Omnivorous inclusiveness and the closing of the browser parenthesis

In the past I've thought of the web as a convoy of browsers. That turns out to be wrong.

Nowadays (thanks to a long lunch with Paul Downey, Jeni Tennison,  et al) I've begun thinking of the web as a ship of Theseus where, despite replacing every single part of the stack, what's left is still recognisably the web.

This made me realise that we are surrounded by unexamined and ossified metaphors that are in danger of becoming thought-terminating cliches. For example:
- open web versus (presumably) closed web
- the web browser is the web platform is the web
- the web as a platform
- web apps
- web versus native

One of the reasons I present at conferences like OpenTech is because I want to have my mind changed and my complacent metaphors jolted. This year my presentation came out of asking myself "what do I most like about the web?" My initial list was:
- its universality (view source meant everybody everywhere could cut and paste their way to something that sort of worked).
- its omnivorous inclusiveness (it tended to absorb neighbouring or competing technologies like WAIS, Gopher, NNTP and FTP).
- its hypertextuality, intertwingularity and document orientation because they open the door to new forms of argumentation as well as letting us create living documents.
- its peculiar notion of addressability without guarantees about the nature of the resources at the end of the links.

This presentation started out as my oft-repeated but never documented "HTML 3.2 was the last good version of HTML" rant. It channeled some of my distress with the ideas behind HTML 5 and the notion that there is a "web platform" which arbitrarily excludes certain technologies (like Flash and native apps) but includes others (like JavaScript). In its final form it asked if today's open web platform is still the web. Now I have my answer.

That answer is driven by two realisations. Firstly it turns out that browsers are not the only user agent. They're not even the only kind of user agent. Secondly now that deeplinking is becoming mere linking it is clearer than ever that apps are just domain-specific user-agents. As a consequence it becomes clear that native versus web is merely a debate about whether we should use 1 universal user-agent or N domain-specific user-agents.

Since browsers and native apps are merely different kinds of user-agents I think it's a mistake to conflate browsers and the web. I think we run the risk of mistaking the capabilities and roadmap of today's most popular kind of user agent for the capabilities and roadmap of the web. For example user-agents that don't support Javascript or CSS are equally legitimate but less popular constituents of the web. However there's a strong temptation to consider them to be obsolete or lagging members of our convoy and thus leave them behind.

So.

The web has changed, is changing and will keep on changing. The convoy is bigger than I originally thought because there are lots of overlooked user-agents out there. These apps aren't part of the web any more than browsers are but their addressable/linkable content most definitely is part of the web. Just because that content has a preferred user-agent doesn't change this.

Perhaps, like the Gutenberg Parenthesis, there is a 'Browser Parenthesis' that is also closing?



Update: The audio from my OpenTech 2015 talk is now available.