a new internet

Before I begin, it’s important to note that most of what I will be discussing here is about a new “web” rather than “internet.” Although I will likely touch on parts of the internet that aren’t ideal, it’s not my area of expertise, so I don’t have strong opinions on the best solutions forward. The Internet refers to the base layers of infrastructure that make our connected devices work—TCP, UDP, DNS, etc. These base layers of infrastructure focus mainly on how we get data from one point to another in an efficient way and how we look up data from the right places. In contrast, the web is purely a specific application on top of the internet. It is one specific use of this ability to send data from one place to another and address specific repositories of data in order to connect websites (some of which are now full-fledged applications) to each other.

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the web of today

What can I say to capture our feelings about the internet of today. What comes to mind when you think about the word “internet”? What images or feeling pop in? For most, there is likely at least some amount of anxiety, dread, or fear. Social media, the thing that people were most hopeful about in the days of the early internet, has become for many a source of repeated cycles of pleasure-filled addiction. Yet, for many of us, more and more in the younger generations, we see the beauty of the internet in all the ways it brings people together over the silly and the serious: from the memes that become the basis for a shared culture to solidarity in the face of injustice.

For a long time, I think we took the web for granted. For a long time, I think we thought we couldn’t change anything about it. But opinions seem to be changing these days. More diverse opinions about the web—the weird, small, cozy, poetic, tiny web—are being shared across the internet in wider and more institutional circles. With the wave of AI-generated content, the violent death of public spaces like Twitter and the API shutdown of Reddit, the quick death of many technology startups with the receding economy, the hopelessness of buying a home or planning very much in the future for many people entering working society, people have started to question the immutable nature of the internet. Maybe it isn’t set in stone. Perhaps things could be different.

The Application Web and the Document Web

A historical debate in talking about reinventing the web is rooted in the generic nature of the web. It was created so open that it allowed for people to create two main kinds of things (and mix and match those) that have fundamentally different priorities and needs. This is the divide between the Application Web and the Document Web.

The Document Web is supposedly what the internet was designed to be from the start. As the name suggests, it is about making readable plain documents, formatted in a standard set of ways (using CSS). It also extends to giving the capacity for end-readers to customize how these documents look to fit their preferences (e.g. changing the font size or family to be more readable or adjusting colors to be friendly in the dark). The document web doesn’t need servers. There is no permanent state that you need to keep when your visitors are just reading and not making any changes to your site. The development of the document web is writing HTML and CSS and is closely related to the Semantic Web. When a site is written in this manner, it is extremely easy to get structured data out of it, which is readable to machines

The Application Web is about creating interactive apps. These often involve having an account that associates your identity with your set of data stored within the application creator’s servers. These servers provide the crucial role of giving you the capacity to save state permanently. When you re-open the application on a later date, your data is still there, and you can even exchange that data with other people, facilitated by the application and its server. Because the application has full control and knowledge over the data, they can create the logic to facilitate these interactions and give you permission to do interesting things with your data and your friends.

The conflict arises from

• the application web is hard to turn into data
• the application web often fights against the fundamental principles of the web (built for document web and writing html)
• the application web is slow compared to the document web
• trying to do both feels impossible

The Future Web

should…

• support both. the best kinds of the internet are when these two things are mixed
• allow you to get structured data out of websites
• make it easy to make applications and customize them with your own data
• make it easy to make applications without needing servers
• allow you to easily publish documents
• allow you to talk to other people without needing servers
• allow you to store your own data on your own terms and give permission to applications to access and work on top of that data
• make it possible to write websites by hand

conversation with jacky about this

2024-01-09 hmmm this is very interesting thank u for sharing!! i agree with the web vs internet distinction - designing an internet also makes this division and focuses on the application layer (at least so far). although interestingly i dont think people really think about it that way and feel more affinity towards internet than web..? or at least it is synonymous to them i dont actually agree with your point about html energy / poetic web being document web-first. i think its true that a large extent of it focuses on the document part but i think the impetus behind that is just being able to start writing it and making something in contrast to having 90% of the time being setting up an environment to do that

like i think the very expressive poetic web sites function more like applications? they wouldnt be the same without their javascript usage even if its minimal i also think you see a lot of pressure on the other side of the application web where ppl want to build their documents in a way that makes it extensible to applications so they try to use nextjs/react etc. to build their “blog” because they want to show off cool stuff in the blog / surrounding it

i think i actually feel this pressure / had been migrating my site to mdx / react and typescript because its just so much more ergonomic to build something interactive and interesting than in vanilla js to me so i feel like i dont agree with the article on separation of the two kinds of webs as the right philosophical way forward even if it probably is the most pragmatic way forward?

References

• https://macwright.com/2020/08/22/clean-starts-for-the-web
  • Web is composed of Document Web and Application Web
    • they have very different intentions:
      • Document Web about making plain documents readable and letting end-users customize how they look
      • Application web: interactive applications
    • They are also often in conflict. Doing more “application-y” stuff usually sacrifices accessibility, performance, and machine readibility now
    • One uses html, css, and vanilla javascript and the other uses JSX
  • proposes a “splintered web”
    • document web powered by some flavor of markdown
      • ‘not as fun’ but maybe you just need “just enough fun” like the early internet
• https://github.com/pzwang/lostweb/blob/master/1%20Web%202017.md
• Designing an Internet