Ian Hickson (“Hixie” — WHATWG specification editor, CSS2.1 co-editor and Google’s W3C representative) recently published an interesting post on Google+. He’s occasionally contacted by people suggesting a better alternative to HTML but, in all cases, none have come close. Ian states that any technology would need to satisfy at least five objectives to displace existing web technologies:

   Be devoid of licensing requirements.
   Be vendor-neutral and accept input from everyone.
   Be device and media-neutral; it should work on PCs, TVs, mobiles, tablets, screen readers and any future hardware.
   Be content-neutral and not restrict itself to types of document or application.
   Be radically better than the existing web in every way; faster, more usable, more features, easier to develop, easier to monetize, etc.


   HTML can fail objectives two and three. Technologies such as XHTML2 and XForms only satisfied one and three. Java and Flash struggle in all areas — and I’d also add Google’s Dart to that list.

I don't really have any coherent picture but I would like to see these ideas I think:

- Anti-commercial/anti-tracking: maybe requiring some sort of open-source license for all published content that makes it harder to commercially exploit the information, ideally this would be by and for the community, especially in light of recent aggressive LLM-training crawling. I would also like to exclude advertisement and tracking.

- Browser-less: The idea would be to do away with the complexity of the modern web (as people say, browsers are basically operating systems), back to more of its hyper-text roots. Simple documents, mostly textual information. I could imagine a mix of basic markdown and some pre-wired complex/interactive views like "forum" or "blog" and so on (differences in how data is loaded, presented, ...) - the idea would be to implement the "app" part in the browser-replacement and not in the web-page itself if that makes sense. This would lead to more uniformity but that might be a good thing. I'm not even sure if/how images would fit in or videos.

- Peer-to-peer?: Hosting should be as simple as hitting a "publish" button on an article. I like the idea of decentralization, so maybe there could be some sort of peer-to-peer federation where users could "host" content that they've read, liked or general content that's part of a certain (sub-) community. This might require some ranking like HN or a similar mechanism to (unfortunately) censor certain content if the community would not believe it to match their values - so not ultimate freedom. P2P would be more about decentralization, and maybe anti-tracking than pure censorship-resistance.

A session might look like opening the "non-browser" app - it would be fast and require very little memory. Then you'd select or type a community/site and you view of all the content with filters and sorts, depending on the community/site's "template" (again, this is not JS/HTML - basically a native form rendered directly if you will). When you feel like it, you click the "create" button, a text-area + preview pops up and you write your post or article in markdown. When happy, you "publish" and it gets slowly disseminated through all the P2P nodes of your community. This could encompass communities like HN or reddit even if the voting mechanics are worked out, personal blogs, ... but would probably exclude e-commerce stores or video sites because the engine would be potentially too simplistic - and that's fine by me.

For the bleakest of disasters, bandwidth would be a premium but a lot can still be done without bandwidth hogging scrip overheads, so site developers just need to include a low bandwidth fall back for the basics - I dare say it might even be lest costly for the LLM scrapers if it were widly adopted. I'd suggest for an idea of basics touring some sites where each page has a small footprint [1] [2] [3] [4] ... I recall days on dialup 3 KB/s - a meg was a wait-a-while.

However I don't hold much hope, generally, things only happen out of necessity.

[1] https://github.com/bradleytaunt/1kb.club

[2] https://250kb.club/

[3] https://512kb.club/

[4] https://1mb.club/

> So what is Thinnernet? Imagine a fiber optic bundle of undersea cables- maybe a hundred or so 10Gbps cables comprising....

and the question goes unanswered. is it a protocol? physical layer? guideline? no idea.

Remember that the world wide web is just one of insanely many application-level protocols that can be run over the internet infrastructure.

https://github.com/mjdave/katipo

https://internet2.edu/network/

Is this a reference to “antennagate”[0], when Jobs dismissed an affected user telling them to “just avoid holding it that way”[1]?

> because 3G technology at the time wasn't robust, and one shouldn't have expected him to have all the solutions that were out of his control

If so, this is an incredibly bad take. Lots of other phones had implemented good 3G connectivity at the time, including Apple's own prior iPhone. Apple made a mistake here, and the takeaway should be that corporate hubris is real and companies aren't your friends, not some cockamamie prattle about how we should accept bad products because technology is hard, boo hoo.

> had Jobs lived to 70 or 80

Jobs' own death is another fine demonstration of his arrogance. Very ironic to refer to it in this paragraph.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_4#Antenna

1: https://www.macrumors.com/2010/06/24/steve-jobs-describes-ip...