What the UTTER fuck are you even agreeing with? X11 was a FULLY NETWORKED CLIENT / SERVER protocol builtin the 80s to PRECISELY DO EXACTLY THAT.
They have been imagining the separation of interface from the software since the 50s and had working technology at least in the 80s, although I am not aware of any similar implementations to X11 in the 70s. Might Xerox Parc built some stuff already?
Http as a protocol was one guy in the 80s sitting around going, I am employed by this nicely funded government scientific agency, I have a network of computers here, how do I share my files with everyone? Oh, I know, I will just do what everyone had been theorizing in scientific and math circles since the 50s and just implement a simple file sharing protocol based around the musing of lots of people in the 20 years before including Ted Nelsons ideas that wrote about this in the 60s all of which was perhaps influenced by people that dreamed about this sort of stuff in the 40s and earlier.
I mean, I know what you mean about simplicity but the web was not designed for anything. It was an accidental creation of limited minds working with limited technologies all sitting on top of theoretical and practical work at had existed for a long time before we got access to it.
I was going to mention X11/X Windows, but I didn't want to stir up shit with that because it isn't fully what we would need now. We need a hybrid of X11 that can utilize both client and server power so that we can delegate the work to whichever end is best for the task. I don't want to take a step back to the concept of dumb terminals, X or otherwise, and thin clients are not the answer either. We need something new that is based on similar concepts but takes full advantage of the computing power we have today. We also need it to be something that doesn't enable further snooping, spying and data collection but still gives us options on where the code runs. Fuck the cloud and fuck the idea that we rent/subscribe to everything, which thin clients will lead to. I want something better and more privacy/security minded.
One guy already built all of that here: https://arcan-fe.com/
//EDIT: That takes care of the networked render engine part. The rest of the stack is the language + toolkit + application that supports Arcan as a back end. Arcan kinda makes your brain melt a bit when you think about the possibilities.
It needs to be polished and accessible to the masses. Just like GNU Linux on the desktop, Arcan will go nowhere because it is too obscure and technical for content creators to adopt. If Arcan could be made accessible to people with less tech skills and more creative and/or other professional skills then it could take off. But as it stands now, Arcan is just too "CLI" for it to break out. It will languish in the shadows and won't drive us forward in any way for replacing the browser. It would be better off being renamed "Arcane" instead because that is what it is.
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