Tags: addressability

The System of the World Wide Web

A fascinating ten-year old essay looking at the early days of the web and how it conquered FTP and Gopher.

And though glitz, politics, hard work, and competitors’ mistakes all played a role in the success of the web, there are also aspects of the architecture that ensured the web would catch on. I think the web won because of the URI.

URIs are everywhere, and what’s vaguely funny now is the idea that they’re something special. But they’re very special: URI management is the fundamental consideration behind the design of web sites, web applications, and web services. Tim Berners-Lee originally intended URIs to be invisible, but they’re too useful for that.

Burying the URL - Allen Pike

Right now, this move to remove URLs from the interface of Chrome is just an experiment …but the fact that Google are even experimenting with it is very disturbing.

“Who? Me? No, I was never going to actually blow the web’s brains out—I just wanted to feel the heft of the weapon as I stroked it against the face of the web.”

Installable Webapps: Extend the Sandbox by Boris Smus

This a great proposal: well-researched and explained, it tackles the tricky subject of balancing security and access to native APIs.

Far too many ideas around installable websites focus on imitating native behaviour in a cargo-cult kind of way, whereas this acknowledges addressability (with URLs) as a killer feature of the web …a beautiful baby that we definitely don’t want to throw out with the bathwater.