Software Over the Web and the Demise of the Web as an Information Platform
The Web became JavaScript, more like Adobe Flash
WE are about to (belatedly) kick off some new series, having spent a lot of time catching up with GNU/Linux news (49 additions yesterday). It'll be a lot easier than in past years, as we made ample time available for the task. 20 years ago or even 10 years ago there was way too much going on at once to actually set aside time and prepare long texts. The Web was loaded with journalism.
Now? There's not much going on in the Web, except plagiarism and slop (which is basically another form of plagiarism) as well as "webapps". Even microblogging became "webapps" and WordPress is a pile of JavaScript.
The "WWW is in bad shape," an associate has noted, and Mozilla's "Mitchell Baker did a lot to worsen it and to kill off Firefox."
"There's a major resurgence in blogging but in proportion to the size of everything else, it is a drop in the bucket. The dangerous part is that there are no young people learning computers. Critically they are not learning the ideas even, not even the origins about how there were no major networks until open networking standards (TCP/IP etc) allowed growth to happen. Everything was locked down and proprietary like what things have been turning into."
"The WWWorst App Store" was presented by Alexandre Oliva 3 years ago. Our upcoming series is indirectly related to this. █