A clean start for the web (2020)

I personally would love a "document web" and an "application web." I've thought of this before independently and talked about it to some people, I think the author is right, the idea of one client application for everything internet related is a core source for the problems we face with the web.

I like Gemini, a lot, and I think it could serve as a "document web" very well, except it's missing certain document features like italics, bold and superscript. If you want a document format that serves the average user's needs, you need those features, period. With superscript you don't need inline links for citations.

An "application web" could just be a UI framework that renders an easy to write and read markup of some kind and fetches it over an internet protocol.

The problem with the distinction is it doesn't solve another core source of the problem, specifically, the reason document delivering websites send applications instead is that they want to track users and serve targeted ads. What's to stop CNN from just sending a message in your document web browser saying "please use your application web browser to view this page"? And that's precisely what they'll do, and then you're in the same boat we are in right now, minus the complexity possibly, and nobody will use the document web at all. How is this problem solved?

> Do we really want to continue having "a web"?

Speaking only for myself, I'm not at all invested in having a website. Yes, I want a publicly accessible site of my own on the internet with which to share documents, and I currently do so over HTTP, but I would equally happy to share them over Gopher or even anonymous FTP.

However, I'd rather pay NearlyFreeSpeech.net for hosting than run my own VPS or self-host on a machine in my basement because I'm lazy, so I'm stuck with HTTP because they explicitly don't support anonymous FTP (and by implication don't support Gopher or Gemini).

I have yet to see a suggestion to "reinvent" the web that expands on publisher or end-user capabilities, rather than taking them away. The end user doesn't want Geminispace, they don't hate that web publishers get to control layout and design, or that sites can be more complex than even the early web allowed. They don't want to write their own clients or stylesheets, they don't want the web to only be strictly static documents, with "apps" quarantined elsewhere. They don't want a different markup language. They don't want to destroy social media and force services not to use algorithmic feeds or discovery because it's "mind control." They don't want to kill all advertising and commerce on the web in the belief that content creators should be forced to work for love instead of money.

I mean if modern tech people had their way, the web would have never been anything but a bare data API on a blockchain, and no one without at least a bachelors' degree in CS or engineering would even know about it. And oh yeah, you'd need a license to publish anything.

I think the post misunderstands the situation.

Its not 100% clear to me what the author's thesis is - but i think its that ever incrasing complexity of web standards results in bad user experience.

I dont think that is true - or as they say correlation does not equal causation.

The web used to be smaller and the corporate world didn't know what to do with it. It was creative and original. Eventually corporate america figured out what to do with it, and now it gets value extracted in a very impersonal way - as if your fave underground punk band sold out.

Complexity didn't cause this. It might be a symptom of this, but if the complexity went away, the corporization of the internet would still be there - the suits understand the internet now, and there is no stuffing that back in the bottle.

If neccessary, it would be entirely possible to recreate facebook in html 3.2. Its a social phenomenon not a technical one.