

Tim Berners-Lee: 25 years on, the Web still needs work - zhte415
http://www.cnet.com/news/tim-berners-lee-on-its-25th-anniversary-the-web-still-needs-work-q-a/

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nakedrobot2
The Web is in great danger of "dying" partly because of Tim's awful
endorsement of DRM baked into HTML5; Walled gardens by Apple, FB; disabling of
web standards (webgl) by apple in their browser in order to favor their app
store cash cow; NSA sodomy; lack of security; no easy way for laypeople to be
truly secure and private....

It is a very sad couple of years and I don't know the solution.

~~~
userbinator
Don't forget browser vendors slowly removing features "that should be
developer-only", the lack of any real choice in browsers (there's only 3 or 4
major browsers, which is not that much better than a monopoly, and they're all
heading in a similar direction), and the growing mass of (needless?)
complexity that they're becoming.

The Web started out being simple, so the barriers to entry were low and people
easily got into writing pages to share information with others. Now anyone who
wants to build a website gets bombarded with dozens (if not hundreds) of
frameworks, libraries, application platform, etc. and it makes them feel like
they have to somehow learn and use all of this new stuff, because they're
given the impression (mostly from big commercial sites) that they have to do
so or their site will "look outdated". I think we should encourage more "just
writing webpages", with an emphasis on (mostly static) content, and less on
the "app-ification" currently going on.

As much as this is probably not a popular opinion here, I think the days of
Geocities and the like, with almost everyone wanting to --- and easily
accomplishing --- the task of writing webpages, was when the Web was much
closer to its goals. Admittedly, these "amateurs" didn't have the best design
for their sites, and browsers were less featureful than they are today, but
somehow the "roughness" and "wild" nature of those days felt like far more of
a user-empowering Web than it is today.

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jaimebuelta
I think that now the barrier of entry to post information is WAY lower than it
was in Geocities era. We have now lots of ways of easy post without having to
know HTML (Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger, Facebook for more personal stuff, etc)

~~~
userbinator
Indeed, that is also partly responsible - there's less incentive for the
public to learn HTML, and instead they will feel more inclined to rely on
these frameworks/applications/services. The barrier of entry to just getting
your opinion published has lowered; but the barrier of entry to making your
own site and being a _webmaster_ has gone in the opposite direction. I think
that is largely how the Web is becoming more closed.

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weland
> With my fitness tracker, I want it to run all the time, even offline like a
> native app. But every day of my workout history will have a URL and I can
> link my friends to it.

Slowly, slowly, we'll be reinventing web. I can't wait for 2020, when these
brand new apps that structure every kind of data and make it uniformly
accessible, in a form that makes it easy for automated programs to reason
about both content _and_ structure, are going to be all the rage.

I'm _actually_ excited about it. What makes me bitter is the fact that I have
no idea what the fuck we were doing wrong in the early 2000s or so, because we
should have been there already.

It's easy to find scapegoats like Facebook, tightly clutching private data in
poorly-designed, ever-changing access schemes that polarize the WWW, but I'm
not entirely convinced they're the only ones to blame.

~~~
toyg
_> I have no idea what the fuck we were doing wrong in the early 2000s or so_

I don't think "we" were dong anything wrong. A lot of stuff now being used to
accelerate web development simply wasn't mature enough, back then. Also, there
are critical-mass effects that simply couldn't be done in early 2000s.

Still, a lot of people were already working on these problems on a conceptual
level.

~~~
weland
> A lot of stuff now being used to accelerate web development simply wasn't
> mature enough, back then.

I think web development is speedy, and it also was fairly speedy in the 2000s,
too. _The web_ , on the other hand, not so much, and much of it is bloated and
hampered by abstraction layers to an indecent degree. JS doesn't help, either.

Something took a wrong turn at a point and the immature, but potentially
capable technologies we had degenerated into today's clusterfuck.

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camillomiller
Am I the only one who isn't totally grasping this 25 years of the Web thing?
The Web was "turned on" in 1991, am I right? Ok, Berners-lee had already been
working on it since he had the idea in 1989, but this is like celebrating your
birthday 9 months in advance because, you know, that day, your mom and dad...

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chris_mahan
What killed the web are js-app sites that don't work in mobile, along with the
1MB webpages that contain everything and the kitchen sink right on the page
that also don't work in mobile (can't resize, font too small, javascript
popups, flash popups, etc) What is needed is a return to the basic: plain html
sites that don't assume unlimited bandwidth, that let the browser render the
content, that don't need images, tables, etc. Most people have limited data
plans and would like to keep most of it for music/video, not monstruously
large web pages.

~~~
erichocean
You forgot to mention CSS. That's a major reason why even non-JS sites render
poorly on mobile.

~~~
chris_mahan
Yes, you're right. I was going to mention it, but I thought it would be
understood.

Sadly, because sites are so bad on mobile, mobile browsers don't do pinch-to-
zoom anymore, and that messes my html-only (no css, no js, valid html5) pages
utility.

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7952
At some point people need to stop treating the web as something distinctly
separate from the rest of human life. If a huge majority of business
interaction is conducted on-line it is not e-business but just business. If
you are socialising with friends on-line it is not social networking or IM, it
is just socialising. Basic protections existed in law before the web and they
should still exist now. That means that piracy is unlawful, but so is spying
without a warrant. The web is just a set of protocols and does not have unique
set of protections or privileges for anyone. Problems should be addressed by
modifying the protocols in an open way.

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ericmoritz
The comments here describe doom and gloom of the web dying.

I doubt the web is going anywhere. The future is going to hyperlink driven
link data services that can power both native and web clients.

I have started to architect such a solution for my employer and let me tell
you, it is the freaking future!

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pyalot2
Timbl's words are meaningless when he speaks on the web as he's himself
bending over backwards to appease corporate interests, control, restrictions
and rubberstamped DRM.

~~~
rimantas
Guess where the money for development of all the major browsers come from?

~~~
mattl
Google Ads.

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endlessvoid94
updated URL: [http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57620198-93/tim-berners-
lee...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57620198-93/tim-berners-lee-25-years-
on-the-web-still-needs-work-q-a/)

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alexhektor
Summary of the article:
[http://sumbees.com/s/ByAJ3D1ZANTeG2PgwxO7](http://sumbees.com/s/ByAJ3D1ZANTeG2PgwxO7)

