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Proposal 3 — A Soft Gooey Center |
The heart of a computer should be friendly and playful -- A place for experimentation. A place with no thorns!
One should have something like a REPL and Browser to dive into tables, objects, and stuff. Everything should start from here. Only after I'm happy with something I've done will I commit it. I can't accidentally ruin my good state in my soft gooey center -- That should give me the confidence to experiment. If I screw up my display or input I should always be able to get back to a known good state. This should be hard-wired with a dedicated button.
Let's tease apart the good parts of web browsing from the obese blob that we're used to dealing with and exile that part to a proxy in a datacenter. This proxy will act as my agent. It will handle the many connections to get resources for a webpage, keep them for eternity, because, you know, why not?... And then construct a stream of bytes to construct a webpage and send that down to my computer. My computer never needs to dirty itself with the messiness of the modern web. My proxy will also opportunistically follow links and construct the pages ahead of time and do it on a schedule for sites I visit regularly. My interface to the web will be a URL that my computer knows how to turn into a page that I can view. This URL is a native type.
If I'm happy with something I've done I can commit it and it will then be safe from further screw-ups and will be part of the stack of known good state that I can escape to.
We will take advantage of the brain's natural ability to remember the location of stuff by using an infinitely zoomable two-dimensional space to keep our working state. We take inspiration from Project Oberon's UI and John Siracusa's Spatial Finder.
One should be able to easily discover what can be done in the soft gooey center. "Oh I have a URL and here's what I can do with it. Oh I have a page of content and here's what I can do with it. Oh I have a table within the content and here's what I can do with it. Oh I have table in a spreadsheet and here's what I can do with it. Oh did this thing and I want it repeated every day and here's how I can do that." I should get that similar feeling that I get when browsing Python's Standard Library, of "Oh wow, I have magical powers available to me. I can fly."