(2023-10-13) Berjon Building The Next Web

Robin Berjon: Building The Next Web. The Ship of Theseus thought experiment which has been keeping philosophers employed for centuries: if every component of the ship were replaced one by one over time, is the resulting ship the same as the initial one?

You could ask the same question about the World Wide Web. HTTP/3 is a binary multiplexed UDP protocol, HTTP/0.9 was just text over TCP (and it didn't even have headers or response codes, it could only transmit HTML). We used to show off just how good we were at making intricate 800x600 layouts with nested tables and transparent pixels, in ways that would get you laughed out of the room by today's responsive subgrid crowd.

That's why it's been so hard to agree about what the Web is: the Web is architected for resilience which means that it adapts and transforms.

browsers — which are often considered immovable — are only one implementation of the user agent component to which we can imagine alternatives with different properties.

This is the kick-off post in a series in which I'm going to explore things that we could change about the Web

Philosophers across the millenia may have focused on figuring out whether the Ship of Theseus would remain the same ship if you changed every single one of its planks over time, but they may have missed the reverse problem: if you don't replace each and every plank as it decays, then eventually the whole thing will rot and you definitely won't have the same ship any more, or any ship at all for that matter.

We're not far from not having a Web left.