They went the simple fast way in times when changing a few completely incompatible realizations while looking for the working one was fine. People still used not just Apple and IBM PCs, but also Amiga and various kinds of Unix. Web reading via e-mail was a popular service. Many different technologies to get some connectivity to the big world. FIDO and so on.
So it probably seemed intuitive that when it becomes problematic, people will think of something better and stop using the flawed thing.
Except that assumption relied on fragmentation and incompatibility and variability, things that useful idiots for corporations were vilifying in late 90s and 00s, and managed to kill around late 00s.
So. Engagement-driven model is pretty similar to casinos. It’s profitable and anti-customer. What allows it in the Web - lack of separation between connectivity, storage and identities.
One can say it differently - the Web application layer should be higher than it is. IP and DNS can identify a site, that is, a computer or a cluster or something united. But they shouldn’t identify a website. Quite obviously. A website shouldn’t go down for the sole reason of some computer somewhere being shut down.
It also simply makes sense for the Web to work as some kind of a version control system - it just came into existence before those became the norm for things, well, requiring version control.
I don’t want to write yet another time what everyone will find by themselves in that direction of thought. In short, WWW was an experiment at networked hypertext systems, similar to Gopher, but nicer. It was intended for nice cool library things. It wasn’t intended as the “information superhighway”. Another system actually was - Usenet. Usenet lacks that flaw of the Web.
Except Usenet is morally obsolete. Some new kind of it, with cryptographic identities of users and of groups, some sort of “websites” represented by sequence of update messages in the same group (here’s version control), and probably something like realtime group chats, would be cool.
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Web architecture was flawed.
They went the simple fast way in times when changing a few completely incompatible realizations while looking for the working one was fine. People still used not just Apple and IBM PCs, but also Amiga and various kinds of Unix. Web reading via e-mail was a popular service. Many different technologies to get some connectivity to the big world. FIDO and so on.
So it probably seemed intuitive that when it becomes problematic, people will think of something better and stop using the flawed thing.
Except that assumption relied on fragmentation and incompatibility and variability, things that useful idiots for corporations were vilifying in late 90s and 00s, and managed to kill around late 00s.
So. Engagement-driven model is pretty similar to casinos. It’s profitable and anti-customer. What allows it in the Web - lack of separation between connectivity, storage and identities.
One can say it differently - the Web application layer should be higher than it is. IP and DNS can identify a site, that is, a computer or a cluster or something united. But they shouldn’t identify a website. Quite obviously. A website shouldn’t go down for the sole reason of some computer somewhere being shut down.
It also simply makes sense for the Web to work as some kind of a version control system - it just came into existence before those became the norm for things, well, requiring version control.
I don’t want to write yet another time what everyone will find by themselves in that direction of thought. In short, WWW was an experiment at networked hypertext systems, similar to Gopher, but nicer. It was intended for nice cool library things. It wasn’t intended as the “information superhighway”. Another system actually was - Usenet. Usenet lacks that flaw of the Web.
Except Usenet is morally obsolete. Some new kind of it, with cryptographic identities of users and of groups, some sort of “websites” represented by sequence of update messages in the same group (here’s version control), and probably something like realtime group chats, would be cool.