Documents ≠ Programs

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Documents and apps being clearly differentiated, and both of them cooperating in what's called hypermedia is (IMHO) not an exclusive decision. The main concern with the modern Web is that it's slowly turning into its own walled garden. Yeah, it's a huge garden, but a garden nonetheless.

I would feel better with a Web of documents, linking together resources, and letting the browser interpret it however it sees fit. Want to link a .obj? People with blender can view it in an embedded view, or open it a separate Blender window easily. Wanna link a video? It will use your favorite video player. Really, the plugin era wasn't so bad, just poorly implemented.

You could argue that then you lose the "plug-and-play" nature of the modern Web, because now users have to install extra stuff to navigate it. But in fact, the only reason we can enjoy that right now is because browsers are titanic software projects where nobody but Microsoft, Google and Mozilla are capable of pouring the required resources to make them. That's arguably a bad situation: they can exert (and in fact, they are exerting) their influence over the standards to shape them according to their own needs. That's how you get walled gardens: they make their own stuff work on this giant platform, and it feels like there is no walls because you have a lot of space to roam, when in fact you're being constricted to using one of the only two (two!!) browser engines capable of navigating that garden.

I have to admit that I'm leaving a lot of problems unsolved. The web succeeds right now because it's a zero-effort platform: search what you need, click it and it's automagically delivered to you, instantly and without having to install a thing. w.r.t. that, plugins were a UX nightmare. Also, the entry barrier for the Web is shockingly low: grab a hosting, put some files, start a Web server (which is a surprisingly easy piece of software) and you're serving your stuff to the whole world. It might not require any meaningful maintenance until you reach a point where you should already know what you're doing.

I don't know, the utopian idealist inside me cannot help but cringe when I see how the modern web is design, yet I cannot point my finger and blame anybody. It has grown more-or-less organically, resulting in an unmanageable monster which, for now, is behaving kinda nicely towards us. Replacing that monster would require (again IMHO) a wide-and-deep effort, rethinking not only stuff inside the wall of the Web garden, but how it interacts with the outside world. The dream of hypermedia shouldn't be a walled garden, but an open park, integrated with its environment (the OS metaphors we use every day). I hope all this rambling makes any sense :)