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And Now, a Brief Definition of the Web (theverge.com)
Dieter Bohn, writing for The Verge: Traditionally, we think of the web as a combination of a set of specific technologies paired with some core philosophical principles. The problem -- the reason this question even matters -- is that there are a lot of potential replacements for the parts of the web that fix what's broken with technology, while undermining the principles that ought to go with it. [...] A lot of tech companies are flailing around looking for ways to fix this problem. There are web apps that work in Chrome but not really all that well elsewhere. There are Instant Articles in Facebook and AMP pages on Google. There are Instant Android apps that stream to your phone over the internet instead of being installed, which go away when you're done with them just like a browser tab. Google claims to be trying to bring some of the open ethos of the web to smart speakers. Hell, go back to 2014 and you'll find Apple pundit John Gruber arguing we should consider apps and "anything transmitted using HTTP and HTTPS" as part of the web. [...] And now, a brief definition of the web: To count as being part of the web, your app or page must: 1. Be linkable, and 2. Allow any client to access it. That's it.
To be part of the web, your app or page must:
1. Collect as much of the user's data as possible. Bonus if you can get their entire social contact graph, page visits from outside your domain, and all their search history.
2. Work as poorly as possible if the user attempts to push back against your data harvesting by disabling javascript. Bonus points if you can disable the clipboard and "save as".
3. Load 10X slower than it should due to making connections to two dozen advertising domains.
4. Attempt to hijack and/or completely break the back button.
5. Scrunch all the text up in a 5cm wide band in the middle of an 80cm wide monitor, no matter how the user might attempt to resize the window.
6. Smear content that would easily fit in a single page over 20 pages separated by "next" buttons so you can harvest as many ad impressions as possible.
7. Attempt to get the user to store all of their data remotely in "the cloud", because you can't easily run big data analytics on it if the user gets to store it on their computer. See also, Gmail.
8. Partner with national intelligence agencies.
9. Enforce political based censorship on everyone. Saying $THING is illegal in country $C? Take it down for the whole world.
10. Load 500KB of random scripts merely to display what could be done with 5KB of plain old HTML.
11. Make sure standard HTML hyperlinks don't work unless the user enables scripting.
12. Attempt to use the hardest to read color combinations.
THAT is how you become part of the modern web.
1) Define "linkable".
2) Define "client".
Do so in a way that is unambiguous, but also is unlikely to change over time. Good luck.