The Web in the High Castle
Imagining a parallel web universe.
Tom Dale’s fascinating JSConf presentation reminds us that the Web as we know it is a hack — it was never supposed to be this way:
Long ago, when Tim Berners Lee put finger to keyboard the Web was a distributed, linked library of articles. A web developer was somebody who knew how to add <p> <h1> and <a> tags to a text file and upload it to a web browser. You could learn it in 5 minutes — and nobody really expected you’d need to learn, because surely a simple editor could soon do the markup for you.
When people talk about ‘saving the open web’ as a network for free flowing speech and ideas, they mean some version of this Web. An accessible, interlinked library of knowledge.
But that’s not what the Web is today. Something strange happened on the way to the future.
The Web stopped being a document library, and became a complete stack for networked applications. Web pages became web sites, web sites became dynamic web sites, and dynamic web sites became web apps. Browsers stopped being a document viewer and became first dumb then smart terminals. Web developers stopped being somebody who’d taken 5 minutes to learn a few markup tags (and several hours to download an FTP client), and became a full stack developer — one of the most complicated and sophisticated engineering roles ever.
Along the way we forgot all about the original, simple dream. Try opening plain HTML in a modern desktop browser. Because modern screens are bigger, it looks worse and is harder to read than it did in the earliest versions of Netscape.
Perhaps there’s a parallel universe where the Web stayed true to its intentions. Where it got more accessible and open — easier to publish documents, more pleasant and faster to consume them.
In such a world the Web probably looks and feels a lot like a distributed, resilient version of Medium. Easy to post, easy to link, and deeply pleasant to read.
Today the Web faces competition on both sides. Native apps provide a strong alternative to web apps. Instant Articles and other hosted solutions provide an alternative to the Web as a document browser.
But it’s not iOS or Android or Facebook or Twitter or Medium that killed the Open Web. The Web did that all by itself.
