A Reactionary Rant by The Famous Brett Watson, 21-May-2001.
It's long been fashionable to predict the imminent death of any new technology. This prediction usually comes in one of two forms: the technology will die because it isn't viable (it will self-destruct), or the technology will die because something better is about to turn up and replace it. Both of these predictions are usually wrong, and the error usually stems from an underestimate of inertia. Any new technology has momentum or inertia in a metaphoric sense, and that momentum or inertia plays a substantial part in keeping it alive and preventing it from being replaced.
In this particular case, I'm commenting about an article in The Register which tries to grab attention by predicting the death of the Web. I'd like to add my two cents worth by making the somewhat safe suggestion that this is a load of old cobblers. In this particular case, they are taking the "it will be replaced" argument, rather than "it will eat itself". They suggest that the problem in need of solving with the existing Web is its lack of dynamics — the fact that it doesn't sufficiently distinguish itself from the print media.
I think they've missed the point, and they've missed it because they're thinking like a corporation. In corporate-think, the Internet is a resource to be exploited in their quest to get people to Consume their Product, and the value of the Internet will be measured on how well it meets this end. No wonder they see the Web as unsatisfactory: it hasn't made Consumers more willing to Consume. In the true spirit of corporate marketing, Forrester seems to think that this is because the Web isn't stimulating and dynamic enough, and thus they want to solve it with a thing they call the "executable Net".
Before I get around to blasting this "executable Net" concept, let's take a look at why the initial diagnosis is wrong. The best argument with which they back their claim is based on the premise that print is to web as radio is to television. What we see of the web now is like the early days of television, they say, which was little more than illustrated radio. Once again, they have fallen victim to corporate producer/consumer think. What they've failed to notice (and it happens time and time again, for reasons which I hope to explain shortly) is that traditional print, radio and television are one-way broadcast media, whereas the web is interactive.
The web is interactive in two ways that traditional media are not. Firstly, you can navigate with much more freedom around the web: the whole web is available at your fingertips. Compare this to the traditional media: you are restricted to whatever printed journal you may happen to be holding at the time, or whatever is being broadcast on the channels available to you at the time you tune in. Secondly, it is usually a simple mattter to participate in a website in some interactive way: using a discussion forum, voting, or simply emailing the author with your opinions. Corporate-think does not really see ease of navigation as advantageous: it does for their website what the remote control did for television, simply making it easier for you to go to somewhere else. The idea of user participation they have difficulty understanding at all because they think of their users as Passive Consumers.
Another point they've failed to appreciate is the low barrier of entry to being a producer in the Web-sphere. I'm being a producer even as I type this, and I don't have any special resources not available to the average person. This is a huge advantage of the web over the print medium. Printing is really hard and expensive by comparison (I have first-hand experience with a small newspaper), and even when you've been through the rigmarole of printing, delivery is still a problem. With the Web I can publish from my desktop and leave the final delivery up to the normal operation of the Internet. Our corporate thinkers aren't going to see this as an advantage either: if they stop thinking of us as passive consumers for a moment, they'll realise that we're now actually competing with them.
In the corporate marketing paradigm, Consumer Attention is a scarce and valuable resource, and by providing other distractions on the web, we raise the bar on getting that attention. The major problem with the Web, in the view of a marketing drone (although they never actually say it as such), is that they can't glue our eyeballs to their website indefinitely whilst they pour their marketing gunk out at us, a la television with no channel zapper. This may be a deficiency from their perspective, but as far as the rest of us are concerned, it's a great feature!
So the web is not deficient, in my opinion, in the way they say it is. That in itself doesn't mean that their idea for a replacement is wrong: it could be so good that it takes off anyhow. As it happens, however, their idea sucks just as badly as their rationale for saying that there is a problem in the first place.
They are touting a concept which they call "X Internet", the basic premise of which is executable content. Rather than HTML or similar technologies, they see downloaded executable applications as being the best medium for conveying whatever message you might have. One example given is that of "a corporate buyer navigating a virtual marketplace with a Doom-like user interface", where buyers shoot the deals they want.
How many things are wrong with this picture? The most obvious is that it already exists, and isn't all that popular. It's called Java, and I'm pleased to say that Nutters.org is an entirely Java-free site. Not that Java itself is a particularly bad language or anything, it's just that I've rarely seen a Java applet that was worth the download time and load that it put on my relatively underpowered computers. Sites that require Java (or even Javascript) are one of my personal pet hates. I'd also rant about Flash here, but it's a little tangential.
And what of the inconsistency? It can be hard enough figuring out the layout of any given website without introducing a whole new interface every time you go to a new site. Yet that's almost certainly what life would be like in the "executable Net". Every site designer would not only reach their own conclusions about how to structure the site, they would also put their own interface on the front of it. The average end user simply isn't up to this sort of challenge.
Even ignoring the inconsistency problem, what benefit does this example "Doom-like user interface" offer in the general sense? They seem to be taking the approach that the end user must be entertained — that the most entertaining website will attract the largest number of Consumers. I have no doubt that a site with a Doom-like interface would see a great deal of popularity for a short while, but it would then fade into obscurity as the novelty wore off and the end users realised they could find the same information more quickly and efficiently by using a plain HTML interface. When they feel like playing Doom, they'll play Doom.
And what of the cost? Developing an online shopping site with a Java back-end is an immensely time-consuming and expensive process even with the relative simplicity of HTML user interface design. Do you really want to spend the extra money involved in inventing your own version of the wheel, every time you create such a site? It sounds like a great proposition for programmers in terms of employment, but I'd expect the failure rate of projects to go up with the increased complexity.
And what of security? We have enough holes in browsers already thanks to "executable content" without finding new and improved ways of doing so. And what of trust? How much trust can you put in a program you've downloaded like that? What information is it sending back about you? Executable content opens many such cans of worms.
Having said all that, is there anything positive to be said about the idea of executable content? Well, it's not a total loss, clearly. There is a place for Java applets here and now, and although they are more often done badly than well, this is a problem with the use to which they are put, not the concept in general. Every now and then someone does come up with a very good idea for a user interface which can only be implemented in a general programming language like Java. And I wouldn't want to give the impression that I think HTML is the be all and end all of user interfaces; its just that I think replacing it with a general executable system (as opposed to supplementing it with the same) is a step in the wrong direction.
All in all, I think there is plenty of scope for alternative schemes to HTML, but they face a system that already has a great deal of inertia and won't easily be shifted. I think the successful contenders, which will turn up in their own good time, will be like HTML in that they will be protocols designed to work in a fairly specific problem space, as opposed to general purpose programming languages. Forrester's "X Internet" might sound attractive to the marketing drones, but I doubt that any such concept will see much wide adoption. Rumours of the Web's demise have been greatly exaggerated, again.
Author: The Famous Brett Watson