Guess now I have to…
Yesterday I created a small proof of concept of how something like this could look like to developers. This is in no way official, so treat this as built by some rando in the community…
The very small program at https://github.com/nomeata/ic-http-lambda/ implements an HTTP-to-IC bridge, encapsulating HTTP requests as Candid data, and sending it to the canister id mentioned in the hostname. This means you can go to https://jwksz-eqaaa-aaaab-aaaaq-cai.ic.nomeata.de/ and the full response (HTML, content-type, cookie headers) are under control of the canister.
As a demo, I wrote a canister that implements a simple Telegram bot, you can play with it at http://t.me/InternetComputerBot and see the code at https://github.com/nomeata/ic-telegram-bot.
Currently, I am hosting this service myself, outside of the IC infrastructure (actually on Amazon Lambda…), but it would be feasible (but not necessary, as I have just proven) that a service similar to this could eventually be provided as part of the Internet Computer platform, with a more official domain, maybe with a name registration service…
I agree that this feature is great to onboard developers, but it also its its problems: E.g. you can initiate HTTP requests from the canister. And worse, you throw out more or less all the amazing security guarantees of the Internet Computer (e.g. responses are tamperproof, user identities are verified by the system). So yes, things are moving … but let’s get the platform properly live first!