[onion2k]

the World Wide Web was originally created as a system for sharing documents

I agree with your post but every time someone says this about the early web I feel a strong stabbing sensation in the back of my mind. It's just wrong. The web was never just a document sharing system. In Tim Berners-Lee's original memo he talks about dynamic pages that are built on the fly, and 'special links' to external apps.

To quote the memo;

"Hypertext allows documents to be linked into "live" data so that every time the link is followed, the information is retrieved. If one sacrifices portability, it is possible so make following a link fire up a special application, so that diagnostic programs, for example, could be linked directly into the maintenance guide."[1]

Dynamic apps running in browsers weren't really a thing until the later 90s, but accessing apps via Common Gateway Interface that rendered HTML on each request was a thing right from the start. That's where I started my career. The web has never been about just static documents. If nothing else it it wouldn't have been necessary if that's what Tim was proposing - we had networked access to document systems before the web was a thing.

But also... Tim wrote his memo 34 years ago. 'The modern web' in the sense of Web 2.0 has been around for at least 20 of those years. Even if the original web was about document sharing, there's no reason to believe that's still the case.

[1] https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html

[forgetfreeman]

You aren't the only graybeard in the room. What you're describing isn't the original intent or usage of the web, but the very beginnings of the ongoing process of enshitification of the web writ large. Yes, from jump there were folks that refused to meet the media on its terms . Table based layouts, JavaScript googly eyes, "jello mold" layouts, flash-based fonts, etc. This trend has culminated in usability issues, page weights, and browser feature creep that can best be described as abusive bordering on sociopathic.

[sanderjd]

The original memo outlining the vision of the web was not describing "the original intent or usage of the web" but rather was "the very beginnings of the ongoing process of enshitification of the web writ large"?

This seems like a very extreme degree of revisionism.

Like, you could say, "the original vision was bad, because it included the seeds of enshitification". That seems plausible to me, from the perspective of people that just want static hypertext.

But it was clearly seeded in the original vision, not something that developed later.

[forgetfreeman]

I'm clearly not as familiar with Tim's writing as you. Please direct me to the relevant parts that call for walled gardens, grotesque disregard for screen readers, and all of the myriad layers of gratuitous protocol/language/feature cruft that's been troweled over the original medium in a largely successful attempt to convert it into a strip mall?

[sanderjd]

I'm not familiar with his writing at all. But conveniently, the person you replied to included a link to the full text they were quoting from. Did you miss that?

[onion2k]

in a largely successful attempt to convert it into a strip mall

Humans do that to everything. Why would you expect the web to be any different?