Is Today's Web Still 'the Web'?

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister raises questions regarding the transforming nature of the Web now that Tim Berners-Lee's early vision has been supplanted by today's much more complex model. AJAX, Google Web Toolkit, Flash and Silverlight all have McAllister asking, 'Is [the Web] still the Web if you can't navigate directly to specific content? Is it still the Web if the content can't be indexed and searched? Is it still the Web if you can only view the application on certain clients or devices? Is it still the Web if you can't view source?' Such questions bely a much bigger question for Web developers, McAllister writes. If today's RIAs no longer resemble the 'Web,' then should we be shoehorning these apps into the Web's infrastructure, or is the problem that the client platforms simply aren't evolving fast enough to meet our needs?" If the point of 'The Web' is to allow direct links between any 2 points, is today's web something entirely different?

Comments

What? Who cares?

[DJ Jones]

Everyone on this website is now dumber for having read that summary. I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul.

Seriously...

None of That Is Different

[Doc Ruby]

These claims are wrong about what the Web used to be:

'Is [the Web] still the Web if you can't navigate directly to specific content? Is it still the Web if the content can't be indexed and searched? Is it still the Web if you can only view the application on certain clients or devices? Is it still the Web if you can't view source?'

The Web has always pointed to content that couldn't be navigated "directly" (with a single click, if that statement means anything). In fact, the original Web (from 1990-1993-1995-1998-whenever) always had content that required intermediary steps. Mostly to build state: login with a password, or a "click trail" that set variables passed in URL or POST data. But also lots of content that couldn't even be opened in the browser itself, requiring external "helper applications". Like RealAudio or any other realtime playable media, lots of image formats, and of course the Acrobat that still opens an external app from most browsers.

Little or none of that content was ever indexed before. And in fact most content wasn't indexed at all, certainly not before Altavista came along at least 5 years into the game, and surely not as completely and precisely (and accessibly, which is the most important) as by Google.

The range of clients and devices that are mostly or completely useful for finding and consuming everything on the Web is extremely broad and diverse now. In the beginning, only the fastest PCs could do it. Now, Web access is embedded in lightswitches, not to mention mobile phones, watches, cars, and all kinds of damn fool novelties.

And of course most of the most valuable and useful parts of the Web have never been available with "view source". The CGI and other server code and databases have never been viewable like HTML source. The browsers themselves in the original Web were all closed source. Whether Internet Explorer, Netscape, Spyglass, AOL, or any other browser, all the source was secret, except the tiny fraction that was the HTML (how it actually worked "under the hood" was unknowable). As were of course most of the Webservers, since they were one of Netscape's or Microsoft's IIS (except for the original NCSA and CERN servers, which quickly became a minority). So in fact only a little bit, the HTML, was viewable, and the vast majority was secret, unavailable, anyone's guess.

So yes, it's still the Web. It's even more what we wanted it to be: all the info and apps in the world linked by simple clicks from any computer attached to the Internet. And the Web's explosive growth and demands for open source have made open source the standard expectation, even if it's still growing to become the standard delivery. And not just on the Web, but on all software (and hardware too) that we use, even as the Web has become the main software and hardware that we use.

Of course, lying about the Web, about the 1990s Web or any given snapshot, is about as old as the Web itself. So why shouldn't the Web catch fire with lies claiming the old Web was some kind of open source paradise that it wasn't, that today's Web actually is?