The early Web had a quality that has been lost ever since: it was *simple*
Download #httpd , #netscape write some #html by hand and boom, the concept of a networked digital society is born.
It first started going pear shaped with #LAMP . The complexity of a full blown database was not justified for most use cases. As proven decades later by the popularity of #sqlite and #ssg approaches.
The final blow was when #bigtech got into the act. Immense complexity for the simplest things became a moat
@openrisk This is why I bit the bullet and started on Kitten instead of just building a peer-to-peer social web app and some means of deploying it… if we want a different web, we’re going to have to simplify the stack (at least those parts that are feasible to).
The journey of #javascript is the poster child of out of control #complexity. What started as tiny client side code to introduce some interactivity has eaten html itself (virtual #dom) and then metastasized also on the server side. A gargantuan duplication of functionality between client and server that eventually backlashed into the #htmx and #livewire type approaches.
When you throw in the explosion of mobile clients (with architectures controlled by a duopoly) you get to the lunacy of today.
The main argument justifying all the complexity of the current Web is that it is required for "scaling" teams and operations. There is ofcourse *some* truth in that. We are (collectively) getting increasingly more ambitious about the things we want to do over the Web.
But what "scale" are we targeting? The tools, frameworks and mindsets currently dominating are those that serve the needs of an #adtech oligopoly. It is not the architecture to support a diversified, decentralized digital society.
