HTML 5 is making a huge splash. It’s like web2.0 all over again. I think it’s a massively important moment in the history of the web, but I also think it’s slightly off-center in terms of where the web should be heading.

It’s difficult to say what the web “started out” as, because there was really no single distinct moment of inception. Sir Tim Berners-Lee cobbled together a program to combine already-extant Internet and hypertext systems, but the primary purpose for this ‘web’ of his was to be a document organisation and retrieval system. In fact I think Sir Tim even wanted the web to be editable, so Wikipedia is more or less what he had in mind.

That’s a telling legacy. The web was designed to be an interconnected system of text. Or a decentralised system of text. Or a self-organising system of text. But always: a system of text.
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