Not really. It was doomed the moment it stopped being a place for mere exchange of information and messages and turned into a marketplace. It is the profit motive that has given rise, directly or indirectly, to every good and bad thing about the modern web. Unfortunately profit motive is completely amoral. And it isn't going away. So what we need are more restrictions and regulations. And a paradigm shift back to doing more things more enjoyably in meat-space.

Although I agree with your sentiment, having the government step in on behalf of the internet with more regulations seems like a step backwards.

> So what we need are more restrictions and regulations.

Like what?

Advertising tax, privacy law, monopoly breakups.

Yes, it really has been downhill since then. I wish js apps just had their own protocol and port. js://js.server.tld could open up your js browser and you could use that when it was something you needed. Then you could just trust browsing around the normal web, knowing its just documents.

I completely agree. I've seen similar ideas get shot down here on HN; but I think we need two separate protocols. One for purely documents, and a second for the universal application platform.

Among other implications, it should be much easier for regular people to create content, and applications should be free of the document-focused legacy.

So how about Gopher for documents, and HTTP(S)+HTML+CSS for apps? I think we have the tools already.

If we did that, how would you propose implementing upvoting in HN without js?

Upvoting in HN works without JS already, it just has a page refresh.

And it doesn't even need a page refresh; it could use a 204 No Content response. Potentially an yet-cleverer static browser system could also use 206 Partial Content to replace a portion of the page.

But at that point, it's no longer "purely a document," it's still an app, just one that runs entirely on the server instead of partly or mostly in the browser.

For the web to be just documents, you have to go all the way and remove state entirely. Idempotence all the way down.

I am hoping that http2 crap protocol will attract all the ecommerce nasties and leave http as the obvious choice for static documents.

it's part of it, but to me the issue is when society started to reimplement itself on top of www.

now we get loads of bad news websites, shallow overgrown aesthetic trends pushed as social advances, perpetual ads ..

I'm old enough to remember when our pre-bubble, pre-amazon "web"team found about javascript via the web monkey website with it's animated moving arms! Prior, all interaction was via CGI or SSI. I still remember a web teacher at a university teaching a side course, telling us never to use javascript, and showed the NBA site and others. Then a student raised his hand: NBA uses javascript. And the prof, said, "Oh, I have javascript turned off, so I didn't know".

I kind of think it has more to do with organizations like Facebook vs. some particular technology itself. It's the way corporatists want to control everything in order to create money rivers that flow only to them.