This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

The W3C is broken: it has spent the last 10 years standardizing <i>ideas</i> instead of <i>existing practice</i>. This is totally backwards and leads to standards that are too complicated, unrealistic, and in many cases not needed at all.<p>The W3C was originally created to standardize HTML, which was already being used by many vendors and users but in incompatible ways. That is exactly the right situation for creating a standard. It leads to standards that are realistic and motivated by a demonstrated need.<p>Unfortunately, almost everything else the W3C has ever done has happened in the opposite direction: in response to an <i>idea</i> or a <i>perceived</i> need, some people theorize about the best way to solve the problem and then write a document that a bunch of vendors are supposed to then implement from scratch.<p>This is how we ended up with the XML stack, which was designed to solve the data interchange problem but ended up being a disaster of complexity, inefficiency, and ad hoc implementations.<p>Even the case of CSS (which has been quite successful) is sub-optimal IMO, because it didn't choose to standardize the existing practice of how people were using tables for layout. The CSS box model makes it stupidly difficult to do things that are trivial with table-based layouts, like a a three column layout (which is considered a "holy grail" by even CSS advocates: <a href="http://www.alistapart.com/articles/holygrail/" rel="nofollow">http://www.alistapart.com/articles/holygrail/</a>).<p>CSS could have used a table-like layout model that makes it easy to arrange &#60;div&#62;s into rows and columns, allowing a smooth upgrade from people who were using the &#60;table&#62; tag. Instead they invented something new that was much more difficult to design for, creating an unnecessary tension between web standards advocates and people who just wanted to get things done.<p>Standards should codify and refine existing practice, not attempt to invent new things.

I've been thinking about this sort of thing a lot lately. Sugar (<a href="http://www.sugarlabs.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.sugarlabs.org/</a>) get a lot of things right in terms of p2p user interaction. If you want to, say, edit a document with a friend you just click invite and Sugar will handle everything else. It will even send them a copy of the editor app if they don't have it installed.<p>I think developing small-scale p2p apps (eg IM, 1-1 audio/video, multiplayer-editors ala etherpad) can be made a lot easier than it is today. My rough plan of attack is to use erl-telehash (<a href="https://github.com/jamii/erl-telehash" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jamii/erl-telehash</a>) for addressing and NAT traversal with something similar to bloom (<a href="http://www.bloom-lang.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bloom-lang.net/</a>) for coordination / logging / debugging. Add libraries for at-least-once messaging, leader election and operational transform. Maybe piggyback on chromeos or android to get secure p2p app installation.<p>I also had some thoughts about the CALM hypothesis (<a href="http://www.bloom-lang.net/calm/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bloom-lang.net/calm/</a>) which I haven't seen mentioned in the literature. A monotonic bloom program is one in which every delivery order for a given set of messages results in the same state. For many protocols what I actually care about is that every possible end state is equivalent, for some protocol-specific notion of equivalence. For example, for leader election all I care about is that every end state should have exactly one leader. Monotonic programs are easy to model check and I think explicitly stating the desired equivalence relations will reduce the state space explosion at points of order. It might be possible to get good results from a very simple/naive model checker by exploiting this.<p>Not hugely related to the article, but its been on my mind a lot lately.

As the comments point out, this is not a generic decentralised web standard to get around ICE and the like, but just a specification for p2p audio/video/etc communications for online video conferencing and so on. Not as big as I hoped.

freenet and other services already do this. You can already use your browser to browse freenet, if you get the freenet program. They recommend using Chrome in Incognito mode for maximum privacy.<p>And it is impervious to DNS takedowns and you can even set up a darknet. It's used in China a lot. Also Perfect Dark is used. They operate on distributed hash tables. The problem is that without a central server, the only way you can connect to the hive is by hoping one of the last known hosts is still up. It also needs to use heuristics for routing.

Less corporate/company crap, more independent ideas please. Things like Freenet, GNUNet, etc. have the right idea for decentralization, same with more specific projects like Appleseed, StatusNet, etc.

Flash supports peer-to-peer communication since Flash Player 10 using RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol).

I wonder how easily man-in-the-middle attacks via node spoofing would be.<p>You masquerade as a node by re-hosting their content and you capture any other client that accesses your proxy of that information.

&#62;Opera is always several years ahead of its time<p>Except in adoption rates.

Freedombox foundation is trying to achieve the same end result.

Tonido (<a href="http://www.tonido.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.tonido.com</a>) is a pioneer in this space. They have invented the model much before opera unit. The cool thing is that Tonido also provides a decentralized openid to end users.<p>Firefox should buy Tonido. It will change the industry if it happens and the way people share information. I probably may be little ahead. If you think deeply it will make sense.