News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ask HN: If web technologies were reinvented, what would b... by pavlov on Thursday May 07, 2015 @02:58PM (#9507421)
Any reinvention today would probably be authored either by a single large company or a committee consisting of representatives of large companies. The first option would produce a spec that addresses some specific pressing needs within the organization and provides vague architectural lip service for everything else. The second option would produce an ever-evolving compromise that's never actually finished.

The reason why we have the web today is that it was invented mostly by an unknown European scientist who just wanted to experiment with some hypertext stuff using the text APIs on his shiny new NeXT computer. No pressure, no money, no committees.

Before Berners-Lee, others tried for decades to make rich networked hypertext happen. It wasn't for a lack of rich sponsors; for example Autodesk poured money into the (in)famous Xanadu during the late '80s, but it was just too ambitious.

World Wide Web didn't have those ambitions. Reinventing it is a process that would only get initiated by a Xanadu-style overarching ambition, and it wouldn't work this time either.

Re:Ask HN: If web technologies were reinvented, what would b... by mathgeek on Thursday May 07, 2015 @05:04PM (#9508301)
You've basically described how online services started before the web came into mass usage. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe