On Sat, 29 Dec 2001, Chen Yixiong, Eric wrote:
> From useless and discarded pages to spam, the Web is showing clear
There's now http spam? Wow. I presume he means ads, especially the popup
variety. (Some jokers will even attempt crashing your machine by keeping
opening up new windows, another good reason to disable ECMA/JavaScript.
> signs of decay, says John Dvorak. But is there anything we can do
> about it?
The browser wars and consumers clamoring for features make the world wide
web an increasingly balkanized environment (for the same reason the
browser as an ubiquitous all-purpose client becomes rapidly uninteresting,
due to severe incompatibilities and combinatorial explosion rendering
testing prohibitively expensive).
So, we need standards. Noncommercial standards, of course, ones immune to
customer base locking as being practiced by all major players. Mozilla and
Galeon could become rather important here.
As to search engines, Google is doing okay now, but we need full text
indexing built into all mainstream web servers, including P2P search
engines.
We also need micrograin digicash for resource allocation and load
levelling, as pioneered by Mojo Nation. I would still like to see more
disciplines adopting a grassroot publishing approach to papers
publication, as pioneered by http://xxx.lanl.gov .
Furthermore, we need to make content immune to filtering and persistant.
The best approaches to date are Mojo Nation http://www.mojonation.net
(they're down for the moment) and Freenet http://freenetproject.org/
They're rather useful already, and I hope at some point will migrate into
default installation of open source OSses. (Redmond won't do this, because
they're now into content control, so empowerment of the end user runs
contrary to their business goals).
And, of course, we need people to still believe into voicing their
thoughts publicly. There's far too much frivolous content out there, and
the effort going into creating a set of pages looks like too much work for
too many people.
Btw, I've recently started looking into different web hosts, and stuck
with http://phpwebhosting.com . Their $9.95/month plan looks rather good,
considering the features. You'll still need a registrar, of course, if you
want your own domain and not blahblah.phpwebhosting.com . I'm rather happy
with http://totalnic.net/ , but there are probably cheaper registrars than
that by now.
So, what can you do about it? Create nontrivial online content. Keep it
small, but high quality. And make it a habit updating it.
-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat May 11 2002 - 17:44:32 MDT