[leoc]

> The premise is questionable. A webpage lives in its own medium, or it is its own medium.

You have to bear in mind that this view is diametrically opposed to the principle of separating presentation and content on which CSS, the HTML content-markup elements and so on were based.

[onli]

I think I know what you are targeting at, but I really don't think so.

You can have a separation of presentation and content while still targeting a specific medium, the separation doesn't automatically mean that the content is fitting for every medium.

And the elements used here show that pretty clearly. When just regarding HTML and ignoring CSS, you can see its elements that are made for other mediums than paper. It is Hyper Text after all, not Text.

And when just regarding CSS, you have all those elements that are of no use on paper, like position: fixed.

Or just think of the issue in responsive design of wanting to have another, shorter text for mobile devices. There, even the content alone is not fitting for the medium, regardless of the presentation.

[DanBC]

> The premise is questionable. A webpage lives in its own medium, or it is its own medium. It is normally meant to be read with an electronic device, to be interactive and linked, though those devices can be quite different of course.

The corruption of the www is something that still makes me sad and angry even though I know I lost the argument years ago.

You should not know, nor care, how the reader is usin the information. Maybe they have screen readers or braille devices or extra huge high contrast text. Maybe they want to print it out.

Most www tex does not need to be forced into an app (which is usually a really bad browser) or to be forced into specific layouts and columns with widgets and gadgets.

I really wish newspapers would learn this lesson.

I want the text. Put all the banners and gizmos and adverts at the top and bottom of the page. Then give me nicely formatted properly styled text and get out of my way.

I am happy to pay for this. Real money, not just leaving an ad-blocker turned off.

[onli]

Now I feel misunderstood.

I'm perfectly fine with using different devices and different presentations. But changing mediums is stronger than just changing the device or the presentation. The web has an underlying vision that can't be transported to every medium:

> He [Tim Berners-Lee] kicked off by explaining what he means by the two words "semantic" and "web." Underlying the Web was the philosophy of a navigable space, with a mapping from URI to resources. He stressed that a URI was an identifier for a resource, and not a recipe for its retrieval.

Sure, maybe you can argue that you can build something like this with paper, but it is not practical. And you can't do that anymore when going to the semantic web.

Therefore, I don't think you can expect webpages to support mediums like paper that are intrinsically not web-able.

That's all I'm saying. Nothing about ads, nothing about apps, nothing about app-browsers.

PS: Why the downvotes? Did I formulate an attack I didn't realize?

[Dylan16807]

I don't understand. Paper can't navigate but you don't need navigation. Why can't the underlying vision of everything except navigation work just as well?

[onli]

The web is more than a place to read an article like on paper. It is a place where articles (ressources) have their own URL and are linkable, sometimes even in both directions (think of trackbacks and pingbacks, following the vision that was way more prominent in the beginning, or xanadu). You need navigation for that, it is essential for what the web provides.

[zokier]

> The corruption of the www is something that still makes me sad and angry even though I know I lost the argument years ago.

You and me both. It is kinda funny (for the lack of better word) how Wikipedia is kinda what I imagine hypertext/web was initially envisioned to be (except for its centralized nature). But it lives another layer above the web, being a web-app for handling hypertext with it's own UI (nested inside browser UI which in turn is nested inside system UI), its own markup format (because HTML evolved away from being pure hypertext format), and its own update mechanism (instead of HTTP methods, because REST is hard, lets go shopping)