>The web is not just a place for text/words, that is not its heart and soul... It really never has been.
I am thinking back when they named the protocol the HyperText Transport Protocol and the primary format the HyperText Markup Language, text was indeed the heart and soul of the medium.
At one point, images weren't even displayed inline but via a helper app. This is why Mosaic was a big deal.
Yeah, that's all fine and dandy, but what if we measure "what the web is for" in bandwidth? What do most people use the web "for"? Netflix and YouTube, I'd wager.
The heart of most TV Shows and Movies? A screenplay. Words. Dressed up with faces and costumes and animation, but words nonetheless.
I'll grant you that YouTube has a lot of cat videos, which probably doesn't have words in it. But those vlogs have a hell of a lot of words in them too.
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A lot of video is streamed with RTMP, yes, but a lot of Netflix and YouTube content is available over HTTP now too (albeit in the contrived manner of chopping videos up into dozens of tiny files).
Words put to effect with the breadth of human expression captured through full motion video. I challenge one to read the screenplay for Shawshank and feel half as much.
What the author extols in word is something quite effectively conveyed in many forms of art. Just as there is great beauty in the text of Baudelaire, there is incredible emotive power in koyaanisqatsi.
We should accept the author's challenge to behave with more conviction and purpose, to express ourselves in a more meaningful way. But to do so in word alone is too restrictive for the imagination to bear.
Dunno, I tried loading a YouTube page and capturing packets. Only ports in use were 443 and 80, even to the cdn-like hostnames (bla.c.youtube.com). First packet shows "GET /videoplayback?...."
A port number is just a port number, it doesn't define what protocol is in use. You can serve different protocols across it - the limitation is that generally you can only have one service listening on a port number. A youtube page will require a couple of different protocols.
It is not transported over HTTP, although it does make use of HTTP at the Application Layer. It is transported over TCP, which is a Transport Layer protocol.
I am thinking back when they named the protocol the HyperText Transport Protocol and the primary format the HyperText Markup Language, text was indeed the heart and soul of the medium.
At one point, images weren't even displayed inline but via a helper app. This is why Mosaic was a big deal.