What should follow the web?
I like this far better than the first post, at least the author is proposing some concrete ideas that can be debated, which I think is worthwhile.<p>However actually going and attempting to implement this idea from whole cloth is a fool&#x27;s errand.  I&#x27;m not really cynical by nature, so it pains to be that guy, but in this case I just think it belies a complete naivete about how software ecosystems evolve and thrive, and why the web in particular was successful.<p>The web you see today bears almost no resemblance to the original proposal.  What got the ball rolling was a very simple document format and protocol that made it much easier to share documents.  That was a unique value-add over Email&#x2F;FTP&#x2F;IRC&#x2F;Usenet&#x2F;Gopher that drove early adoption.  The reason the web is so crufty is because all the application stuff was bolted on after the fact, but here&#x27;s the rub—if they had designed it for applications from the beginning it would not have been too complicated and wouldn&#x27;t have taken off.  There were tons of proper app development platforms that could have formed the basis for &quot;proper&quot; cross-platform GUI app development, but none of them could cross the chasm to true ubiquity the way the web has.<p>By the late 90s, the amount of effort being invested in the web was far greater than any single company or organization could ever bring to bear on a problem.  20 years later it is a deep sedimentary stack of more technologies than anyone can really keep track of, and yes it&#x27;s been quite tortured and abused, and often feels extremely janky.<p>But tempting as it might be to think you can design something better, you really can&#x27;t.  You can&#x27;t solve all the problems the web has solved.  It will seem good when you start, but as you go you run up against the edge cases, and the scope grows, and then you have to bring in more people to solve the new problems, and you start to lose control of the design again, and you end up with an entirely new mess that people write hang-wringing blog posts about.  Either that or you play benevolent dictator and try to control everything, but then adoption slows and it becomes more of a proprietary platform that never gains ubiquity.<p>The only tractable way to improve the web is to pick an area and work on improving it, it&#x27;s not as satisfying because you have to much cruft, but it <i>is</i> possible to slowly improve things.  It takes a long time this way, but you are leveraging the millions (billions?) of man-hours that have gone into web technologies to date.<p>That&#x27;s not to say the web is invincible, yes the web might be replaced, but it won&#x27;t be replaced by someone building a better app platform (that will never gain traction, mark my words).  Instead, it will be something unexpected, it will be a simple use case that, in unforeseeable ways, over time, creates an entirely new ecosystem that simply makes the web irrelevant.