Is the Web dead? Of course not.

August 19, 2010 by JD · 2 Comments
Filed under: Internet, Musings 

Have you read the article in Wired magazine about the Web being dead?

How much hype is that? The Internet (and all it’s protocols) and the World Wide Web are growing at a prodigious rate and Wired has the audacity to say that the Web is dead. I don’t understand it. They’re usually much better at presenting the facts than this suggests.

What am I talking about? Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff wrote this article: The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet

Normally, I really like reading what Anderson has to say, but this time, I think he’s (they’re) missing the point when he tries to make a distinction between using a web browser versus a specialized app to retrieve information. How does having more options for accessing data mean that the Web is dead?

It may be true that the use of a general-purpose web browser — for some people, especially those who use their mobile devices all the time — is declining. For myself, about a tenth of the time when I’m at home and most of the time when I’m out somewhere else, I use apps on my iPod Touch to read and reply on Twitter, Facebook, and other sites. I check the weather forecast and view the local radar on it.

Those are options I use in addition to my normal Web use. If I didn’t have the iPod, or I were stuck in a doctor’s office with no Wi-Fi, I would not be accessing the net during those times, I’d probably have my nose stuck in a book.

At least in my particular case, using apps on my iPod doesn’t mean I’m using the Web less, it simply means that I have an additional option to interact online when I’m away from one of my main computers.

But, what Anderson and Wolff fail to point out is that most of the content they say is leaving the Web and moving onto apps is still being served by the Web. Other protocols may be used by some people to interact with the data, but most of it still lives on the Web. It’s a technical distinction, but it’s an important one.

Even though I can follow Twitter and Facebook on an iPod/iPhone app, I’m still limited in what I can do. If I want to take full advantage of Facebook, for example, then I have to go there using a Web browser. The app just doesn’t offer the full experience, nor full access to the data.

Is FTP part of the web? No. It’s a different protocol, but it does allow us to upload information that can be served on the web.

Is DNS part of the Web? No, but it’s an essential part of the Internet. Without the domain name service protocols, data packets would not go hither and yon over the network using TCP/IP and we would not be able to access data easily. DNS is a protocol for finding servers and IP addresses and is part of the process used to direct info packets. It is absolutely necessary for the World Wide Web, as we know it today, yet it isn’t really part of the Web. It is one of the ancillary, underlying protocols that make the Web work when we click a link, type in a Web address, or call up a bookmark.

Is email part of the web? No, and yes. If you’re using an email application to send and retrieve email using protocols like IMAP and POP3, it’s not being done on the World Wide Web. However, a great deal of people, possibly a majority, use their browser to read and send email, and that’s definitely part of the Web.

(If you’re interested in knowing more about this subject, Wikipedia has an article about Internet Protocol Suite that links to lots of technical data and explanations. It’ll get you started, but you’ll have to learn a whole lot more to understand how the Internet works.)

Now, do we really care if the information we want to access is being served on the World Wide Web or through some other protocol? For most people, the answer, most likely, is “no.”

But don’t we hold technical writers at a technical magazine up to a higher standard? I know that I do. I go to Wired to get straight information about technical subjects and this time, I believe, they let me down.

I’m one of those people who wants technical subjects to be covered accurately (and I sure hope I am doing that properly here — I hate the way my foot tastes when I get caught with it crammed in my mouth!).

All the stats that I’ve seen show that the Internet is growing at a huge rate. And I am assuming that the use of most of the major application protocols (ftp, telnet, IMAP, POP3, http, etc) is growing too. In absolute numbers in terms of bandwidth, I’m sure that’s a true statement.

However, when looked at from a percentage of bandwidth perspective, then protocols that are very low bandwidth, such as http: and DNS surely fade away when compared to video and audio.

I don’t want to put too fine a point on this, because I don’t want to start making distinctions that aren’t important to most people, but even video and audio are accessed via the Web, using http: protocols. The server may hand off the information from Apache (or another web server) to a different server and stream the data using a non-web-based protocol, but without a Web browser being able to access the information being presented by a Web server, there would not be as much of it being served.

(Does that make sense, or should I just go back to sleep?)

I remember when information was much harder to find than it is now. There were no Web browsers and search engines. We used things like the Gopher protocol and applications like Archie to find and retrieve information. Those were not the good old days. Sometimes it would take hours to find information we knew existed, whereas, now, we can find just about anything in a few seconds by searching on Google.

Web browsers (Mosaic, Navigator, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, and all the others) made it so much easier to read (and interact with) information when we found it.

Search engines and directories made it easier to find, but not nearly as easy as it is today. We tend to take Google for granted and not recognize how much easier it is to find and retrieve information than it has ever been before in history. I don’t use Bing on a regular basis, so I’m not qualified to have an opinion on their service.

Does it make a real difference if I’m accessing Facebook through an API with a specialized app on an iPod as compared to accessing it through Safari, my browser of choice for most things?

Anderson and Wolff say it does make a difference. I’m not so sure.

For another take on this article, Ken Evoy wrote about it on the Sitesell blog, Is The Web Really Dead?, and he approaches the deficiencies of the Anderson/Wolff article from their use of statistics and misleading graphics.

If this article was designed to stir up controversy and bring more readers to Wired’s magazine and website, it was a success. But, does that justify being technically inaccurate?

What do you think?

Act on your dream!

JD

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