-- Leo's gemini proxy
-- Connecting to drawk.cab:1965...
-- Connected
-- Sending request
-- Meta line: 20 text/gemini
The original World Wide Web was a linked set of resources which people had made available on the Internet. The key innovation was the link, which you could use to navigate from one resource to another, no matter where they might be located. But the focus was still on the resources themselves, the information that was out there.
Web 2.0 wasn't really about the Web, but about the browser. Forms led to Javascript, and Javascript (the good parts, at any rate) enabled the web to deliver not just resources, but experiences. It was only a short while before the experience was the only thing actually delivered over the Web. The resources, the information itself, moved off the Web to some database or cloud.
So this became the world of Google and Facebook. The browser provides a (ubiquitous, standard, carefully-sandboxed) virtual machine into which we invite service owners to deliver their products. In my last job I don't know if I actually installed any software on my work laptop, apart from the Web browser.
Web 2.0 was essential to mainstreaming the Internet. Anyone can use these apps because they are delivered as a complete product. But there's little of the Web left in them. Only the way the software is gated behind a login rather than an install---and this is becoming increasingly blurred from both sides.
The early Web wasn't mainstream. You needed to put your files somewhere, run a server, or borrow someone's. You needed to be a bit of a geek. But any type of person can be a geek, if they have the inclination, and far more people have geek friends than have friends who work at Facebook. Yes, there's a gate, but there's no gatekeeper. Go ahead and lift the latch. Just don't let the animals out.
I want to make space for a modern Web 1.0, where the information returns to the centre. A Web 1.0 app can use all the power of a modern browser, but it's designed from the start to work with resources anywhere on the Internet.
There is definitely an influence here from the permacomputing scene, Gemini, and the like, which I've been circling for a while. I think a modern Web 1.0 can fit into that vision, though the movement has a lot more strands than the one I've chosen to pick up.
In particular, the permacomputing scene seems to have something against making use of client-side compute power, unless for security purposes;---this despite modern devices delivering far more compute for far less energy than ever before. To me this seems a missed opportunity, and risks entrenching the idea of active services and passive consumers that I want to get away from.
It's served over the Web at a known URL.
It uses URLs to link to any resources it needs.
It doesn't place any restrictions on the location of any user-supplied resources.
It transforms and presents those resources in a useful way.
Ideally, it has no part in controlling access to resources: this being done between the browser and whatever is hosting the resources. But in practice there's not a well-used general standard for this, because Web 2.0 apps didn't need there to be one, handling all that stuff internally. (I agree with Gemini that client certificates are probably the best approach, but the UX for these in standard browsers is uniformly terrible.)
Here's an in-browser BBC micro emulator that I would count as a Web 1.0 app.
It's located at http://bbcmicro.co.uk/jsbeeb/play.php ✅
It uses a resource at http://bbcmicro.co.uk/gameimg/discs/2575/Disc999-calypso-201119.ssd which you can access separately ✅
Any resource can be substituted, just change the URL in the `disc` parameter ✅
The usefulness in this case goes without saying ✅
The resource (the game) is public and read-only, so access isn't a concern ✅
A thought I come back to quite often is how making a tool for some task empowers the people who need to perform that task, freeing up time or energy for them to promote their interests in other ways. And how systems are set up to reward making tools for people who can afford to pay for them.
ITEM.PARTY is a tool whose target user is anyone who needs to organise items. However, this way of thinking, finding ways to frame your ideas and goals in terms of sets of like items that can be manipulated, is itself a powerful tool, one that deserves to be accessible to as many people as possible. With a little help from their geek friends.
-- Response ended
-- Page fetched on Tue May 14 08:15:26 2024