This one is interesting because Alan Kay is so expressly against it ("browsers shouldn't have features"). He thinks every object should just render itself as a bitmap.
Besides, browsers do have standard components. That's what the semantic HTML tags like <button /> are. The specific views vary between browsers. Is that a problem? Regardless, almost no site uses the standard stylings that do exist. They use a de facto standard like Bootstrap, or they build their own.
I agree with some of your other points, but I don't understand your lament of "enormous complexity" while you're advocating for more features.
I'm with you in principle. I think such a modular architecture based on standard interfaces between objects is exactly what we need, but I don't see how it precludes e.g. the dominance of Google. Google dominates because they have all the search data. People don't want non-Google results in their views. Non-Google results are worse.
wikipedia defines URL as "Uniform Resource Locator", and i don't think i've ever heard "unique" in there
- reverse index to resources
- Easier to move resources
- Cryptographic signatures on id’s
"What if "data" is a really bad idea?" -- Alan Kay (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11945722)
I just don't see how he has ever pushed for the direction you're advocating. If anything, it's the opposite.
I think he's made his way into this thread, so I invite him to clarify!
And the network effects can only happen because there is a tight coupling between the data (contained and scrambled within the HTML page) and the presentation. Had data and presentation be decoupled, I could have combined network information from various providers and present it to me in one overview.
> I'll grant that CSS is a mess. What else?
Everything. The security model, the fact that the user has limited control over their identity (and it is not build into the protocols), the multi-threaded nightmare, no component standardization, very limited integration with low-level OS systems, the 'one-tab is one context' metaphor, the box-model, the misfit of page-to-interaction (and the history API), the non-existent voice interaction, the color-model, the DPI/pixels/ems transformations, the invisible local storage we barely manage, the resource utilisation, the lack of uniformity in the programming model, the peer-to-peer communication (WebRTC does not count, since it is not standardized and has quite some flaws), the lack of (easy) customization abilities (high-contrast websites), the limited math-rendering, the enourmous complexity... I could go on.
> You can create multiple URLs that point to the same object.
Yes, but they would not denote equivalence. I could use a redirect, but then one system needs to know the representation of the other. It would be fundamentally asymmetric.
Also, it would contradict the term Unique Resource Locator.