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Discussion on: If the World Wide Web were re-created today with no legacy dependencies, how would it be different?

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mortoray profile image
edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

It'd probably be worse, since I assume it'd be some mega-corporate committee who sets about with the task of recreating it.

Look at HTML, CSS, and JS. All of these have had numerous opportunities to add clearer constructs and make things easier. Yet at every iteration they also add a bunch of nonsense and fail to address critical errors. This effect would be magnified if the same people were to recreate the entire web.

I actually don't see the problem with just deprecating old standards. Our world is changing so fast that any active service/content provider needs to make changes frequently anyway. If we wish to access old content, then we can use special legacy browsers. It's not like a Blu-Ray player can read VHS tapes, so why should a browser be able to browse content from 20 years ago.

Evolutionary design is by far the best approach, but we do need to drop compatibility with old crap. It'll also help a lot for learning, by thinning out the garbage.

But no, redesigning would be a failure. I'm pretty much against up-front designs, since they tend to fail. Everything must be evolutionary to work.

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drbearhands profile image
DrBearhands

I think you mean iterative design. AFAIK 'evolutionary' would involve having a population of solutions, that are selected based on fitness, mutated and combinated to create a new generation of solutions. Rinse & repeat. You might argue that is how human populations/companies work but it seems a bit of a stretch.