Doom-mongering for the Web

[mmcirvin]

Spamocalypse may be in the cards for the world of weblogs, but it's worth noting that many predictions of Web doom have been wrong in the past.

I was an early adopter of CSS, and consequently I hung out frequently on the Usenet group comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets a few years ago. The newsgroup seemed populated by people who were knowledgeable and brilliant, but also perpetually disgruntled and prone to lectures about how the Web was going to hell because nobody had listened to their favored way of doing things back in 1992. Around 2000, when the first wave of browsers with half-decent standards compliance started to get some traction, I ventured to express some optimism about the situation, and my sentiments weren't generally shared. Sure, these browsers can finally lay out a nontrivial box-model situation without barfing, but can't you see it's all doomed because the W3C's cascade model can't handle this or this or this? Sure, DOCTYPE sniffing allows browser developers to cover their butts on backward compatibility while putting in proper parsing, but it violates the stated function of DOCTYPEs in SGML and would have bad results in this corner case and this one and this one, so is anathema!

Half a loaf was never good enough, doing nothing would have been preferable to doing things in any imperfect way, and because of the industry's willingness to compromise, we were inevitably progressing toward a Web wholly owned by Microsoft. What's happened instead is interesting: Microsoft indeed has overwhelmingly dominant market share, yet open standards compliance is enough of a selling point that you can actually use a non-Microsoft browser for pretty much all of your needs outside of corporate intranets, and a small fraction of sites designed by dimwits. If any one company has a proprietary lock on a chunk of the Web, it's Macromedia.

Here's another one: Remember the Imminent Death of the Amateur Indie Web? There was a lot of this going around back in the Nineties during the dot-com boom. The story went something like this: "Once upon a time, the World Wide Web was a collection of thrown-together personal sites with kitty pictures on them. But now, with big corporations moving into the space, individuals are going to be out-competed, and soon the Web will just be another big-media organ, with amateurs reduced to the status of cable access television, scorned and ignored." What followed was the tale of the Death of Content, which I found particularly amusing: "Once upon a time, people went to the Web to obtain information, and we said that content was king. But companies founded to make money off Web content haven't. Since, as we said earlier, corporate sites will soon outcompete amateurs, it follows that content is vanishing as a driving force on the Web." I used to wonder what they thought would replace content: Empty templates that hypnotize you into looking at them? Sites full of random characters, like Borges' Library of Babel? More likely they thought it would just all go to e-commerce, like TV channels switching to 24-hour home shopping. Some mysterious force would keep people from wanting to see the kitty pictures any more. The Web was always going to be more like TV in some way or other, and if it wasn't turning out to succeed in the way TV had, it was probably just going to evaporate.

It didn't happen. Every corporation has a Web presence now, and a few of them even have content worth looking at. But the big exciting story of the past few years has been the weblog explosion, which is almost completely amateur material. E-commerce is mostly corporate and content is mostly amateur. The difference from cable access television is that a dedicated amateur with little capital can put up a content site that's as polished as a corporate product, or more so. There are scaling problems when the site gets popular, but nobody said that any individual site had to be as popular as amazon.com, and it turns out that a few of them can even meet expenses by hawking T-shirts.

Comments

[jwgh]

A couple of reactions:

Once upon a time, the World Wide Web was a collection of thrown-together personal sites with kitty pictures on them. But now, with big corporations moving into the space, individuals are going to be out-competed, and soon the Web will just be another big-media organ, with amateurs reduced to the status of cable access television, scorned and ignored.

I remember being amused by this, mostly because some of the same people who said this had earlier complained that the web was pointless because it consisted of web sites for peoples' cats.

The difference from cable access television is that a dedicated amateur with little capital can put up a content site that's as polished as a corporate product, or more so.

I think this is true, but I think to some extent it's because so many professionally-designed websites are ugly or unusable or both, even for organizations that should know better.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

MUHAHAHAHA WE OWN THE WEB!!!

Hey, that can be our next slogan!