What a comprehensive, well-written article. Well done!
The author traces the evolution of web technology from Notepad-edited HTML to today.
My biggest difference with the author is that he is optimistic about web development, while all I see is shaky tower of workarounds upon workarounds.
My take is that the web technology tower is built on the quicksand of an out-of-control web standardization process that has been captured by a small cabal of browser vendors. Every single step of history that this article mentions is built to paper over some serious problems instead of solving them, creating an even bigger ball of wax. The latest step is generative AI tools that work around the crap by automatically generating code.
This tower is the very opposite of simple and it's bound to collapse. I cannot predict when or how.
I was also impressed and read the whole thing and got a lot of gaps filled in my history-of-the-web knowledge. And I also agree that the uncritical optimism is the weak point; the article seems put together like a just-so story about how things are bound to keep getting more and more wonderful.
But I don't agree that the system is bound to collapse. Rather, as I read the article, I got this mental image of the web of networked software+hardware as some kind of giant, evolving, self-modifying organism, and the creepy thing isn't the possibility of collapse, but that, as humans play with their individual lego bricks and exercise their limited abilities to coordinate, through this evolutionary process a very big "something" is taking shape that isn't a product of conscious human intention. It's not just about the potential for individual superhuman AIs, but about what emerges from the whole ball of mud as people work to make it more structured and interconnected.
The author traces the evolution of web technology from Notepad-edited HTML to today.
My biggest difference with the author is that he is optimistic about web development, while all I see is shaky tower of workarounds upon workarounds.
My take is that the web technology tower is built on the quicksand of an out-of-control web standardization process that has been captured by a small cabal of browser vendors. Every single step of history that this article mentions is built to paper over some serious problems instead of solving them, creating an even bigger ball of wax. The latest step is generative AI tools that work around the crap by automatically generating code.
This tower is the very opposite of simple and it's bound to collapse. I cannot predict when or how.