The Tyranny of the Timeline

This is a general outline of a way I think about the previous eras of the web (That’s the WWW for my fellow olds)

Web 1.0

1994 - 2001 - The Handmade Web, from the point that HTTP traffic outpaced Gopher traffic to the rise of MovableTypeYes, yes, I know. Hypertext, and the World Wide Web didn’t begin in 1994. You can call Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Memex Web 0.1, Ted Nelson’s 1960’s Project Xanadu Web 0.2, and Tim Berners-Lee’s 1989 CERN work Web 0.5 if that will soothe your angry pedant rash.

In the beginning was the hypertext. Lovingly crafted by hand. Layouts and organizational schemes were highly personal, and ranged from the rigidly hierarchical to the absolutely chaotic. All content (which it wasn’t called then) was evergreen (which it also wasn’t called).

Web 2.0

2001 - 2024? - The CMS A Content Management System stores content in predefined database fields and generates pages when they are requested by a site visitor. Reverse Chronology Reign of TerrorAmy Hoy wrote the definitive capsule history of how Movable Type destroyed the web. I suggest you read it.

In one of the most stunning examples of how terrible opinionated software can be, ease of (tool) use and fitting your words into the tool took precedence over making cool things, and in a matter of a decade literally everything on the web became default sorted by reverse chronology, even though almost nothing in the history of writing down words has ever been organized that way.So rare is reverse chronology in writing that outside of ephemeral things like news bulletins, there are no notable examples between Virgil’s Aeneid in the 1st century BC and W. R. Burnett’s Goodbye to the Past in 1934.

See Not A Blog for the specific reasons I finally came to my senses and stopped trying to fit my words into the tool.

Web 3.0

2024 - ?? - The Coming SSG A Static Site Generator is a tool that generates a full static HTML website based on raw data and a set of templates. Essentially, a static site generator automates the task of coding individual HTML pages and gets those pages ready to serve to users ahead of time. WebYes, I am well aware that this is not how crypto-bros use the term Web 3.0, but crypto-bros are legally not people so we don’t have to pretend like their hustle culture market speak matters. What I am talking about is much closer to Tim Berners-Lee’s Web 3.0 proposal for a fully Semantic Web.

The tool making monkeys finally make a tool that can take the drudgery out of hand-building every single web page, but doesn’t shoehorn everything into a single database schema. Soon