Remember to listen to the credentialed experts, such as Hal Berghel, Ph.D. computer nerd. A 1995 academic paper… “The inevitable demise of the Web”:
There is no doubt that the fastest growing part of the Internet is the World Wide Web. From its inception in 1990, the Web has established itself as the leading packet hauler on the Internet, passing beyond FTP, Telnet, WAIS Gopher and all of the other, more established Internet client protocols. The reason for this success is that the Web has established itself as the standard unifying environment for the Internet’s digital riches.However, the days of the Web are numbered. The technology behind the Web is outdated already and may not survive the decade. The current growth rate, which some estimate at 15% per month, suggests that if the end of the Web is to come soon, it will likely be cataclysmal. If this seems unrealistic, consider that this fate befell Gopherspace. As Figure 1 shows, Gopher lead the Web in packet volume as late as March, 1994. In the following twelve months Gopher presence on the Internet all but disappeared. Life cycles are accelerated to frightening paces on the Internet.
Dr. Berghel predicts that, with a little more innovation (from funded academic research?), the muscular connection-oriented Hyper-G protocol will crush HTTP and Java will replace HTML.
Saw Netscape founder Mark Andreesssen talking about how http+html came to rule the world. He explained how every good engineer knows that binary is the most efficient transport for data, and that messages must always have exactly correct syntax. But he says they explicitly went against those ideas, choosing ease of use instead. So they chose text (http) instead of binary, and put hundreds of hacks into Netscape so that improper and/or incomplete html would still render nicely.
do you always talk about your self in the 3rd person?
When size matters, binary is incorporated into HTTP , via POST which posts binary data. Similar for GET, http response allows retrieving binary data
As a minor celebrity, he can!
Obama always says, if you wanna keep your snottiness, you can keep your snottiness.
I think A8n knows that his first name is Marc.
How the demise of google? I’ve replaced at least 50% of daily google searches in my technical work with AI (using http://www.perplexity.ai, doesn’t require signup like ChatGPT).
Prompt: “jd rockefeller walking the streets of cleveland looking for a job”
Bleh response:
*Each day Rockefeller put on a dark suit, shaved, shined his shoes, and hit the pavement making inquiries about town [ie, Cleveland]. Thus from morning until later afternoon, six days a week, for six weeks, Rockefeller continued to seek a position. Finally, on September 26, 1855, he heard the words he’d been waiting for: “We’ll give you a chance”*
…
.
*There are no search results that suggest that John D. Rockefeller walked the streets of Cleveland looking for a job.*
We hardly ever hear about protocol wars nowadays. The news is always about AI but never tensorflow vs pytorch, opencl vs CUDA. Lions missed out on the blockchain craze, but it undoubtedly had many competing protocols.
Yes, everyone wants their own walled garden. So they hire a huge number of open source developers who create gigantic monoliths and evangelize the product, until the product is scrapped. Rinse, repeat.
Compared to the massive Javascript frameworks that simulate state or the secure (trust us!) WASM, one could get nostalgic about Java applets.
Personally, I could live without all of that. Simple HTML is enough.
Java UI is terribly slow
You could integrate applets into the DOM API, using the browser’s UI. Cleaner than what we have now, but of course also with security risks.
Prime example of academia non-professionalism and luck of focus. FTP and Telnet traffic contrasted to WWW. FTP and Telnet were non-protected Base64 giant security threats for a duration of entire generation.
To be fair, a lot of apps (Instagram comes to mind) are mostly mobile apps, with their web interfaces existing as kind of vestigial for most people.
As if on cue, “Threads” doesn’t apparently have a web app (although it’s really a sub-app of instagram, so we will see) https://www.yankodesign.com/2023/07/07/the-threads-app-is-filled-with-deceptive-dark-design-patterns-we-spotted-more-than-ten/
There are a few shopping apps which are basically mobile-only, and venmo is pretty much, too.
“But they use http APIs internally”! Do they? Does it matter?
When I snoop on mobile users in public, they are as a rule watching a video about makeup, making a loud video call, texting secret lovers, etc. Not really a lot of ‘web’ per se.
The best way to track web usage is by web server installations and traffic, and both are staggering.