
The World Wide Web Is Dead - dacodanelson
https://medium.com/@dacodanelson/the-world-wide-web-is-dead-b36aaebe708d
======
type0
The irony of this post being on medium isn't completely lost on me while the
author is perfectly capable to publish it on his own website. Consider Spain's
linktax , Google's AMP and continuous Reactification of the Web into SPAs. The
present doesn't look bright but everyone except Big Tech realizes that
decentralization is needed. The same thoughtless article about the Web gets
posted every week with one being worse than another, the Web is dead long live
the Web!

------
bitwize
We should have listened to Ted Nelson the first time around. For Nelson,
hypertext is not just hyperlinked text. It's a permanent repository of text
with hyperlinks _and_ transclusions, both being permanent references, _and_
DRM to ensure the rightsholders of linked/transcluded text get automatically
remunerated whenever their work is downloaded/read, _and_ a microtransaction
system to enable such remuneration.

Tim Berners-Lee thought he could nick just the "good bits" from this model --
or rather, the low-hanging fruit, punting the tricky-to-implement stuff until
later -- but you really need _all_ of the parts, otherwise you will have a
broken, half-working (if that) system with seams showing all over the place.

It's time to realize that Project Xanadu was the correct way to view
hypertext, and compromising on that vision has cost us dearly.

~~~
type0
> really need all of the parts, otherwise you will have a broken, half-working
> (if that) system

WWW won exactly because it was half finished - extendable and not despite of
it, otherwise we would all be using Gopher now.

~~~
bitwize
It's one of those things like C that seemed like a good idea at the time, and
only with the fullness of time do we come to realize its bone-deep irreparable
flaws... but now we're stuck with it effectively forever.

~~~
type0
Worse, it isn't that we stuck with it, but the public have lost control to
WHATWG (el Goog & the Gang)

------
HelloNurse
And the award for "clickbait title of the month" goes to...

The article makes some good points despite being written from the perspective
of someone too young to remember the time without significant link rot when
most websites were someone's home (and equally permanent), links came from
people, and search engines were an immature competitor to curated directories.

~~~
dacodanelson
Regretted the title about 20 minutes after "publishing". Mistakes were made. I
do remember directories and personal pages though. I still stumble across them
from time to time and it's such a pleasure. This was my latest discovery:
[http://www.macdougallelect.com](http://www.macdougallelect.com)

~~~
HelloNurse
Around 1994, when the choice of technological platform for someone's public
internet presence was between FTP or Gopher or HTTP from a server on their own
network, _all_ pages were a curated publication. Corruption required a lot of
time and technology.

------
aoshifo
More like undead.

