Google, Facebook, and Amazon have fundamentally transformed the web

A lot of the comments here seem to be quibbling. The analysis/argument isn't exactly how you/I would have phrased it. But beyond the details, I think it's hard to argue with the main point. The web is much more of a large corporation's playground today, far more. That means new things will be built in a different, more giant friendly way. The part of that that worries me most is the cultural part, more than the economic side. My favourite…

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often practically at launch, and finally the…

Yes, it’s time for a successor format designed from the ground up based on 35 years of lessons learned. For example the DOM scares the shit out of people. If you want to identify cowards have them write simple DOM traversal without query strings. I have an idea how that should work a bit more elegantly and simultaneously increase performance. Secondly, almost nobody can write HTML correctly, considering accessibility and SEO. HTML should be replaced by markdown extended with identifiers…