i have been creating websites since the early 90s, and every single one of them was an application. html was always generated dynamically, and never static. any static html documents were embedded with a dynamically generated navigation.
the whole idea of a web of semantic hypertext was never a reality. that idea died with gopher. (anyone remember that?)
why? because gopher had a builtin navigation system that allowed you to manage directories and document structures that didn't belong to the documents themselves. semantic hypertext within gopher would have worked well. as would have applications. but without gopher we were forced to reinvent that navigation and squeeze it into our documents, overloading them with stuff that didn't belong inside.
think of a library with books. what the semantic hypertext promised was to make all those books into interactive texts where you can easily jump from one reference to another. but those books still need a library to live in.
what the web ended up doing was to remove the library completely, forcing me to reinvent the library within the book. suddenly the semantic document that i want to send you not only contains references relevant to its context, but it has to include the whole navigation for my library, because there is no way to do that externally. with that navigation included, you are no longer getting a semantic hypertext, but an application.
now, we get to write that application in javascript and actually run it on your device, instead faking it on the server. but on the flip side, on the server i can now finally go back to serving static documents. i can finally serve semantic hypertext documents as they were meant to be served because i can separate the application from the content, and i can treat the content as static as it was meant to be treated.
i am not reinventing navigation logic in javascript. browsers never had navigation logic in the first place. gopher had that. i always had to re-invent navigation logic for every site i built and was forced to embed that into html dynamically so that site visitors could find their way.
the whole idea of a web of semantic hypertext was never a reality. that idea died with gopher. (anyone remember that?)
why? because gopher had a builtin navigation system that allowed you to manage directories and document structures that didn't belong to the documents themselves. semantic hypertext within gopher would have worked well. as would have applications. but without gopher we were forced to reinvent that navigation and squeeze it into our documents, overloading them with stuff that didn't belong inside.
think of a library with books. what the semantic hypertext promised was to make all those books into interactive texts where you can easily jump from one reference to another. but those books still need a library to live in.
what the web ended up doing was to remove the library completely, forcing me to reinvent the library within the book. suddenly the semantic document that i want to send you not only contains references relevant to its context, but it has to include the whole navigation for my library, because there is no way to do that externally. with that navigation included, you are no longer getting a semantic hypertext, but an application.
now, we get to write that application in javascript and actually run it on your device, instead faking it on the server. but on the flip side, on the server i can now finally go back to serving static documents. i can finally serve semantic hypertext documents as they were meant to be served because i can separate the application from the content, and i can treat the content as static as it was meant to be treated.
i am not reinventing navigation logic in javascript. browsers never had navigation logic in the first place. gopher had that. i always had to re-invent navigation logic for every site i built and was forced to embed that into html dynamically so that site visitors could find their way.