MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA Keeping the internet, and the content that makes it a vital and vibrant part of our global society, free and accessible has

  • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Fair points. Talking of revolution was indeed a bit vague.

    Perhaps I am just more conservative in temperament. I focus on the value in keeping things and improving them. Software lends itself to iterative development where the result can still end up being revolutionary. So my intuition is that if there’s a problem with HTTP then let’s solve that problem rather than throwing the whole thing out and losing all its accrued value. In this case 3 decades of web archives and the skills capital of all the people who make it work.

    Sure, HTTP is suboptimal, and as a sometime web developer I can see that HTML is verbose and ugly and was only chosen because XML was fashionable back then. Even the domain name system suffers from original sin: the TLDs should come first, not last!

    Human culture is messy. Throwing things out is risky and even reckless given that the alternative is all but certain not to work out as imagined. Much safer to build upon and improve things than to destroy them.