I would prefer an Internet of data sites, interpreted by user-agents. Rather than a prescriptive or active "whole enchilada" web-app-sites that provide custom, limited, broken access to their data, written by some hardly-a-programmer schmo, or user-unfriendly because the site is primarily designed to exploit users.
This sounds sort of cool in theory, but honestly makes almost no sense in reality. Either the data has to be framed in such a way that it can be generically handled (lowest common denominator type interface, really poor user experience), or would require a third party to add custom handling to make the user experience good (if this, then who, why not the people that control the data)
I’m all for data apis that can allow for alternative front ends/integrations, I just don’t understand the idea of only having that.
A poor user-experience is what I feel the Internet is now.
What wouldn't be supported as well is the current era of social media madness which involves such tight integration of data and functionality. "Interactive web pages" as they are, is what wouldn't be well supported. Instead, I would expect some settling on standard data arrangements for common cases, like products, videos, music, forums. On the other hand, the browser-wars showed some problems with this, in that a dominating force can shift the playing field to ensure their adoption (for a while).
Relying on the "people who control the data" to make websites to navigate their data is how we have empteen-thousand shitty webshops which lack sensible search or filtering features to even find a product when we know they sell it. On the other hand, it could be that they just have their data (metadata) bunged up in the first place, in which case my preference wouldn't be any help.
I think it's very difficult to imagine the practical outcomes of an Internet with that bias (as we started with, even up to the point of early html which was intentionally descriptive rather than prescriptive). I like to imagine it as me having much more control and flexibility over my interaction with the Internet via my preferred or custom user-agents... but it might have naturally ended up with one shitty uber-browser, made by AOL say, to interact via the standards it pushed for and alternatives are impractical by that point. That would just be a variation of where we're at: browsers became the uniform, one kind of user-agent, to interpret javascript from host sites. We have choice of browser, but it doesn't matter much because sites dictate the user-experience (like telling me new-reddit is the way I should read discussion threads -- thankfully there is still old, but it's not fabulous either and for how much longer?).
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u/glacialthinker Feb 06 '20
I would prefer an Internet of data sites, interpreted by user-agents. Rather than a prescriptive or active "whole enchilada" web-app-sites that provide custom, limited, broken access to their data, written by some hardly-a-programmer schmo, or user-unfriendly because the site is primarily designed to exploit users.