The future still isn't what it used to be: This whole "web" thing

It's worth keeping in mind that the building blocks of today's web, particularly HTTP and HTML, were developed by academic researchers. One thing that academic researchers have to do, a lot, is follow references, because most academic work builds on, critiques and otherwise refers to existing work.

Let's take a moment to appreciate what that meant before the web came along. Suppose you're reading a reference work and you run across a reference like this:

4. Ibid, 28-3

That is, you've just run across a passage like this totally made-up example:

It is also known that the shells of tropical snails vary widely in their patterning⁴.

That little raised 4 tells you to skip to the bottom of the page and find footnote 4, which says "Ibid, 28-3", which means "look in the same place as the previous footnote, on pages 28 through 33". So you scan up through the footnotes and find

3. Ibid, 17

OK, fine ... keep going

2. McBiologistface, Notes on Tropical Snails, 12-4

OK, this is something previously referenced, in particular something written by McBiologistface (likely the eminent Biologist McBiologistface, but perhaps the lesser-known relative General Scientist McBiologistface). Keep going ...

1. McBiologistface, Something Else About Tropical Snails, 254

OK, looks like this person wrote at least two books on tropical snails. The one we're looking for must be referenced in a previous chapter. Ah, here it is:

7. McBiologistface, Biologist, Notes on Tropical Snails (Hoople: University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople Press, 1945), 32-5

Great. Now we know which McBiologistFace it was, and which edition of which book published by which publisher. Now all we have to do is track down a copy of that book, and open it to ... let's see, what was that original reference? ... oh yes, page 28.

To be fair,  "McBiologistface, Notes on Tropical Snails" from reference 2 is probably enough to find the book in the card catalog at the library, and if a reference is "Ibid", you may already have the book and have it open from following a previous reference to it. It's also quite possible that your department or office has copies of many of the books and journals that are likely to be referenced.

Nonetheless, thinking of the tasks I mentioned when describing the Olden Days -- navigating an unfamiliar place, communicating by phone, streaming entertainment and searching up information -- simply following a reference from one book or article to another could be more work than any of them.

Even answering a question like "where was the touch-tone™ phone invented" would have been easier, assuming you didn't already have a copy of Notes on Tropical Snails on hand: go to the library, walk right to the easily-located reference section that you've already been to, pull out the 'T' volume of one of the encyclopedias, flip to Telephone and chances are your answer is right there (or you could just ask someone who would know).

To find the reference on snails, you'll have to look up the book in the card catalog, note down its location in the stacks, go there and scan  through the books on those shelves until you find the book itself (and then open it and flip to the right page, but you already know that from the reference). This is all assuming there's a copy of the book on the shelves that no one's checked out (who knows, maybe there's been a sudden interest in tropical snails in your town). Otherwise, you could call around to the local bookstores, or your colleagues and friends, to see if anyone has a copy. If not, your favorite bookstore could special-order a copy from the publisher, and with luck it would be there in a few days.

Chasing a link in an HTML document is more or less instant. You can probably see the appeal.

My point here is that the interlinked nature of the web, that ability to click on a link, immediately see what's on the other end and easily get back to where you were, was an absolute game-changer for the sort of people who created the early web. Your own milage may vary.

To make this work, you need a few key pieces

• A way of referencing data that's available on the network (URLs)
• A way of embedding URLs in a body of text, similar to the way footnotes are embedded in ordinary text (HTML)
• Ideally, a standard way of accessing something referenced by a URL (HTTP)

I say "ideally", because it was already possible to access data on the web using protocols like FTP and Gopher, and you could reference those with a URL. Nonetheless, having a integrated suite of {URL, HTML, HTTP} working together fairly seamlessly meant that http:// URLs (or later, https://) quickly came to dominate.

You also need one more thing, namely that there should actually be something on the other end of the link (it's OK if links are sometimes dangling or become broken, but that should be the fairly rare exception). By the time the web standards were developed, there was already enough interesting data and text on the internet to make links useful. To some extent, the early web was just an easier way to get at this kind of information. If you had the pieces, you could easily pull together an HTML page with a collection of links to useful stuff on your server, stuff like interesting files you could fetch via FTP, with a little bit of text to explain what was going on, and anyone else could use that.

The truly webby part of the web, the network of links between documents, is still around, of course, but as far as I can tell it's not a particularly important part of most people's web experience. Links are more a way of getting to content -- follow a link from a search result, or follow a reference from an AI-generated summary to see whether the AI knows what it's talking about -- but following links between pieces of content is not a particularly important part of the web experience. Some articles include carefully selected links to other material, but a lot don't. Personally, I've mostly stopped doing it so much, because it's time-consuming, though these recent Field Notes posts have a lot more linkage than usual.

One sort of link that I do follow quite a bit is the "related article" link in a magazine or news source -- articles by the same author or on the same topic, or just to stuff that the server thinks you might find interesting, or that the publisher is trying to promote. But again, this seems more like navigating to something. The articles themselves largely stand alone, and I generally finish one article before moving on to the next. A truly webby link, like a footnote before it, links from some specific piece of text to something that's directly related to it.

And, of course, I do click on ad links, though usuallyt by mistake since you just can't get away from them.

Realizing this, I think, is a big reason that this blog went mostly quiet for a couple of years. If the webby part of the web is really only of interest to a few people, except in a few special cases like sharing social media content and browsing Wikipedia, why write field notes about it, particularly if the blog writer doesn't find social media particularly appealing?

Conversely, this latest spate of posts is largely the result of relaxing a bit about what the "web" is and talking about ... dunno, maybe "the online experience" in general? Or just "internet-related stuff that doesn't really seem to fit on the other blog?"

Whatever you call it, I seem to be enjoying writing about it again.