of time to think when you're getting
concrete ready for painting.
So I've been thinking about Gopher 2.0
/ HTML 0.5. If I understand correctly,
the consensus among the proponents of
the liminal protocol seems to be that
the it would have lesser capabilities
than the web, but more than gopher. I
think it's reasonable to state that
this seems to be a universal
assumption.
other new features, and improved
the web, designed to prevent bad
filtering/shaping (just to name a
couple).
alternative impacts how you react (and
viscerally!).
At first, because of the nature of
the proposals to be focussed on the
creation of a kind of Gopher++
(Gopher+ is already taken, so I'm
ad-libbing here). I hate that idea
because I like Gopher (it's lovely to
nhabit an online world without links
and images), and because the idea of
Gopher++ holds out the possibility of
However, when I think about the
From that perspective, it's a
Yet if viewed as web-, we do have to
the web already. That's true. The
community -- constrain the overall
mpact of the practices we don't want
mposed on us on the web.
As users, we can block the
anti-features of the web, and many of
us do. But when the majority around us
are exposed to those anti-features,
they pattern the collective mentality
and the social interactions that
visiting reddit with images turned
off. Yet everyone else is exposed to
and considering those images.
Likewise, I can peruse the web with a
avoiding, including my own experience
of it.
A new protocol -- if it is to be
on a shared vision of a good online
environment rather than technical
One of the real problems with the web
s that its capabilities are being
(and have long been) reshaped by
non-standards-based 'features' are
added into browsers as unique
additions to html, and then frequently
adopted into the html standard
afterwards. Some of you may remember
the "Best viewed in Netscape" and
"Best viewed in IE" labels on sites in
the 90s/00s. If not, you surely notice
the "works best with Chrome" messages
Could Web- and it's RFC remain in the
and I think it would be an interesting
exercise to design the standards.
Agreeing on limits, however, would not
be easy. Many of the abused features
of the web undoubtedly started out as
useful enhancements.
cookie thinking that it would be a
each visitor -- without considering
that the stored information could be
exploited in nefarious ways. Mind you,
cookies. I could be completely wrong
about their origins. But it's
conceivable that they might have been
created to serve a useful,
non-exploitative purpose.
that there would be great debates
between the enhancers and privacy
advocates in defining the protocol,
but the key thing would be to have the
community, with it's purpose being
That being said, I have a
ntended to prevent private entities
or random individuals from introducing
non-standards-based feature-creep:
non-protocol features.
a technical basis, but I think it
about how standards become abused and
broken.
