Firstly there are no real examples of a “hypertext computer”. It is a proposal.

The key idea is to actually go ahead and build a general purpose computer on top of the network. That is achieved by implementing it in such a way that the computer (you could substitute VM) has access ONLY to resources that are retrieved via HTTP. The proposed computer’s programming model is true to this principle to the lowest opcode level.

High overheads – yes! However within the boundaries of one ownership of a computing system, much of this overhead could be compiled out to more efficient referencing mechanisms (e.g. in main memory or on local disk). The key here is that the optimisations along with the choice of where the computing is performed would be made at run time NOT made in advance through choice of technology (PHP+Javascript or plain PHP).

Granularity of this mechanism would be at the level of a browser request. This is discussed somewhat in this post.

It seems to me that as HTTP and HTML has revolutionised content creation and consumption, I am proposing that they may be extended to provide a unified programming model for a truely network computer.

I’m not sure if I understand correctly. When you say every operator is implemented as an HTTP request, how granular is it? Say I have a UI. Would I make requests to get all the listsbox and their regions? Or would I make requests to fill each listboxes with their data. Or would I make requests to perform the operations of drawing a listbox? Or are you talking about every operator in any declarative programming language, like HTML, subject to an HTTP request? Or are you talking about operators in an imperative language?

Sorry for all the Ors. Any chance you could provide a real world example?

Regards,

jm