Realising the Full Potential of the Web (1998)

> The second side to the Web, yet to emerge, is that of machine-understandable information. As this happens, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade and bureaucracy will be handled by agents, leaving humans to provide the inspiration and the intuition.

I find it pretty amazing that Tim BL was insightful enough to foresee the Web would evolve into a space for both humans and machines (even referring to the latter as "agents"). I believe we're at the tip of that mentioned emergence, but many are fighting it, in part because of the bad behaviour of many past and present bots, but also in huge part because the machine-understandable form (web APIs) is incomplete. LLMs are making the form somewhat unnecessary by being able to handle human-understandable content, but publicly available sites still need to make their content accessible in such a way that agents can get to said content without triggering a DDoS incident or otherwise causing a server meltdown. If something is available to a particular human on the Web, then it should also be available to that particular human's agent. We need to properly support the Semantic Web.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web