The genius of the web was its focus on documents: GET, POST, UPDATE, DELETE. Authoring and sharing text and images and video is essential to human knowledge and the web’s big contribution to the world was creating a fairly simple, universally understandable format for people to read and publish documents. The idea of the separation of information from presentation (and putting presentation in the control of the user-agent) was genius and lead to some of the biggest forms of innovation built on top of the web like RSS and podcasting. The gradual evolution of the web away from a hyperlinked network of documents towards being a thin frame into which we deliver complex software applications mostly destroyed so much of this value. It’s convenient for engineers but often deeply hostile to users and has lead to a systematic disregard for what was unique and special about the web. How easy do you find it to discover interesting or useful information created by actual people nowadays vs, say, 2007? Web engineers have largely destroyed one of the great human information technologies in order to make it easier to ship software. Good job everyone.
The genius of the web was its focus on documents: GET, POST, UPDATE, DELETE. Authoring and sharing text and images and video is essential to human knowledge and the web’s big contribution to the world was creating a fairly simple, universally understandable format for people to read and publish documents. The idea of the separation of information from presentation (and putting presentation in the control of the user-agent) was genius and lead to some of the biggest forms of innovation built on top of the web like RSS and podcasting. The gradual evolution of the web away from a hyperlinked network of documents towards being a thin frame into which we deliver complex software applications mostly destroyed so much of this value. It’s convenient for engineers but often deeply hostile to users and has lead to a systematic disregard for what was unique and special about the web. How easy do you find it to discover interesting or useful information created by actual people nowadays vs, say, 2007? Web engineers have largely destroyed one of the great human information technologies in order to make it easier to ship software. Good job everyone.