> The web started as a digital version of books and newspapers. Now it's trending towards a replacement for TV? How awful.
The web started as hypermedia with support for very limited media forms. As it supports more media, it fills more roles; becoming hypermedia that includes in the kind of media it supports types which allow it to serve as a replacement for radio, TV, etc., doesn't stop it from having the book/newspaper like functionality.
The modern web is a much better platform for the book/newspaper-like functionality that the early web was used for than the early web was, as well as competing with radio and TV for that kind of functionality.
Awful? Why, because people who like things you don't can also get things they like from the web?
>The modern web is a much better platform for the book/newspaper-like functionality that the early web was used for than the early web was
Really? Do you ever select a few words on a web page, then Ctrl-C it? You did not notice over the last 10 years as browsers have gotten more complex that you now have to use a lot more trial and error to get the words you wanted? How just a tiny movement of the mouse while dragging can have drastic effects on the selection? How text far away or in a different column sometimes gets selected for difficult-to-fathom reasons?
Never noticed how on Safari if the text is next to an image or in a title, it sometimes takes Safari a really long time to transfer the text to the clipboard, sometimes with beachballing involved?
Ever use Ctrl-F to search a web page? Never noticed how "mystery hits" are a lot more frequent than they were 10 years ago? (Where the search stops at some place where there is no visible occurance of the string you searched for.) Never noticed how Ctrl-F is not smart enough to make sure that the hit it is showing you is not obscured by one of those elements that respond to scrolling by remaining at a fixed position relative to the window?
Never noticed how even though links have a relatively short half life, hardly anyone bothers to make a local copy of the pages they have bookmarked because it is such a hard technical problem to write code that makes a local copy of all the "assets" that might be referenced by a page? (Contrast with Usenet, which, for all of its faults, made it easy to make a local copy of an article or a thread of articles.)
Never tried to bookmark a page or send someone a link to a page and notice that you cannot because it is one of those web sites where every "page" has the same URL?
The web started as a digital version of books and newspapers. Now it's trending towards a replacement for TV? How awful.