The World Wide Web Is Dead

The irony of this post being on medium isn't completely lost on me while the author is perfectly capable to publish it on his own website. Consider Spain's linktax , Google's AMP and continuous Reactification of the Web into SPAs. The present doesn't look bright but everyone except Big Tech realizes that decentralization is needed. The same thoughtless article about the Web gets posted every week with one being worse than another, the Web is dead long live the Web!

We should have listened to Ted Nelson the first time around. For Nelson, hypertext is not just hyperlinked text. It's a permanent repository of text with hyperlinks and transclusions, both being permanent references, and DRM to ensure the rightsholders of linked/transcluded text get automatically remunerated whenever their work is downloaded/read, and a microtransaction system to enable such remuneration.

Tim Berners-Lee thought he could nick just the "good bits" from this model -- or rather, the low-hanging fruit, punting the tricky-to-implement stuff until later -- but you really need all of the parts, otherwise you will have a broken, half-working (if that) system with seams showing all over the place.

It's time to realize that Project Xanadu was the correct way to view hypertext, and compromising on that vision has cost us dearly.

And the award for "clickbait title of the month" goes to...

The article makes some good points despite being written from the perspective of someone too young to remember the time without significant link rot when most websites were someone's home (and equally permanent), links came from people, and search engines were an immature competitor to curated directories.

More like undead.