Of the web

[Dave Winer on Scripting News]

I think Dave Winer makes an important distinction here:

“For a piece of software, being of the web means that it is built to share data with other apps, ones that receive data as input, as a feed reader consumes feeds, or generate output for other apps, e.g. software used to publish feeds. Or competitive apps, that do roughly the same thing another app does, and want to be able to receive the user's data, or better, share the users' data so they can use both apps (we shouldn't settle for less than this, imho).”

By his definition, most web apps are on the web, but not of it. This seems right to me, and I suspect web instigators like Tim Berners-Lee would agree.

The odd thing is that, for a while, desktop software did exactly this. Word would save a document in a particular format, and another application written by someone else entirely could open that document. When we moved to the cloud, we signed up for a computing environment that was as much about siloing and isolation as much as it was about ease of access and maintenance.

Some of the effects of that are good: zero trust enterprise services have made organizations more secure. But the obvious benefit for vendors is lock-in. That’s been true for decades: the whole thrust of the tech side of my has been helping to remove gatekeepers and empower people to access the data and services they need, on their terms. These days, some jurisdictions have legislation to help prevent that.

But the web, as Dave points out, was never about lock-in. As Tim Berners-Lee made clear, again and again: this is for everyone. It’s a public domain platform, using open protocols, that allows anyone to publish, share, and read. Anything that’s truly of the web is in line with those principles — and those principles are worth protecting.

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