3 ms·

> The car works best as a transportation device. This is only true if you constrain the "car" to mean the Henry Ford, transport-centric engine-and-chassis. Th

by weland 11y ago

> The car works best as a transportation device. This is only true if you constrain the "car" to mean the Henry Ford, transport-centric engine-and-chassis. The "car" also means the whole transportation stack: pavement, asphalt, road signaling, etc. In that case, the car is a foundation tool for anything that transports people or inanimate objects. To say the "car works best as a transportation device" is like saying "the electricity grid works best as a lightbulb platform." We've gotten past the historical motivations of a horseless carriage and have done other things with it.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mreiland 11y ago
lmao, stop beating architecture astronauts at their own game!
jasode 11y ago
I'm not saying I like for "the web" to be interchangeable with "the internet". Instead, I'm pointing out that the world out there without permission from any savvy HN readers has moved on. The "web" has become the "internet" for both documents and applications. It's descriptive, not prescriptive. (See my other replies to illustrate how usage of http has evolved to coexist with corporate firewalls that lock down ports.)
- weland 11y ago
  > Instead, I'm pointing out that the world out there without permission from any savvy HN readers has moved on. The world has not moved on. Part of the world has dug itself into a technological hole. Most of the people who work in it have never seen what's outside it, so they think the solution to all their problems is to keep digging. Edit: crap, I sounded so snarky and aggressive. Sorry about that. It's not something personal -- I obviously got the point that you don't think everything about that is a good idea. The point I'm trying to make is that not ever technological move is necessarily a "good" evolution. Every narrow street in technology was once thought to be a superhighway that everyone flocked to. I remember everyone being so bloody enthusiastic about this whole Web 2.0 thing back then (and I was one of them). Then all this data crumbled as people paid less and less attention to information structure and semantics and focused on the flashy stuff. Then it turned out a lot of problems were intractable if you clung tightly to JS, CSS and the web browser. Yet for some reason, people thought those problems happen just because we don't cling tightly enough to JS, CSS and web browsers. Oh -- and twenty years after operating systems that aren't full of memory leaks, security problems (eh...) and performance clunks became reasonably accessible to people everywhere, people are trying to promote ditching those for web browsers. Which, I would estimate, will need another twenty years or so to stop having memory leaks, dubious security and privacy practices, and embarrassing performance clunks.
  - jasode 11y ago
    >The world has not moved on. To clarify, I'm not saying "moved on" as an objective measure of superior technical progress. The "moved on" is referencing a descriptive (not prescriptive) state of affairs with how the world now defines "the web". The existence of sliding around map tiles in maps.google.com, syncing folders in Dropbox, etc is evidence that the world does not think of "web" the way Tim Berners-Lee thought of hyperlinked documents in 1993.
    - weland 11y ago
      Yes, but whatever that is should not be called "web", just like we call "cars"... "cars", not "carriages", though they may look like it. "The web" is defined by a set of traits (hyperlinks etc.). When whatever we're doing stops having those traits, it's no longer the web. Continuing to call it "the web" is not some form of philosophical awareness, it's just ignorance.
      - jasode 11y ago
        But "computer" used to mean a "person who calculates" and not a "machine that calculates". All of us call modern day devices with CPUs a "computer" even though it lost the essence of "human". The usage of words evolve. I 100% agree that ""The web" is defined by a set of traits (hyperlinks etc.)". I'm also adding that "web" also now includes expanded perceptions by everyone else beyond "hyperlinks+http" and that enlarged perception is unavoidable. We could ask the world at large to *not" call it "web" but that's like asking us to quit calling "machine calculator" a "computer". Sometimes we invent a new word, but many times we don't. Yes, a person uses a "web" browser to read a "document" on New York Times. But they can also use that same browser to play a Sudoku game that's not a document at all. To the layman, both actions are "surfing the web".
        weland 11y ago
        By the time electronic computers became widespread, very few non-electronic computers remained -- and few of them were human. The term was easy to repurpose. But the World Wide Web is very much here and very present. > To the layman, both actions are "surfing the web". To the layman, a server and a computer are the same thing, and yet calling Apache a computer is incorrect.

by weland 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

mreiland 11y ago

lmao, stop beating architecture astronauts at their own game!

jasode 11y ago

I'm not saying I like for "the web" to be interchangeable with "the internet". Instead, I'm pointing out that the world out there without permission from any savvy HN readers has moved on. The "web" has become the "internet" for both documents and applications. It's descriptive, not prescriptive. (See my other replies to illustrate how usage of http has evolved to coexist with corporate firewalls that lock down ports.)

weland 11y ago
> Instead, I'm pointing out that the world out there without permission from any savvy HN readers has moved on. The world has not moved on. Part of the world has dug itself into a technological hole. Most of the people who work in it have never seen what's outside it, so they think the solution to all their problems is to keep digging. Edit: crap, I sounded so snarky and aggressive. Sorry about that. It's not something personal -- I obviously got the point that you don't think everything about that is a good idea. The point I'm trying to make is that not ever technological move is necessarily a "good" evolution. Every narrow street in technology was once thought to be a superhighway that everyone flocked to. I remember everyone being so bloody enthusiastic about this whole Web 2.0 thing back then (and I was one of them). Then all this data crumbled as people paid less and less attention to information structure and semantics and focused on the flashy stuff. Then it turned out a lot of problems were intractable if you clung tightly to JS, CSS and the web browser. Yet for some reason, people thought those problems happen just because we don't cling tightly enough to JS, CSS and web browsers. Oh -- and twenty years after operating systems that aren't full of memory leaks, security problems (eh...) and performance clunks became reasonably accessible to people everywhere, people are trying to promote ditching those for web browsers. Which, I would estimate, will need another twenty years or so to stop having memory leaks, dubious security and privacy practices, and embarrassing performance clunks.
- jasode 11y ago
  >The world has not moved on. To clarify, I'm not saying "moved on" as an objective measure of superior technical progress. The "moved on" is referencing a descriptive (not prescriptive) state of affairs with how the world now defines "the web". The existence of sliding around map tiles in maps.google.com, syncing folders in Dropbox, etc is evidence that the world does not think of "web" the way Tim Berners-Lee thought of hyperlinked documents in 1993.
  - weland 11y ago
    Yes, but whatever that is should not be called "web", just like we call "cars"... "cars", not "carriages", though they may look like it. "The web" is defined by a set of traits (hyperlinks etc.). When whatever we're doing stops having those traits, it's no longer the web. Continuing to call it "the web" is not some form of philosophical awareness, it's just ignorance.
    - jasode 11y ago
      But "computer" used to mean a "person who calculates" and not a "machine that calculates". All of us call modern day devices with CPUs a "computer" even though it lost the essence of "human". The usage of words evolve. I 100% agree that ""The web" is defined by a set of traits (hyperlinks etc.)". I'm also adding that "web" also now includes expanded perceptions by everyone else beyond "hyperlinks+http" and that enlarged perception is unavoidable. We could ask the world at large to *not" call it "web" but that's like asking us to quit calling "machine calculator" a "computer". Sometimes we invent a new word, but many times we don't. Yes, a person uses a "web" browser to read a "document" on New York Times. But they can also use that same browser to play a Sudoku game that's not a document at all. To the layman, both actions are "surfing the web".
      - weland 11y ago
        By the time electronic computers became widespread, very few non-electronic computers remained -- and few of them were human. The term was easy to repurpose. But the World Wide Web is very much here and very present. > To the layman, both actions are "surfing the web". To the layman, a server and a computer are the same thing, and yet calling Apache a computer is incorrect.