The author

The 100 Year Web

Steven Pemberton, CWI, Amsterdam

Contents

Stewart Brand

Stewart Brand
From Wikipedia, by Cmichel67 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Stewart Brand's life

Now 83, he has had an amazing life. For instance,

How Buildings Learn

One of his books:

Book cover

The Argument

The argument behind How Buildings Learn is that buildings should be designed to anticipate change.

Architects can't know how a building will be used over its whole life, and so should design with the future in mind, as well as the present.

New College, Oxford, 1379

New College Dining Hall
As reported in How Buildings Learn

Built in 1379, New College has a dining hall with huge oak beams in the roof.

Eventually the beams needed replacing. But where do you find oak beams? They asked the University forester if he knew:

- "Which college are you from?"
- "New College."
- "Well, I've got your trees".

It turns out that around the time that New College was built, they planted new trees to be ready for when they would need them.

We don't see that sort of attitude much these days.

Books

When New College was being built, all books were still hand-written, and very expensive.

In 1424 The University of Cambridge had one of the largest libraries in Europe: 122 books.

A Manscript

Book 1450

Printing in 1568

When Gutenberg introduced the printing press around 1450, it had several effects:

1450

printing_presses_in_Europe_1450

1460

printing_presses_in_Europe_1460

1470

printing_presses_in_Europe_1470

1480

printing_presses_in_Europe_1480

1490

printing_presses_in_Europe_1490

1500

printing_presses_in_Europe_1500

Image source. Data source.

Information explosion

Before, producing a single copy of a book took several years. By 1500:

And bear in mind, you didn't just "set up a print shop". You had to:

It was a real revolution.

Permanence

The first page of Gutenberg's bibleThanks to the high quality of the materials they used, and to libraries, we can still read the books they printed, 500 years ago.

Which is one of the points of books: to store information for later ages.

Before the printing press, because vellum was so expensive, books would occasionally be reused, by scraping off the ink, and rewriting over them.

With printed books you didn't need to do this any more.

Style

A book looking like a manuscriptFor the first 50 years, they made books look as much like manuscripts as possible

Why?

This was partly because that was what was expected of a book at the time.

It was where the money was.

But also, they didn't know any different.

After about 50 years, readable fonts were introduced, and the features we now expect from a book.

This was probably after the death of the first generation of printers.

The Web

In many ways, the development of the web has echoed that of the book:

Amsterdam

Amsix stats 2022

Interesting Amsterdam information-explosion factoids:

2022

Installation of first public computer in 1957Installing the first municipal computer, in Norwich, 1957

This year is only sixty-five years since the start of public computing. Computing is still very young.

Last year was the 30th anniversary of the Web being released.

I consider us still to be in manuscript-imitation phase of the Web: we're still driven by how it used to be.

How the web was won

Tim Berners-Lee and Steven
Tim Berners-Lee and Steven discussing HTML

Many people think that Tim Berners-Lee must have been a genius to have invented the web, but in fact at the time there were several alternatives being developed.

Why did the Web succeed where the others didn't?

Declarative

A Declarative Definition

We learn in school what numbers are, and how to add, subtract, multiply and divide.

However, when we get to square roots, we are only told:

The square root of a number is a number that when you multiply it by itself, you get the original number.

This is a declarative definition. It tells you what something is, it tells you how to recognise it, but it doesn't tell you how to calculate it.

Most people know what a square root is, few people leave school knowing how to calculate one.

A Procedural Definition

Here is a procedural definition of square root:

function f a:
{
   x ← a
   x' ← (a + 1) ÷ 2
   eps ← 1.19209290e-07
   while abs(x − x') > eps × x: 
   {
      x ← x'
      x' ← ((a ÷ x') + x') ÷ 2
   }
   return x'
}

Advantages of Declarative

The Development of HTML

HTML, the language underlying the web, was largely declarative.

In the early days of HTML, there were very few browsers, and only one or two of importance.

Browser makers were very tempted to add to HTML. We still live with the bad design decisions of Netscape...

W3C was partly created in order to protect HTML, so that everyone used the same HTML, and everyone agreed on new features.

Unfortunately, recently the browser makers, led by Google, have taken over HTML, and are now changing it radically, and badly, to create HTML5, largely forgetting its declarative foundation.

Declarative numbers

number: optional sign, digit+.
optional sign: "-"?.
digit: "0"; "1"; "2"; "3"; "4"; "5"; "6"; "7"; "8"; "9".
A number has its normal everyday meaning.

This is:

Procedural numbers: HTML5

2.4.4 Numbers

2.4.4.1 Signed integers

A string is a valid integer if it consists of one or more ASCII digits, optionally prefixed with a "-" (U+002D) character.

A valid integer without a "-" (U+002D) prefix represents the number that is represented in base ten by that string of digits. A valid integer with a "-" (U+002D) prefix represents the number represented in base ten by the string of digits that follows the U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, subtracted from zero.

The rules for parsing integers are as given in the following algorithm. When invoked, the steps must be followed in the order given, aborting at the first step that returns a value. This algorithm will return either an integer or an error.

  1. Let input be the string being parsed.
  2. Let position be a pointer into input, initially pointing at the start of the string.
  3. Let sign have the value "positive".
  4. Skip whitespace.
  5. If position is past the end of input, return an error.
  6. If the character indicated by position (the first character) is a "-" (U+002D) character:
    1. Let sign be "negative".
    2. Advance position to the next character.
    3. If position is past the end of input, return an error.

    Otherwise, if the character indicated by position (the first character) is a "+" (U+002B) character:

    1. Advance position to the next character. (The "+" is ignored, but it is not conforming.)
    2. If position is past the end of input, return an error.
  7. If the character indicated by position is not an ASCII digit, then return an error.
  8. Collect a sequence of characters that are ASCII digits, and interpret the resulting sequence as a base-ten integer. Let value be that integer.
  9. If sign is "positive", return value, otherwise return the result of subtracting value from zero.

2.4.4.2 Non-negative integers

A string is a valid non-negative integer if it consists of one or more ASCII digits.

A valid non-negative integer represents the number that is represented in base ten by that string of digits.

The rules for parsing non-negative integers are as given in the following algorithm. When invoked, the steps must be followed in the order given, aborting at the first step that returns a value. This algorithm will return either zero, a positive integer, or an error.

  1. Let input be the string being parsed.
  2. Let value be the result of parsing input using the rules for parsing integers.
  3. If value is an error, return an error.
  4. If value is less than zero, return an error.
  5. Return value.

Inflation

So the HTML5 definition of signed numbers is 16 times longer and has internal inconsistencies.

It will not surprise you to learn as a result that the HTML5 spec is very large.

HTML5, the Spec

The HTML5 Spec printed
One of the advantages of the web is that you can read its specification without having to print it out

Declarative Markup

Declarative methods are not only for specification.

For instance, in HTML, elements like <h1> just announce that this is the top-level heading, without requiring anything about how it looks, such as in a large bold font.

<h1>The 100 year web</h1>

Or the <a> element:

<a href="talk.html" title="..." target="..." class="..." >My Talk</a>

This compactly encapsulates a lot of behaviour including

Doing this in programming would be a lot of work.

CSS

CSS, the web styling language, is another example of a successful declarative approach.

When W3C started the CSS activity, Netscape, at the time the leading browser, declined to join, saying that they had a better solution, JSSS, based on Javascript.

Instead of

h1 { font-size: 20pt; }

you could use script to say

document.tags.H1.fontSize = "20pt";

Which brings us to Javascript.

Javascript

Javascript- the definitive guide

Javascript: So Good it has Good Parts!

Javascript, the good parts book

Javascript, good vs bad.

The good parts vs the rest

Programming

The HTML5 designers, rather than designing new declarative ways of dealing with new use cases, instead turned HTML into a programming environment.

"You know... I feel like I blinked and then all of the sudden what I thought was my job was suddenly not my job but now I'm being told that I need to do this other stuff that I don't even like and people wonder why I'm wielding a stiletto like a weapon and screaming, "I HATE JAVASCRIPT! YOU CAN'T MAKE ME! NO MEANS NO!" and considering a second career in comedy writing." -- Nicole Henninger

Consequences

Without going into detail about why Javascript is such a bad language, and therefore barely fit for purpose, let's look at the consequences of dropping a declarative approach for programming.

Consequence: Standardisation

One of the problems with using programming for functionality is that standardisation disappears.

Example: CSS presentation mode (which I am using here). This allows you to specify how any document can be formatted when doing a presentation.

Alas, HTML5 has taken the approach that you can do this better in Javascript. No one supports Presentation Mode any more. And there are now lots of Javascript packages to do presentation.

ALL DIFFERENT!

You can no longer switch in a different presentation package, and use that, because you have to CHANGE THE DOCUMENT.

The programmers are doing the document design, so all the documents become proprietary, and there is no interoperability, which is the whole point of standards.

Consequence: Divergence

Javascript is why there are so few new elements in HTML5: they haven't done any design, and instead said "if you need anything new, you can always do it in Javascript".

And many have.

Wikipedia lists 26 packages of Javascript (such as Angular, Dojo, and Bootstrap) that you can use to build your webpages.

They are not interchangable, thus effectively creating 26 different versions of HTML.

Consequence: Frameworks

So which framework do you use? And what happens when:

YOU HAVE TO CHANGE ALL YOUR DOCUMENTS.

This is why standards are needed, not proprietary formats like frameworks.

Consequence: Availability

"The U.K.’s GDS (Government Digital Service) ran an experiment to determine how many of its users did not receive JavaScript-based enhancements, and it discovered that number to be 1.1 percent, or 1 in every 93 users. For an ecommerce site like Amazon, that’s 1.75 million people a month, which is a huge number." -- alistapart

Consequence: Bloat

To look at the webpage of one single tweet of 140 characters, you have to download just under a megabyte. It's 5200 lines of HTML before you even get to the five Javascript packages.

The whole of James Joyce's Ulysses is only half as long again.

"An article from 2012 titled "The Growing Epidemic of Page Bloat" warns that the average web page is over a megabyte in size.

The article itself is 1.8 megabytes long.

An article two years later, called “The Overweight Web" warns that average page size is approaching 2 megabytes.

That article is 3 megabytes long.

If present trends continue, there is the real chance that articles warning about page bloat could exceed 5 megabytes by 2020." -- The Website Obesity Crisis

Consequence: Speed

"Because of #GDPR, USA Today decided to run a separate version of their website for EU users, which has all the tracking scripts and ads removed. The site seemed very fast, so I did a performance audit. How fast the internet could be without all the junk!

5.2MB → 500KB

They went from a load time of more than 45 seconds to 3 seconds, from 124 (!) JavaScript files to 0, and from a total of more than 500 requests to 34." -- Marcel Freinbichler

Consequence: Accessibility

One day we will all be 80, and still need to be able to use the web.

"Many developers who have grown up only using frameworks have a total lack of understanding about the fundamentals of HTML, such as valid and semantic markup ... This is of great concern as semantic markup is one of the core principles of an accessible web." -- Russ Weakley

Consequence: Permanence

The web is the way now that we distribute information. We will need the web pages we create now to be readable in 100 years time, just as we can still read 100-year-old books.

Requiring a webpage to depend on a particular 100-year-old implementation of Javascript is not exactly evidence of future-thinking.

Declarative markup is easier to keep alive because it is independent of the implementation!

A Letter from Einstein

An Einstein letterEinstein: 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955

CWI is in possession of a couple of letters from him to a colleague (and the replies)

And one from Escher

MC EscherCWI also has a letter from MC Escher thanking the CWI in 1954 for helping his work to achieve recognition.

Ephemera

That such letters still exist is a piece of luck.

Usually such pieces of ephemera are not appreciated for their value until much later, often long after they have been thrown away.

Example: Apple Lisa

Apple LisaIn the 80's I was working on the programming language ABC (the forerunner of Python), and we had amongst other computers an Apple Lisa (the forerunner of the Apple Macintosh).

Apple Lisa

It was a big thing, and after the project it sat on a desk unused and getting in the way, until the point that it was just a worthless slow lump, with the result that it was unceremoniously thrown away.

Big mistake: an Apple Lisa is now a historic computer, and would be worth way more than what it cost when we bought it; just the mouse would fetch more than $500 now... It is one of a few computers that has increased in value over the years.

But at the time, no one considered that this heap of junk would actually ever be valuable.

Example: BBC

Dr WhoBefore 1978 the BBC had no archiving policy.

So many seminal events were erased (for economic reasons!):

See "Wiping" on Wikipedia for more.

Artefacts

One of the unfortunate side-effects of digitisation is that in the future we probably won't have any paper artefacts like letters to find in library archives:

And what do many organisations do when the information is no longer needed? Delete the lot!

Gone:

You can't argue it from a cost perspective: 1 gigabyte of diskspace costs 3 or 4 cents now (and dropping), and spread over the lifetime of a disk is negligable.

Plan to keep your future history

Don't just back up the data and delete everything.

Webpages should be preserved. I recently found some important data on the homepage of someone at MIT who had left in 1996!

And webpages should be preserved at the same URL they always had. As Tim Berners-Lee says: Cool URLs don't change!

Cruft

Of course that means a lot of cruft will be kept.

But who cares? It is almost free to keep.

I still have all my email from the 90's: there's a lot there that's not of interest (at least, not yet), but thanks to it we now know when CWI first had a website, and I know how much filestore I was using in 1992 (117MB if you're interested, much of it binaries).

Future

The only way to find out which data will be valuable is to wait and see, and that means we have to keep it around long enough to let it accrue its value.

Conclusion

The Web has become too important as infrastructure to be treated lightly.

The Web itself must return to declarative foundations to make it durable and persistent.

But attitude by web creators is also important: design with the future in mind, as well as the present.