Fascinating read on Brewster Kahle’s blog (he founded the Internet Archive) about restructuring the fabric of the web to be distributed like the Internet is.
Contrast the current Web to the Internet—the network of pipes on top of which the World Wide Web sits. The Internet was designed so that if any one piece goes out, it will still function. If some of the routers that sort and transmit packets are knocked out, then the system is designed to automatically reroute the packets through the working parts of the system.
He compares that to how “the web” works:
The Web is not distributed in this way. While different websites are located all over the world, in most cases, any particular website has only one physical location. Therefore, if the hardware in that particular location is down then no one can see that website. In this way, the Web is centralized: if someone controls the hardware of a website or the communication line to a website, then they control all the uses of that website.
He goes on regarding building versioning into this new version of the web:
On library shelves, we have past editions of books, but on the Web, you don’t have past editions of websites. Everyday is a new day, unless you know to use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which may have copies of previous versions. Where the Wayback Machine was created after-the-fact to solve this problem of the current Web, in this next iteration we can build versions into the basic fabric of the Distributed Web to provide a history and reliability to our growing digital heritage.
I’m 100% on board with Kahle’s vision for a new web that has memory, versions, and is distributed.
