Reply to post: Let's take a look at Prestel/Minitel/Bildschirmtext/Ceefax

Worldwide Web wizard Tim Berners-Lee sticks wellington boot into Worldwide Web's giants: Time to break 'em up?

Christian Berger

Let's take a look at Prestel/Minitel/Bildschirmtext/Ceefax

I mean the web has some problems. Since the technology has moved from "write the structure of your document and your browser will try its best to display it" to "stack several frameworks to micromanage your webpage to it'll look acceptable even on a smartphone". Browsers today need Gigabytes of RAM, they expose very large attack surfaces by having to support things like Javascript.

What if we look into those old online services. The biggest problem was that those were controlled by the post office. This was because back in the 1970s when they were thought up, the idea of a private person owning their own computer was considered to be idiotic. Today that is a very real possibility, virtually everybody has their own computer connected to a high speed network capable of establishing a connection in milliseconds.

What few people know is that those old technologies were meant to be extended. For example the French Minitel had a provision for vector graphics. The Singapore system even had full colour photographic images. Provisions for audio have been made and adding video wouldn't be hard.

Now think of it, building a WYSIWYG editor for those old standards is near trivial. 40x24 characters also work quite well on mobile or TV-like devices. On desktop devices you can always display "successive" frames. When using this over TCP/IP(v6) speed is no issue, and since TCP/IPv6 is peer to peer it is really simple for anyone to have their own website.

Since those standards were essentially terminal protocolls, they define a captive connection. This makes session management trivial, you have one TCP connection which is one session, no cookies or other complicated stuff to get wrong. Instead you have a fairly simple program looking for key presses and sending a file.

Of course I do not claim that this is the solution from the problems of the web, however I believe that in order to find a better solution one also must know about previous attempts and how they worked.

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