Building new weblike things - by Gordon Brander

The web is the world’s biggest software platform that isn’t owned. There are other closed networked software platforms but very few open ones. The web mostly stands alone. Why is this? And how might we build more weblike systems?

What’s next for the web? I’ve spent a good chunk of my career trying to answer this question in practice, making the web do things it maybe shouldn’t, like mobile operating systems, and VR. This is a big question, so I’m tackling it in pieces: In “Why did the web take over desktop and not mobile?”, I try to understand how the web got to now. In “The state of the web”, I look at the web in 2021, making the web do apps, and the WebAssembly plot twist. In “Weird web3 energy”, I explore emerging distributed web efforts. In “Building new weblike things”, I consider how we might build new…

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