The dream of a web where the server simply sent data, and the client chose how to display it, is totally dead. Web designers want their websites to look a certain way right down to the pixel, and client-side display control messes that up. To be clear, it's not that you can't still do it, but the website is never going to be designed for it and actively help you.
This is just one symptom of the advertising-supported web. The web was intended to inform, but modern websites are designed to impress. Personally, I'm more impressed with websites designed to inform, but the average person apparently isn't.
The Semantic Web failed for the same reason: Humans click on ads but computers don't. Hence we're left with a web that is not only designed purely for human consumption, but also to appeal to the ADD part of our simian brains that says "Oooooh. Shiny!".
I understand your point, but I am incredibly suspicious of the ad market. For that reason, I do not believe that more people than computers click on ads.
My degree is in marketing so I used to offer human versus bot click analysis as a service. The initial sale was very easy but the practice was more like grief counselling than consulting. As a result, my customers weren’t sticky - they were happier before me. And I don’t believe anyone actually changed how they bought ads as a result.
A criticism of social media advertising is that it’s too easy for small business to get stuck thinking that it’s work when in reality it’s just a very boring hobby. Many digital ad campaigns don’t show a return on investment so maybe that criticism applies to digital ads too…
I can totally believe your conclusion there. I worked for a digital ad agency back in the 2000s and was repeatedly told not to add conversion tracking before things went out to clients because everyone involved knew the numbers would be utterly damning. Half the time I think the only people who looked at the sites we were building were us, and the client team that was paying for it.
>A criticism of social media advertising is that it’s too easy for small business to get stuck thinking that it’s work when in reality it’s just a very boring hobby.
we have such a divided world these days (the old mom and pop ads on a phone tower in town won't reach the entire country) and traditional ads are and always were untenable for a small business. They turn to digital ads because they are plum out of other ways to reach their audience properly.
The semantic web and advertising web aren't mutually exclusive. The issue is that the advertising web, which optimizes for human attention, is necessarily going to get more human attention.
> Web designers want their websites to look a certain way right down to the pixel
I’d say we’re actually further away from that than we’ve ever been. I’m old enough to remember <table> based designs, “best viewed at 800x600” etc etc. These days we have responsive design, adaptive color palettes for dark mode and accessibility, flags for users the prefer more contrast, reduced motion, etc etc etc.
User preference time display is interesting but I don’t think it’s realistic. My preferences can be universally applied without context.
And yet people will load a megabyte of JavaScript just to create a date picker that looks nice while you need about 20 characters to get a bugfree one in HTML: <input type="date">
Everything you described is nice, but in the end it’s still up to the developer to support it and especially to choose its behavior. I can technically use “when reduced motion, html {animation: shake 1s infinity}”
> The dream of a web where the server simply sent data, and the client chose how to display it, is totally dead
When did you have such a web?
The web used to be completely server side, so you could only receive formatted HTML/CSS/JS and you would need to scrape this page to get information.
Today you have (or can have) APIs and some sites are cleanly server/client. It is much, much, much better than it was if you want to consume data. At least there is a framework for that (not always available), as opposed to before when there was none.
