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The ‘Form’ Element Created the Modern Web. Was It a Big Mistake?

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Re: The ‘Form’ Element Created the Modern Web. Was It a Big Mistake?

#11

Post by jasode »

>THE WEB WAS born to publish documents—in particular, physics papers from CERN, the great laboratory where Tim Berners-Lee, [...] I have argued many times, to the despair of anyone within range, that the element was a pivot point for the entire technology industry. It is what changed the web from a read-only medium for physics papers into a read-write medium for anything.

Tim Berners-Lee also invented the HTTP protocol. HTTP 1.0 had the "POST" method and HTPP 1.1 added "PUT". So the read-write capability of the web was there from the beginning. TBL also said the web was meant to be read-write: "I hope I do not have to motive here the fact that the Web in general should be read-write."[1]

If we use Paul Ford's framework that the "web" was meant to be read-only documents, what's the correct intended uses for POST and PUT? The writeback specification was already present at a lower level than the element in HTML.

But we have to look at the macro forces beyond HTTP+HTML and consider if a read-only web was realistic. Before 1989 Tim Berners-Lee protocols, older online services like Compuserve and Prodigy already let users do shopping and buy airline tickets. The underlying desire for bi-directional flow of read+write to enable transactions was proven before the www was invented. Therefore, even if TBL himself didn't put write capabilities into the spec, others (maybe Netscape Navigator or Microsoft IE) would have added that capability in as an extension which becomes a defacto standard that everyone adopts. (E.g. Industry adopts MS IE's XMLHttpRequest())

Would the world really want an open platform like HTTP+HTML to have less functionality than the closed commercial services like CompuServe and Prodigy that already had read+write?

[1] https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/ReadWriteLinkedData.html

Re: The ‘Form’ Element Created the Modern Web. Was It a Big Mistake?

#12

Post by throwaway0x7E6 »

I get uncanny valley feeling whenever I look at an article from corporate clickbait farms. are these even written by humans? it reads like a regurgitated twitter diarrhea

I wouldn't have even clicked the article if I had noticed the domain it was coming from, and I regret the time I've wasted trying to parse this garbage

Re: The ‘Form’ Element Created the Modern Web. Was It a Big Mistake?

#13

Post by mikewarot »

jasode wrote: post #11

>THE WEB WAS born to publish documents—in particular, physics papers from CERN, the great laboratory where Tim Berners-Lee, [...] I have argued many times, to the despair of anyone within range, that the element was a pivot point for the entire technology industry. It is what changed the web from a read-only medium for physics papers into a read-write medium for anything. Tim Berners-Lee also invented the HTTP protoc…

Imagine instead of HTML, we had something like GIT... a collection of elements that make up a document, possibly spread across many files. When you loaded a page, it was like git clone. Your form would be locally saved (git commit), and you could optionally push those changes back (to give them your filled in form). Future updates to that same local form could be pushed at any future time.

--- Better yet

Imagine if the form element only took a URL of the completed form. You'd get the form, fill it out, save it on a server, and push that repository address to the form's input handler on it's original server. (Much like a pull request)

Re: The ‘Form’ Element Created the Modern Web. Was It a Big Mistake?

#14

Post by ryanbrunner »

If HTML didn't have a tag, then HTML and the web would still be a fairly marginal technology, and something else most likely would have existed where all these problems occurred. Maybe we'd all be complaining about how IRC is radicalizing people or something.

A repository full of static documents isn't really all that interesting. That's basically a library on a computer. Even in the very earliest days of the web, people were drawn to interactivity, whether it was early online stores, web forums, or even little interactive bits like comment sections on blogs or things like livejournal.

Re: The ‘Form’ Element Created the Modern Web. Was It a Big Mistake?

#16

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

If we are looking for stuff that really changed the direction of the web, it is online advertisement.

Once you could reliably turn views into money, the web became more and more about “engagement”. Couple that with machine learning that optimizes engagement, and you know the rest.

Re: The ‘Form’ Element Created the Modern Web. Was It a Big Mistake?

#19

Post by xg15 »

I think the form field certainly influenced the particular technical evolution path the web and internet took, but I also think it's not the reason we have social networks or e-commerce. Those were extremely compelling usecases even before the web and I don't think any particular technology was the reason, they got so big. That was probably more due to economic or social factors.

My guess is even without the form field, someone would have eventually tried to hack interactivity via some "stateful" links or something.

If Berners-Lee and co had somehow adamantly defended the "web of documents" idea, interactivity and e-commerce would probably have gone through other technologies, e.g. email or IRC.

Though I think it would be interesting to imagine an alternate universe where most of the effort and development went in those technologies and not HTTP.

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