In our minds the concept of distributed internet takes shape as a way to retrieve a web content not taking into account who serves it.
This concept applied to IOTA starts from the premise that we are able to serve a web page querying for a transaction. In particular, we could store a web page in a transactions bundle, and serve it extracting the data from the bundle. We are talking about a transaction published to the IOTA network, hence a distributed piece of data. Starting from the assumption of the availability of this distributed data, we need a distributed way to serve them.
We base our concept on available technologies. Our goal is not to replace the HTTP protocol. We should be able to use a simple open link web browser to ask for a domain name and receiving back a web page content.
Currently, to retrieve a transaction from the Tangle, we have to go through the IRI node, using the JSON RPC interface via the command line or using one of the API implementations. This operation implies the need of a web server able to listen for the request, where reasonably it should find the bundle hash, and retrieve the transaction through an HTTP request, extracting the content and sending it to the client specifying the Content-Type as text/html. This would work, but this is obviously not a distributed way to serve the web page.
It's time to dive into the technical aspects to understand how this mechanism could be built.
This concept applied to IOTA starts from the premise that we are able to serve a web page querying for a transaction. In particular, we could store a web page in a transactions bundle, and serve it extracting the data from the bundle. We are talking about a transaction published to the IOTA network, hence a distributed piece of data. Starting from the assumption of the availability of this distributed data, we need a distributed way to serve them.
We base our concept on available technologies. Our goal is not to replace the HTTP protocol. We should be able to use a simple open link web browser to ask for a domain name and receiving back a web page content.
Currently, to retrieve a transaction from the Tangle, we have to go through the IRI node, using the JSON RPC interface via the command line or using one of the API implementations. This operation implies the need of a web server able to listen for the request, where reasonably it should find the bundle hash, and retrieve the transaction through an HTTP request, extracting the content and sending it to the client specifying the Content-Type as text/html. This would work, but this is obviously not a distributed way to serve the web page.
It's time to dive into the technical aspects to understand how this mechanism could be built.