“I think the real advance – albeit an incremental one anticipated in the designs it builds upon – is in the protocols and data model.

And I don’t think the protocols and data model are anywhere near done and I’m certain that there are flaws in the current design, but here is why they matter:

To a first approximation, every resource on the web as we know it today is identified by a host-based URL. Of course most commonly the URL has the form:

* http://example.com/relative/uri

Contrary to popular assumption, we do not name resources on the web – we name hosts and relative addresses within hosts. If I type into the location box on my browser:

* http://example.com/docs/GPLv3.txt

My browser operates correctly not when it returns

to me a verbatim copy of the GPLv3 in plain text format but, rather, when it contacts the host “example.com” and asks it to reply to a GET request for “/docs/GPLv3.txt”.

In effect, a URL of that form does not name the document – it names a question posed to whomever currently owns “example.com”.

In fact, there is no widely accepted, human-friendly, secure, distributed and decentralized namespace in which I can name some specific text – like a GPLv3 text file originally published by the FSF – and expect a browser to find it.

Wave opens that door a crack. There’s still some chains keeping the door closed but the deadbolts have been unlocked and the door cracked a couple of inches and with a few swift kicks the rest inevitably follows. The web-as-you-know-it has numbered days, now.

Wave opens the door, more specifically, to a secure, human-friendly, browser-friendly (really, user-agent-friendly), distributed, decentralized, dynamically updated, secure, and location independent namespace for web resources. A namespace in which routing is based on content or resource name and goes to any convenient verifiable host of that has that content or can provide that resource.

The way that Wave encourages this is by encouraging the development of clients that route to resources by host-independent IDs like wave ids, wavelet ids, and document ids — while at the same time leaving fairly open ended what a document id is and leaving open to extension what an id is.

Wave initiates the game of building a much needed and much anticipated overlay network that can operate in a distributed and decentralized way, giving names to resources rather than questions to hosts.” (Autonomous mailing list, June 2009)