuration would still be controlled by someone else. These solutions were made in response to something the web was missing, but they were far from ideal, and would later become the cause of the major problems we deal with today. The limited upload bandwidth and network infrastructure are often brought up as reasons in this discussion, but ISPs only offered what users demanded, which in turn was driven by what was technically possible. Had there been demand for symmetric connections and home servers, we would've standardized on that much earlier. > Which web are you referring to? The document web from the 90s to early 2000s, or the now app-centric web we have now? The current web TFA criticizes. But the design of the early document web is what allowed it to get to this point. > If TBL's view of the web emerged, you wouldn't need a separate tool to author web pages, the browser could do it, and use PUT to store new pages on a web site. I don't think that vision was ever developed in detail. The original proposal[1] mentions a phase 2 of the project where "authorship becomes universal", but that was never implemented AFAIA. The entire concept is very vaguely described. I imagine that the complexity of that phase far exceeded phase 1, which pushed it back, and eventually sites like GeoCities and Tripod appeared to fill the void. By that time the momentum was gaining ground, and any web-native solution would've been difficult to launch. I think this was a major misstep which led to hyper centralization, provided a huge opportunity for advertisers, and the rest is history. TBL is only recently trying to fix this with his Solid project, but it's too little, too late. Over the years we've also had several attempts at something similar, like Opera's Unite, but none of them gained traction. And now we have the fediverse, and all kinds of decentralized protocols, but they're all focused on the technology rather than the user experience, so I'm not hopeful that they will succeed. [1] : http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Proposal.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Proposal.html
- spc476 2y ago
  I don't think Dreamweaver was "too complicated" [1] and I recall seeing tons of sites in the 90s, some managed by hand, some by program (whether custom written or commercial). Yes, that might have been early adapters of technology, but I recall seeing web sites from as many non-technical people as technical (and I'm not talking about GeoCites either). Hindsight is always 20/20. I don't think it was centralization via GeoCities and Tripod was a major misstep. Yes, possibly a misstep, but there were several along the way (Javascript and Active-X are two that come to mind). [1] Just how stupid do we need to assume a user is? A person who has never seen a phone would still need training on how to use it, and that's not a hard thing to use at all.