Mastodawn

Yes, but is it the web?

What is the web? I’ve been working in the web since the beginning of the web, and I co-chaired the W3C Technical Architecture Group for over a decade, so you think I might be able to answer this simple question. Some think anything you can do “in the browser” is the web and anything that happens outside the browser (such as in a native app) isn’t the web. However, you can have very non-webby experiences in the browser and likewise apps can sometimes be very webby. I think the web […]

https://www.torgo.com/blog/2026/03/yes-but-is-it-the-web.html

Yes, but is it the web? – Dan's Blog

Show thread

Ben Francis Mar 21

@daniel I think this is a very good question, and something we have been debating a lot in the W3C Web of Things Working Group recently. I recently wrote a very long blog post on "Putting the Web back in the Web of Things" https://tola.me.uk/blog/2026/03/05/putting-the-web-back-in-the-web-of-things/. 🧵

Putting the Web back in the Web of Things

We spent over a decade standardising the Web of Things, but I believe it’s still missing a key component it needs in order to grow. I this blog post I provide a deep-dive retrospective into the last 10+ years of standardisation, how the Web of Things is being used today, and what I believe it is sti

Ben Francis

Show thread

Ben Francis Mar 21

@daniel I think Tim Berners-Lee's new book "This is for Everyone" does a good job of explaining the origins and philosophy of the web but it's difficult to distill into a brief definition. Tim describes the original parts of his invention as being URLs, HTTP and HTML. CSS and JavaScript are important layers on top of that, but having a JavaScript runtime or CSS renderer doesn't make something the web. However, I also think CoAP is a very web-like protocol and JSON is surely also part of the web.

Show thread

Ben Francis Mar 21

@daniel I personally keep coming back to an old article on The Verge (https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/24/15681958/what-is-web-definition) which says that to be part of the web something has to:
1. Be linkable, and
2. Allow any client to access it.

I really like that definition.

And now, a brief definition of the web

Linkable; agnostic to the client

The Verge

Show thread

Ben Francis

@daniel At a slightly deeper level I think for something to be really web-like it needs to be resource-oriented and RESTful, but there are lots of things built on the web which are neither (e.g. XML-RPC, SOAP, and more recently AT Protocol and MCP).

Ultimately it's very difficult to come up with a single definition but I really like The Verge's definition which centers on being linkable and client-agnostic.