How would you redesign the WWW (WorldWideWeb) today?

Question

Examples: - Tim Berners Lee laments how the web became predominantly read-only rather than editable (more like a wiki perhaps) and is also working on Solid (the idea that instead of having your data spread around the internet, you keep it safe in a pod and decide what sites can access), also promoted the 'semantic web'. - Marc Andreessen has mentioned payments, real identity and annotation. On the other hand was bearish on the semantic web. - Alan Kay argued for something like a self-compiling and object-oriented web in which html standards and browsers aren't necessary.For context: The WWW is over 30 and we are now so used to it that not only is it easy to forget the distinction between WWW and the Internet but also that for all the standards, protocols and working groups that exist today, at the beginning the web was little more than an app (the first browser), plus documentation on a file format that it could read (html). And like any app, specific design decisions went into it. So although much of the discussion today focuses on details of complicated standards and browser features of the existing web, I believe the thought experiment is interesting, especially now that the web has lost most of its share of internet usage to native apps anyway: Hackers, if you could redesign the whole stack of the web today from scratch - what would you do?edit - grammar, added full name 'WorldWideWeb' to make page easier to find

feliperz · Accepted Answer

As you mentioned, there seems to be a &ldquo;balkanization&rdquo; of the internet into (mostly) proprietary platforms (social networks, super apps).With the same capabilities organically emerging along everywhere (payments, real identity and reputation, media publishing, audience interaction, embedded software, services).The incentives for this is to own the audience or to own the transaction.If there were a new set of incentives, for an example if, in a next phase, a lot of the major infrastructure becomes public utilities (search, social/fan graphs, access to the phone&rsquo;s hardware capabilities, frictionless transactions)&hellip;Then it makes sense to have, once again, unified protocols. Like if the www and the app stores had a baby. Then you have the browser for this&hellip; and off you go.

PaulHoule · Answer

I think today about how to rebuild the web based on current technology. That is, the technology based into the browser offers a wide range of choices. Why not pick better from what we've got rather than build something new?

compressedgas · Answer

Uniform Resource Characteristic for a WWW with no link rot.