A Brief Overview of Webstrates

"We’ve very quickly gotten used to real-time collaborative software on the Web. We can write together in Google Docs, make interface mockups in Figma, edit computational notebooks in Observable, and we can share our documents simply by copying a URL. We’ve also gotten used to applications working across our devices. Spotify seamlessly lets you control music playing on your laptop computer from your phone, and Apple’s handoff lets you continue work when moving between devices.

However, building software that allows for collaboration, sharing of content, and distribution across devices requires the use of sophisticated frameworks and the ability to create mappings between an abstract data model and the concrete HTML of a page.

In our research lab at Aarhus University we have created Webstrates. We use Webstrates to explore what it would mean if these capabilities were an integral part of the Web, and could be leveraged using basic skills in Web development. Webstrates makes the Document Object Model (DOM) of a webpage collaboratively editable. What does that mean? It means that any changes made to the document of a webpage will be synchronized to other clients of the same page, and made persistent across reloads. We call such a webpage a webstrate (short for web substrate)."