[liveblog] Paul Frazee on the Beaker Browser
At the Web 1.0 conference, Paul Frazee
is talking about a browser — a Chrome fork — he’s been writing to browse the distributed Web.
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NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people. |
The distributed Web is the Web with ideas from BitTorrent integrated into it. Beaker
uses IPFS and DAT
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This means:
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Anyone can be a server at any time.
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There’s no binding between a specific computer and a site; the content lives independently.
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There’s no back end.
This lets Beaker provide some unusual features:
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A “fork button” is built into the browser itself so you can modify the site you’re browsing. “People can hack socially” by forking a site and sharing those changes.
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Independent publishing: The site owner can’t change your stuff. You can allocate new domains cheaply.
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With Beaker, you can write your site locally first, and then post into the distributed Web.
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Secure distribution
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Versioned URLs
He takes us through a demo. Beaker’s directory looks a bit like Github in terms of style. He shows how to create a new site using an integrated terminal tool. The init command creates a dat.json file with some core metadata. Then he creates an index.html file and publishes it. Then anyone using the browser can see the site and ask to see the files behind it…and fork them. As with GitHub, you can see the path of forks. If you own the site, you can write to the site, with the browser. [This fulfills Tim Berners’-Lee’s original vision of Web browsers.]
QA
Q: Any DNS support?
A: Yes.
