alt Hacker NewsYou can't fix a broken wheel. Let the downvotes illustrating the ignorance of HN pop culture start....
This web link post, the original NEXT webbrowser as a web page, tries to celebrate and revive the reinvention of the broken wheel.
The World Wide Web, browser and html standards are a very broken wheel. Alan Kay, the inventor of personal computing, explains why:
https://youtu.be/FvmTSpJU-Xc?t=961
Some of the comments of youtube are fun too.
This lecture Alan aimed at this particular audience, the computer science (programming) students at University of Illinois, where they programmed the second browser, the second broken wheel 20 years after Alan and Dan had showed them how do do it better.
Dan Ingalls implemented most of Alan Kay's invention of the personal computer, in the following demo's he shows how to fix the webbrowser's broken wheel a bit.
The Lively Kernel would be another way to fix html but retain the web. Two demos says it all:
https://youtu.be/gGw09RZjQf8?t=147
https://youtu.be/QTJRwKOFddc?t=234
Their Squeak, Etoys and Croquet fixed it completely:
Early Croquet demo (there are several others): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZO7av2ZFB8
Croquet in webbrowser: https://codefrau.github.io/jasmine/
Demo of webbrowser replacement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s9ldlqhVkM
Squeak and all its predecessors: https://smalltalkzoo.computerhistory.org
Etoys: https://squeak.js.org/etoys/
> The Lively Kernel would be another way to fix html but retain the web.
The Web is not HTML (and it's not JavaScript). It's URLs. It's a machine-readable graph of clickable references on cross-linked Works Cited pages. It's certainly not Smalltalk-over-the-Internet, and it's not trying to be (at least it wasn't when TBL created it).
The biggest problem facing the Web in the 90s and still today is that everyone who saw it then hallucinated TBL describing an SRI-/PARC-style application platform because that's what they wanted it to be—including people like Alan Kay—who then perversely go on to criticize it for being so unaligned with that vision.
It is both surprising and unsurprising (given this reaction) that the industry managed to make it all the way through the 90s without Wikipedia showing up until after the crash.