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I think the way forward is even more powerful and interactive "document". Imagine for example a car manual that also lets you run diagnostics or tweak the HUD.

• TeMPOraL 7y ago
  We hit problems of ownership, control and scope here. I want a tool I can use to find a baking recipe and configure my baking machine automatically. I want that tool to be entirely independent of the sites it pulls recipes from, and of the machines it configures. From this point of view, I want the recipe sites to be dumb documents, preferably in machine-readable format. Similarly, I want my baking machine to be a dumb telemetry/configuration endpoint. In this baking example, there are three pieces of the puzzle. Recipe source, configuration endpoint, and the brain in the middle that uses one to work on the other. I want that brain part to be independent - but you can easily see how the recipe site and the machine vendors would each like to own the brain part exclusively. That's why we can't have nice things on the Internet - nobody can accept their role as a service provider, everyone wants to be a platform, the landowner of their digital sharecrop.
  • z3t4 7y ago
    That would be even better. A static document with an URL. Then you "swipe" the URL from your phone/pad to the baking machine, which fetches the URL and reads the marked up recipe. You then confirm the ingredients on the baking machine, and it starts baking I however want both "apps" and semantic "documents". Launching an app by typing an URL is powerful. And on Android you can now add an web app to the home screen. We might not want the recipe to have the same capabilities as the "app". Maybe the apps should be closer to the OS, and "documents" opened in a reader app (browser). One problem with the "semantic web" is that the added markup feel alien and too verbose. It was designed to be used with web page builder apps. But I and many others still prefer to code the HTML manually, with the help of a powerful editor (with autocomplete and macros). "Structured data" gets too hard to read by source. An idea is to replace the many span and div elements with actual semantic elements. In another post I ranted that nothing had really changed for "documents" on the web in the last 20 years. We are practically standing still, without any innovation. Probably due to browsers being overly complex and hard to develop. I think the time is ripe for a "document only" web browser, and we can start innovating again! For example, the enterpise market is still using word documents, some use alternatives like Google docs. But web "documents" would be far more powerful. Instead of e-mailing files, you should just share a URL. I'm currently working on an Editor for making web documents (but also for making web apps). I've put a lot of thoughts to how enterprise can use my editor to make web documents instead of word files and PDF's. Almost everyone are using the web today, but very few people actually make web "documents".