Tim Berners-Lee: 25 years on, the Web still needs work | Hacker News Reader

Tim Berners-Lee: 25 years on, the Web still needs work

cnet.com

60 pointszhte41527 comments

The Web is in great danger of "dying" partly because of Tim's awful endorsement of DRM baked into HTML5; Walled gardens by Apple, FB; disabling of web standards (webgl) by apple in their browser in order to favor their app store cash cow; NSA sodomy; lack of security; no easy way for laypeople to be truly secure and private....

It is a very sad couple of years and I don't know the solution.

Please tell me more how any of this will kill the web. Me using DRM somehow kill all the web sites not using it? Walled gardens? I guess this phrase has lost all the meaning by now and is just thrown around as if it means something. Does Apple limit which web sites you can visit on iPad? Or maybe, just maybe Apple actually helped the web by releasing the first phone with truly capable browser? What has Facebook to do with it? It is just a successful product, do you also go around shouting that Adobe is killing the design industry, just because majority of the work is done in Photoshop? Also, your lament about walled gardens and then whining about being truly secure and private does not really compute. I guess I have much more privacy inside the Apple's garden than in an open land owned by Google.

Also, looks that you have no idea how much work Apple has done to propel the things that we now take for granted: canvas element, CSS transforms and animations, all the initial work on WebKit before Google joined in (yes, I know it is based on KHTML, but it has none of the aforementioned staff before).

There is no wonder you don't know the solution: it is hard do find a solution to nonexistent problems. No matter what you think, technology is not a zero sum game, and the web is not supposed to rule it all.

When a concerted effort is made by an industry leader to kill open standards in favor of locking down users to their ecosystem (or "stack" as bruce sterling puts it)

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/bruce-...

http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2...

It's not zero sum. High quality walled gardens push the 'open' world just as much as high quality 'open' solutions push walled gardens.

Consider as much as people complain about walled gardens DNS is quietly backing the 'open' web because some things really do work better as a walled gardens.

Don't forget browser vendors slowly removing features "that should be developer-only", the lack of any real choice in browsers (there's only 3 or 4 major browsers, which is not that much better than a monopoly, and they're all heading in a similar direction), and the growing mass of (needless?) complexity that they're becoming.

The Web started out being simple, so the barriers to entry were low and people easily got into writing pages to share information with others. Now anyone who wants to build a website gets bombarded with dozens (if not hundreds) of frameworks, libraries, application platform, etc. and it makes them feel like they have to somehow learn and use all of this new stuff, because they're given the impression (mostly from big commercial sites) that they have to do so or their site will "look outdated". I think we should encourage more "just writing webpages", with an emphasis on (mostly static) content, and less on the "app-ification" currently going on.

As much as this is probably not a popular opinion here, I think the days of Geocities and the like, with almost everyone wanting to --- and easily accomplishing --- the task of writing webpages, was when the Web was much closer to its goals. Admittedly, these "amateurs" didn't have the best design for their sites, and browsers were less featureful than they are today, but somehow the "roughness" and "wild" nature of those days felt like far more of a user-empowering Web than it is today.

I agree with your basic stance, but I think that most people who would have used Geocities in the 90s use Tumblr or Wordpress/Blogger now.

I think that now the barrier of entry to post information is WAY lower than it was in Geocities era. We have now lots of ways of easy post without having to know HTML (Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger, Facebook for more personal stuff, etc)

Indeed, that is also partly responsible - there's less incentive for the public to learn HTML, and instead they will feel more inclined to rely on these frameworks/applications/services. The barrier of entry to just getting your opinion published has lowered; but the barrier of entry to making your own site and being a webmaster has gone in the opposite direction. I think that is largely how the Web is becoming more closed.

> As much as this is probably not a popular opinion here, I think the days of Geocities and the like, with almost everyone wanting to

Yep, I made a similar (but less eloquently stated) observation a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3876834

It now seems clear to me that the only way to keep the Web/Internet free is to narrow the gap between what programmers and non-progammers can make, at least prima facie. That is the real difference between now and then: kids and novices like me could make something that prima facie resembled what the professionals were doing, whether it was hacking DOS apps or simple web pages; at least I thought I had a chance of getting near the pros.

> The Web is in great danger of "dying" partly because of Tim's awful endorsement of DRM baked into HTML5

Can you explain precisely how this will kill the web but the status quo where everyone uses Flash / Silverlight instead of the web stack does not?

Flash is dying

Silverlight is already dead,

There was a window to kill DRM, Tim Berners-Lee should have called the MPAA bluff..

The MPAA needs the internet far more than the internet needs the MPAA and their content

EME goes far far far far beyond just allowing netflix to claim HTML5 Compatibility

when EME is in the spec, the Open Web is dead...

Cool how "google's awful monopoly in search and online profiling for advertising purposes" didn't get a place in your list.

> With my fitness tracker, I want it to run all the time, even offline like a native app. But every day of my workout history will have a URL and I can link my friends to it.

Slowly, slowly, we'll be reinventing web. I can't wait for 2020, when these brand new apps that structure every kind of data and make it uniformly accessible, in a form that makes it easy for automated programs to reason about both content and structure, are going to be all the rage.

I'm actually excited about it. What makes me bitter is the fact that I have no idea what the fuck we were doing wrong in the early 2000s or so, because we should have been there already.

It's easy to find scapegoats like Facebook, tightly clutching private data in poorly-designed, ever-changing access schemes that polarize the WWW, but I'm not entirely convinced they're the only ones to blame.

  > I can't wait for 2020

You may as well wait till 2200 till someone finds a solution to the problem no one has. If we are going to do something slowly of quickly it is to finally understand what web is and what it isn't.

> I have no idea what the fuck we were doing wrong in the early 2000s or so

I don't think "we" were dong anything wrong. A lot of stuff now being used to accelerate web development simply wasn't mature enough, back then. Also, there are critical-mass effects that simply couldn't be done in early 2000s.

Still, a lot of people were already working on these problems on a conceptual level.

> A lot of stuff now being used to accelerate web development simply wasn't mature enough, back then.

I think web development is speedy, and it also was fairly speedy in the 2000s, too. The web, on the other hand, not so much, and much of it is bloated and hampered by abstraction layers to an indecent degree. JS doesn't help, either.

Something took a wrong turn at a point and the immature, but potentially capable technologies we had degenerated into today's clusterfuck.

Am I the only one who isn't totally grasping this 25 years of the Web thing? The Web was "turned on" in 1991, am I right? Ok, Berners-lee had already been working on it since he had the idea in 1989, but this is like celebrating your birthday 9 months in advance because, you know, that day, your mom and dad...

What killed the web are js-app sites that don't work in mobile, along with the 1MB webpages that contain everything and the kitchen sink right on the page that also don't work in mobile (can't resize, font too small, javascript popups, flash popups, etc) What is needed is a return to the basic: plain html sites that don't assume unlimited bandwidth, that let the browser render the content, that don't need images, tables, etc. Most people have limited data plans and would like to keep most of it for music/video, not monstruously large web pages.

You forgot to mention CSS. That's a major reason why even non-JS sites render poorly on mobile.

Yes, you're right. I was going to mention it, but I thought it would be understood.

Sadly, because sites are so bad on mobile, mobile browsers don't do pinch-to-zoom anymore, and that messes my html-only (no css, no js, valid html5) pages utility.

At some point people need to stop treating the web as something distinctly separate from the rest of human life. If a huge majority of business interaction is conducted on-line it is not e-business but just business. If you are socialising with friends on-line it is not social networking or IM, it is just socialising. Basic protections existed in law before the web and they should still exist now. That means that piracy is unlawful, but so is spying without a warrant. The web is just a set of protocols and does not have unique set of protections or privileges for anyone. Problems should be addressed by modifying the protocols in an open way.

The comments here describe doom and gloom of the web dying.

I doubt the web is going anywhere. The future is going to hyperlink driven link data services that can power both native and web clients.

I have started to architect such a solution for my employer and let me tell you, it is the freaking future!

Timbl's words are meaningless when he speaks on the web as he's himself bending over backwards to appease corporate interests, control, restrictions and rubberstamped DRM.

Guess where the money for development of all the major browsers come from?

Google Ads.

updated URL: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57620198-93/tim-berners-lee...

Summary of the article: http://sumbees.com/s/ByAJ3D1ZANTeG2PgwxO7

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