On Tue, 16 Mar 2004, Morbus Iff wrote:
> Please don't make the web a world of Geocities.
On the other hand, it has always kind of bugged me that having a fully
functional web server out of the box isn't seen as a normal part of having
interenet access, or more simply, a network connection.
I really like how, on a network full of Mac where people have web sharing
turned on, if you go into the Rendezvous link in Safari, you get to see
all your neighbor's home pages. Even if most of them are just the default
"Welcome to your new web site!" page, the fact that there's anything at
all there is nice to me. Once people get used to the idea, there's no
reason why these people wouldn't start sharing information this way.
Why isn't it like this with cable or DSL? Wouldn't it be nice if, with
your five free email addresses, every subscriber got access to a domain
name like ${account}.home.${isp}.net, on which they could put up their
pictures of the cat or the newborn or the honeymoon in Paris that no one
but their friends & family would care about? I think so.
You're right that things like backup & security are real problems, and I
suppose an environment like the one I'm picturing would be vulnerable to
web server worms in the same way that unpatched Outlook clients allow for
all the mail worms we se all the time. But I'm sure it can be done Right.
Oh well. That Internet died a long time ago, didn't it?
Tim Berners-Lee must be disappointed, at least on some level...
--
Chris Devers
