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The original idea behind the web was a publishing platform that, like a classic car, would be easy to explore, maintain and develop. The new vision is the appl

The original idea behind the web was a publishing platform that, like a classic car, would be easy to explore, maintain and develop. The new vision is the application. Whether it's on a phone, or running as a web site, these are not publishing so much as services. Perhaps it's time to fork protocols: one for publishing, one for interactive applications.

weland 13y ago
This has been on my mind, too, for a long time. Many applications don't fit the semantic framework of the WWW anyway; why not call it a day and fork it? This way the web app crowd will be able to do their somethingJS magic without worrying about what the WWW was meant to be, and the people who use WWW for publishing can get a sane platform back on track.
- hollerith 13y ago
  That would be a big win if you can pull it off. I wonder what is the best way to do it. convincing all owners of web apps to migrate to a new infrastructure strikes me as extremely hard. convincing the millions of 'publishers' of web writings (including all bloggers) to migrate sounds really hard, too.
  - pbsdp 13y ago
    What do you think 'native' platforms are? They're the platforms built to support app development.
- mbrock 13y ago
  This is all very interesting... I feel that the document-centric request-oriented nature of the web has been a powerful influence on the design of "web applications." But we still haven't really figured out how to do it. The web has been full of applications since the beginning, no? There was no golden age of pure document sharing. So much of the web throughout its history has been CGI, ASP, JSP, ad hoc setups to provide dynamic sites. Session cookies, inscrutable URLs, forms with two dozen hidden fields encoding cryptic parameters... (Here's a www-talk thread from 1993 discussing the new script support in NCSA httpd http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q4/0485.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q4/0485.ht...) But since the formulation of the REST architecture, it seems that more and more people are interested in what the WWW was meant to be. Maybe we're only beginning to understand the possible implications of the WWW design, and to purify that into a powerful conceptual framework. Does that essentially involve a text-based HTTP protocol? I don't think that's the most important part. The REST philosophy seems to say that the sane platform of the web is more crucially about clearly defined paths to typed resources providing a uniform set of actions and discoverable associations. This is not just for publishing -- what makes it so interesting and fruitful is the way it can be used to structure many kinds of applications in the form of published resources... "Calling it a day and forking it" seems in some way to mean giving up on this fruitful encounter between two paradigms. Then you get a binary socket protocol with no resource structure but with a lot of potential for shiny stuff, versus a document-centric protocol that's slower and more restricted... And then all the big players do the shiny thing, and the document protocol is left for enthusiastic hobbyists and legacy applications...
  - weland 13y ago
    > The web has been full of applications since the beginning, no? There was no golden age of pure document sharing. So much of the web throughout its history has been CGI, ASP, JSP, ad hoc setups to provide dynamic sites. Session cookies, inscrutable URLs, forms with two dozen hidden fields encoding cryptic parameters... True, but many of those dynamic pages actually had semantic meaning in their structure. Think of a discussion forum, for instance. That's a case for which the WWW is perfectly fit. > Calling it a day and forking it" seems in some way to mean giving up on this fruitful encounter between two paradigms. On the other hand, this encounter doesn't look too fruitful in applications like Google Docs, Meebo or Prezi. In the meantime, one side tries to push for things that are primarily relevant for non-semantic applications (think HTTP 2.0's binary protocol, which is all around HN nowadays), pissing off the people who primarily want to transfer semantic content, while the primarily semantic-oriented additions keep dragging the other side back. People have been building web apps with fancy UIs for almost a decade now, and there's still no decent UI builder to speak of.

weland 13y ago

This has been on my mind, too, for a long time. Many applications don't fit the semantic framework of the WWW anyway; why not call it a day and fork it? This way the web app crowd will be able to do their somethingJS magic without worrying about what the WWW was meant to be, and the people who use WWW for publishing can get a sane platform back on track.

hollerith 13y ago
That would be a big win if you can pull it off. I wonder what is the best way to do it. convincing all owners of web apps to migrate to a new infrastructure strikes me as extremely hard. convincing the millions of 'publishers' of web writings (including all bloggers) to migrate sounds really hard, too.
- pbsdp 13y ago
  What do you think 'native' platforms are? They're the platforms built to support app development.
mbrock 13y ago
This is all very interesting... I feel that the document-centric request-oriented nature of the web has been a powerful influence on the design of "web applications." But we still haven't really figured out how to do it. The web has been full of applications since the beginning, no? There was no golden age of pure document sharing. So much of the web throughout its history has been CGI, ASP, JSP, ad hoc setups to provide dynamic sites. Session cookies, inscrutable URLs, forms with two dozen hidden fields encoding cryptic parameters... (Here's a www-talk thread from 1993 discussing the new script support in NCSA httpd http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q4/0485.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q4/0485.ht...) But since the formulation of the REST architecture, it seems that more and more people are interested in what the WWW was meant to be. Maybe we're only beginning to understand the possible implications of the WWW design, and to purify that into a powerful conceptual framework. Does that essentially involve a text-based HTTP protocol? I don't think that's the most important part. The REST philosophy seems to say that the sane platform of the web is more crucially about clearly defined paths to typed resources providing a uniform set of actions and discoverable associations. This is not just for publishing -- what makes it so interesting and fruitful is the way it can be used to structure many kinds of applications in the form of published resources... "Calling it a day and forking it" seems in some way to mean giving up on this fruitful encounter between two paradigms. Then you get a binary socket protocol with no resource structure but with a lot of potential for shiny stuff, versus a document-centric protocol that's slower and more restricted... And then all the big players do the shiny thing, and the document protocol is left for enthusiastic hobbyists and legacy applications...
- weland 13y ago
  > The web has been full of applications since the beginning, no? There was no golden age of pure document sharing. So much of the web throughout its history has been CGI, ASP, JSP, ad hoc setups to provide dynamic sites. Session cookies, inscrutable URLs, forms with two dozen hidden fields encoding cryptic parameters... True, but many of those dynamic pages actually had semantic meaning in their structure. Think of a discussion forum, for instance. That's a case for which the WWW is perfectly fit. > Calling it a day and forking it" seems in some way to mean giving up on this fruitful encounter between two paradigms. On the other hand, this encounter doesn't look too fruitful in applications like Google Docs, Meebo or Prezi. In the meantime, one side tries to push for things that are primarily relevant for non-semantic applications (think HTTP 2.0's binary protocol, which is all around HN nowadays), pissing off the people who primarily want to transfer semantic content, while the primarily semantic-oriented additions keep dragging the other side back. People have been building web apps with fancy UIs for almost a decade now, and there's still no decent UI builder to speak of.