[Edu-sig] Alan Kay - another one of his ideas

[Ian Bicking]

Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
>   In regards to the "is the web good?" discussion.  Sure, the web is
> good, but it could have been much better.  For an historical account,
> the idea of "objects that talk to each other bi-directionally over the
> network" weren't new by the time HTTP was created.  In fact, when the
> word "hypertext" was invented, Ted Nelson surely wanted the things on
> the net connected bi-directionally.  (And ACM Hypertext conference
> predates HTTP, etc., etc.)

The whole Ajax thing is really centered around that bi-directional web, 
and the recent discovery of the previously-ignored XMLHttpRequest which 
lets Javascript initiate new requests.

Of course, as these things go it's still relatively crude, and currently 
hooking things together means lots of crufty-looking scripts.  But then, 
I think the natural way to hook things together on the web is 
declarative anyway, and maybe the natural way to think about HTTP is as 
resources not objects, and I suspect that leads to some substantive 
differences with Squeak's model.

I actually started playing around with these ideas some this weekend at 
a local conference, using DOM objects as the basic kind of object 
(Javascript objects show up too, but just as transient implementation 
details).  It's just a toy a couple of us are messing around with at 
this point, and we haven't gotten far enough into the implementation to 
see what the hardest parts of the problem are yet, but I'm hopeful.

One thing that occurs to me that defines the web is how 
transaction-oriented it is.  So no *one* person has a hold on any 
object; everyone actually just gets a browser-local copy of the objects, 
and may try to commit changes to the server.  This is probably very 
different from how Squeak works as well.  But, of course, it scales way 
better because it is so optimized for reading, and it's quite unclear to 
me if a "better" web is actually feasible from a performance and 
management perspective (certainly Ted Nelson's transclusion seems absurd 
given the instability of content on the web that we should now accept as 
inevitable).

...Incidentally, while we were looking at some possible examples people 
might write in this Javascript system, we'd write something out in 
Javascript and then look at it and despair that it seemed quite unlikely 
a non-programmer would ever come up with the right incantation -- that's 
somewhere where the LogoWiki language implementation could offer a 
really nice alternative.  Of course, we are just now starting to see 
reasonable debugging interfaces for Javascript that aren't too heavy or 
too obscure, and this'll mean giving up even that... :(


-- 
Ian Bicking  |  ianb at colorstudy.com  |  http://blog.ianbicking.org