The Seif Project by Douglas Crockford - talk.js

Speaker: Douglas Crockford

Upgrading the Web

The web was originally imagined to be a simple distributed document retrieval system. It is now being used for applications that go far beyond the system's original capabilities and intentions. We have found ways to make it work, but they are difficult and far too fragile. Many times companies have offered to replace the web with superior proprietary systems, but we rejected them. We have been adding features to the web, but this does little to correct the deep underlying deficiencies, increasing instead of reducing its complexity.

This talk suggests a way forward, taking inspiration from our successful transition from NTSC to HDTV. There is a way forward to a web that is safer, easier, and as good as we desire.

Douglas Crockford is best known for his ongoing involvement in the development of the JavaScript language, for having popularized JSON, and for developing various JavaScript tools such as JSLint and JSMin. He is currently a senior JavaScript architect at PayPal, and is also a writer and speaker on JavaScript, JSON, and related web technologies.

Produced by Engineers.SG

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[anotherelvis]

He presents his idea at 22:30
Development plan at 34:30
Goals of the project at 41:05

[treenopie]

How does Seif work with, or compare to, IPFS?

[AndyVanee]

I think the sentiment is great, but the technology choices seem strange. Qt may be a great environment, but was not developed to be a modern UI layer for the web and I don't think it's a long-term solution. JSON may have great flexibility, but it seems irresponsible not to use an optimized wire format (eg: protocol buffers). Also, why not just support arbitrary client & server languages by just providing a generic runtime/VM to target?

[treenopie]

I like the "web:" protocol identifier over "seif:" ... just sayin'.

[Snytkine]

Some good ideas except why would you dictate what server-side technology must be used? Why node.js? I'm sure it's a good technology but are you really suggesting that there is nothing else out there that is just as capable of parsing and generating json as node.js? Is node.js really the most efficient and most scalable way to create modern applications?
I think if you want to see adaption of this technology then this seif thing should be just a set of specifications. Leave it up to developers to come up with implementations.

Of cause it's not surprising that Mr. JavaScript's vision of the future web is that every browser uses ONLY Javascript and every server is Node.js.