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

I know it's still the web 'cause it still has porn

[elrous0]

As long as there is a central place for me to go download my midget porn, the web will live on.

What web?

[e03179]

The point of a Web is to make one, wait for visitors, catch them, and then eat them. It doesn't really matter what the visitor does once it gets in the web. It's just a matter of the spider finishing the deal.

More mainstream... more useless..

[brxndxn]

The more mainstream the web becomes, the more bullshit we have to sort through... the more useless it becomes. There used to be a banner ad. Now there's a banner, links on the left, links on the right, popups, flash over the actual text, sound, video, and 10x as many pages all with the same shit to click through just to get the same content. And, we're already hearing about ISPs adding their own shit to our shitty internet experience.

It doesn't make any fucking sense that an article that could be entirely scrolled through takes 27 clicks to read.. It doesn't make any fucking sense that clicking 'yes' one time on the wrong thing can allow malicious software to install itself (that is your fault, microsoft). It doesn't make any fucking sense that our own damn web clients allow the developer to disable right-click on a page. It doesn't make any fucking sense that I have to watch a 30-second advertisement to watch a 10-second video clip.

The web is quickly turning into television - a bunch of stupid avertisements created by stupid people geared for stupid consumers. The web is still way better than anything else we got.

Re:I always thought...

[Free the Cowards]

Every time you use the phrase "fixed that for you," God makes you look like a tool.

Re:it might be more complex now

[Bugs42]

theres still more porn on the inter tubes than one can shake a stick at

When referencing porn, could you PLEASE choose a better expression?

Re:I always thought...

[Mr. Slippery]

If you're going to nitpick, probably a good idea to learn about the difference between HTML and HTTP first, eh?

...and to understand that FTP resources are also part of the web.

According to W3C, the web is "the universe of network-accessible information, the embodiment of human knowledge."

Some of the stuff under question is applications for using information, not information itself, and thus isn't really part of the "web" in that sense. A bunch more - perhaps the majority - neither contains nor uses actual information, except in the information-theoretic sense in which noise has more "information" than signal...

Obligatory

[Red Flayer]

I can't agree more. One of my pet peeves is people using those terms interchangeably and then thinking they are the same thing (ie interweb). I can't believe someone on Slashdot even got that wrong.

YMBNH.