The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet | Hacker News Reader

The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet

wired.com

51 pointsssclafani30 comments

This article basically uses the graph as a jumping off point to make the same old 'apps will take over the world' argument we've been hearing since the iPhone opened its SDK (it seems like people have completely forgotten the evolution of the Desktop PC and are intent on reliving those same mistakes with the smartphone)

The problem I see with the graph is it's based on percentage of total traffic but it doesn't take into account a huge increase in bandwidth and internet users. Put it in perspective and you realize the web's "peak" according to this graph was when most people were using 56k modems (2000 which was about a year after V.90 modems started hitting the street).

There's also an efficiency factor. Ajax type technologies have dramatically shrunk the size of the data chunks being passed back and forth. Back in 2000 most were still resending the whole page on every refresh.

Excuse my ignorance, but i thought Ajax sends the whole page but only renders a part of the page?

The server sends a client a whole page and once that page renders in a browser then you can use Ajax to transfer arbitrary bits of data to and from the server. You typically would not send an entire page to a client via Ajax, but you would use it to tell the server that 'User A' has voted on 'Story B' without having to load an entirely new page or refresh the page you're on.

If your Ajax code is reloading the whole page every time anything changes, that's some awful code. I have seen such designs in the wild, but that's just because whoever wrote the script was a lousy developer. It's not supposed to be that way.

Here's how Ajax works: A whole page is downloaded once from the server, then the page's Ajax functions start running — and then when part of the page needs to be updated, the Ajax toolkit only has to reload that specific data and render it on the page.

Agreed. Aren't these apps just an extension of the web anyway? If it's sent over HTTP and is accessible to virtually anyone who had access to the "normal" web, then isn't that the web.

I know many people are excluded because they don't have iOS running on the machine they use for the web, but not everyone had the means to surf the HTML/Flash-based web on Opera's web browser a while ago. Were they not part of the web?

This all depends how we define the Web. If we focus on transport protocols like HTTP, then you are correct; but the whole point of the article is that you don't need browser/HTML/CSS/ajax/whatever to consume the content.

All that is no news, and the whole concept was very hip back in the days when XML and Web services were all the rage, some ten years ago. In my opinion, it's not about who will take over -- we will simply have different forms of content transfer over the Internet, and will decide on a case-by-case basis which is better in each particular situation.

One big difference is that a lot of people are willing to pay $0.99 for and app while the same charge for a web page bookmark would not go over well.

"Put it in perspective and you realize the web's "peak" according to this graph was when most people were using 56k modems."

I think this is precisely the point: traditional, browser-based Web (text-based, asymmetrical...) is designed to work perfectly with low-bandwidth connections. With the advent of broadband, it becomes obsolete and is to be superseded by modern technologies which better utilize this type of connections.

Of course, Web is not dead by any means; but Wired is in the business of selling tech-related sensations.

Interesting graph, but is 'video' really a different class of traffic to web? Every other type shown in the graph is literally a different internet protocol (email, telnet, web, etc). Separating 'video' from 'web' seems a little unwarranted.

It's true that you could make a distinction - the web is hyperlinked multimedia and video isn't very web-like according to that definition.

But I don't think you can claim from that graph that 'the web is dead'. The weaker claim that 'traditional hypermedia is giving way to video' would be better supported, but less interesting.

tldr - false dichotomy

The Web is moving to include video. Just look at the <video> tag in HTML5.

The parent's point was that only a myopic definition of the web does not already include video.

But I agree with the article that video is not an integral part of the Web -- up until HTML5 the browsers even didn't have the ability to play video natively, relying on plugins like Flash.

If you watch YouTube videos on your iPhone, you don't even have a browser to play the video at all. It's true that it's still transferred using the HTTP -- the Web protocol -- but that's the whole point of the article: a new Web, which uses much the same protocols but don't rely on the browser for consumption.

I've previously given a thought to the whole concept at http://berislav.lopac.net/post/615858128/the-future-of-web-b...

But 9 times out of 10, I'm viewing video in a web browser. Splitting it out only makes sense if they track which videos are being viewed in a web page and which ones are viewed in apps, and they aren't doing that, so the graph is meaningless.

Should Gmail be counted as Web or email?

It's all about usage, not about the technology. Think out of the box.

Once upon a time browsers couldn't render images either.

Why does the graph end five years ago? That seems silly given how short the whole time scale is.

Also, that graphic is very confusing and I'm not too sure how to read it. Peer to peer hasn't changed much in the last five years on the graph, but it looks like its in decline. Am I reading that right?

Edit: Also, it says "Wired September 2010" at the top. What? This is from the future, and yet the data is 5 years old? Silly website...

The graph is skewed but to be fair Peer-to-Peer saw an upswing from 1999-2001 when the original Napster introduced the technology to the masses. Then declined for a while between Napster being shutdown and more decentralized systems taking hold.

And, there is the big, centralized, web-based, file sharing services like MegaUpload and RapidShare. Thanks to the silly asymmetry in our connections (and if you pay), they are faster than bittorrent based file sharing. Thanks to some laws (like HADOPI in France), they are legally safer than bittorent (for copyrighted work). I suspect bittorent based file sharing is losing ground to them.

''Wired September 2010 at the top. What? This is from the future''

I guess that's a habit left over from print journalism. It's their September issue.

This is stupid. Of course video percentage will grow. Every time you double the resolution, you quadruple the amount of data you have to transfer.

It's not really that linear because of compression. As an example, I shrunk a bunch of photos to 1/4 the resolution, and they only dropped in size about 1/4.

Plus, video can get even more aggressive about compression because it can reference between frames.

The graph is interesting but gives a skewed view of the facts, since it's relative to each other. A more interesting graph would be one where absolute numbers are shown. I bet the "web"-part would still be on the rise, however not as fast as the "video"-part for example.

Even if you accept the author's premise that the world is moving to "apps", how many of those are just built on a webkit core? I'd say half of the "apps" on my iPhone are just wrappers of varying complexity for good old port-80 HTML and HTML5 content.

i think the author follows a similar idea as Tim Berners-lee with this paragraph in the "Giant Global Graph" article:

"So the Net and the Web may both be shaped as something mathematicians call a Graph, but they are at different levels. The Net links computers, the Web links documents."

published at http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/215

so, if it is something that is not a html document that can can be reached via a hyperlink is not part of the web but it just uses the internet.

"At work you scroll through RSS feeds..."

...is the author of The Long Tail really this ignorant of technology?

I think he meant to imply that one scrolls through RSS feeds using a news reader. He wasn't being literal.

Still, RSS readers use plain old HTTP requests (Web Traffic). Transition of users from browser to reader apps shouldn't matter if we count traffic by type.

Right, that was my point (which was written from my phone, so it was terse). RSS is just XML, but to my knowledge, no one's _delivering_ RSS over anything but HTTP in a generic way. Indeed, it's a syndication system _for_ the Web. I will admit, I didn't read the entire article (again, on my phone), but as another commenter pointed out, most of the examples were either pretty-printed data over HTTP, or were services that have never existed in the sphere of the Web.

I don't have time to read that huge article. Question for those who did: If video is counted as video delivered from the web excluding video delivered from torrents because that would count as P2P, then 51% + 23%= 74%

So, if you told me text is not the king medium it would be more real than web is dead. But that wouldn't make it a title for retweeting, or would it?

*edit: a quick search on the content of the article for the word video has only 1 result.

read: Cisco want to sell video-on-demand stacks and other software.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com