Wired Magazine on the Internet and the Web

The September issue of Wired has an article that's online and already developing some buzz. Called The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet, it addresses the fact that we're using the Internet technologies (TCP/IP and HTTP) separately from the Web (HTML) in many cases. Where we once thought in terms of Web pages, we now think of apps. There are a variety of consequences particularly including the fact that HTML is considered an open technology and the technologies found in apps (and other non-HTML software) are more often than not closed.

That may sound like a bad thing, but it's part of a trend that's been going on for years. It's not so much the open/closed issue that many people look at. Instead, it's the question of what you can do programmatically with the data that flows over the HTTP connections. From the beginning of Web pages, developers have been pushing for more functionality with tools such as JavaScript, and XMLHttpRequest which was actually the most critical part of this evolution. Before XMLHttpRequest, the smallest unit that you could work with on the Web was a page. Now, you can write code (often JavaScript on the Web and languages such as Objective-C on iOS) that lets you manipulate parts of pages and even things that never will be displayed on pages. That's the great change.

For the history of XMLHttpRequest, see the Wikipedia article. It goes back to March 1999, Internet Explorer 5, and that old favorite, ActiveX.

The open/closed discussion is separate from this long-standing issue: developers need tools to let them write programs using the network.