Re: <nettime> Bill Thompson: Dump the World Wide Web

[geert <geert@xs4all.nl>]

Florian Cramer wrote:

> Geert, what interests me is why you posted this article. It seems to me
> that you weren't necessarily thrilled by Thompson's technological vision,
> but more by the apocalyptic rhetoric of doing away with the web, right?

Yes, you are right. But what stroke me most is the very idea that one can, 
still, question the basic architecture and existence of WWW. One can say, 
that's naive, but it's also good news. The very fact that protocols are 
not God-given is not clear to most Internet users, I bet. The proposal 
that the WWW can be dumped, must come as a surprise as most of the 
technologies, once they are around for a number of years, sink down to 
some level of the collective subconcious. HTML might be a nightmare for 
designers, but who cares about them? Neither users nor Berners-Lee, so it 
seems.

I posted the piece primarily because we're doing this Decade of Webdesign 
conference in a couple of weeks here in Amsterdam 
(www.decadeofwebdesign.org) where topics like this will discussed.

Greetings, Geert





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