What should follow the web?
There should be a name for the fallacy in this type of post -- perhaps the &quot;boil the ocean fallacy&quot;.<p>Something as big as the web is necessarily evolved rather than designed.  Obviously every programmer and their mother thinks they can design a better web.  But that&#x27;s not how large systems are built.<p>I take more of a pessimistic view of systems, as in:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Systemantics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Systemantics</a><p>This post seems to have a little too much optimism :)<p>In particular one slogan from that book is &quot;large systems operate in a permanently degraded mode&quot;.  They perform poorly and some part of them is always broken.  There is massive redundancy and inefficiency.<p>That couldn&#x27;t be more true of the web.  (It&#x27;s also true of things like governments and health care systems, but those things also serve their purpose to some extent.)<p>But this post does nothing to convince me why that won&#x27;t be true of a replacement.  It seems oblivious to the facts and forces of technological adoption.  There is only one mention of the word &quot;compatibility&quot; in the post, and it&#x27;s in regard to authentication.  I&#x27;m not sure where all the binary protocol stuff is coming from.<p>Without compatibility, it&#x27;s not very interesting to contemplate, because it will never happen.<p>There will be something beyond the web, but it won&#x27;t be &quot;like the web but with certain of my pet peeves fixed&quot;.  It will have to have a fundamental new capability, like iOS&#x2F;Android were to Microsoft Windows, which is another platform with an enormous network effect.  Whatever new platform that comes along will coexist alongside the web for decades, just like iOS&#x2F;Android and Windows do.<p>EDIT: The style and tone of the book can be annoying to some, but there is wisdom there.   Here are some nuggets of wisdom relevant to the web:<p>- <i>One of the problems that a system creates is that it becomes an entity onto itself that not only persists but expands and encroaches on areas beyond the original system&#x27;s purview.</i> -- This is everybody&#x27;s complaint about the web evolving from a hypertext platform to an app platform.<p>- <i>Complex systems tend to produce complex responses (not solutions) to problems.</i> -- Every new technology introduced on top of the web (e.g. PHP, CGI, Java applets, Flash, CoffeeScript&#x2F;TypeScript, PaaS, etc.) is better viewed as a temporary response than a solution.<p>- <i>Great advances are not produced by systems designed to produce great advances.</i> -- I believe this applies to the solution proposed in the original article.