Warning: rant ahead (pet topic) When HTML came out, it was purely academic. People said sure, it's cool, but how could you ever make money from just text with

Warning: rant ahead (pet topic) When HTML came out, it was purely academic. People said sure, it's cool, but how could you ever make money from just text with pictures and little links? Now we have the answer: you create content -- text, video, pictures, games, etc -- that actively interacts with the user. Then, if you're smart, you make it so they have to "visit" your site to see this content, and, once there, they can only see whatever you choose. It's called a walled garden. All is beauty and loveliness. As long as you stay within the walls and don't piss off the gardener. But this idea of "visiting" a site is only there because people type some text into a navigation bar and the browser loads material from a certain server. There's no reason or law that says I have to type in an address -- or that once I type in an address I am limited to seeing things from one server only. There's not even a reason I should see the information in some certain format or another. Why not type in "weather" and see various weather forecasts put out by various sources? After all, I want weather, not Joe's weather or Amit's weather. With all due respect to Joe and Amit, weather is weather. Google is already doing this, of course, but only as a gateway. And they've got their own walled garden they're working on. Play by the rules and you'll appear on Google -- exactly where we want and alongside ads we feel are relevant to your page (and ads we make money from) But what if you took the "location" idea completely away from HTML? Then you wouldn't be "visiting" anybody's site, and there wouldn't be any gardens to build. What if you simply interacted semantically with your computer and it gathered information from various sources and condensed it into plain text for you to consume? Gone would be "site stickiness", "addictive gaming", and "landing pages" and all sorts of other nonsense that's grown up around the idea of internet locations. You could still consume multimedia and interactive material, of course, but only under terms you set, not terms the various site owners set. Perhaps you would want no ads, or no hyperlinks, or a time limit each day that would be acceptable for you to play games. This puts the user back in control of their internet activities, the way it should be. It destroys many business models, but the internet is data-based, and it must evolve. I do not want the same internet in 2050 as we have now. It also gets back to the true meaning of HTML -- separating the data from the presentation. The designers of HTML realized that the purpose was structuring the data so that it relevantly linked, not creating a walled amusement park in the form of Facebook. The curating and presentation of data is inherently a personal matter and best not left to others. We either fix this problem or it will continue to get worse, as recent events keep showing.