> The reason why the web exploded was because ... Depends on which big bang you talk about. Gopher lost to HTML because Gopher was TUI-oriented when HTML was

> The reason why the web exploded was because ... Depends on which big bang you talk about. Gopher lost to HTML because Gopher was TUI-oriented when HTML was GUI-oriented. And Gopher lost a second time when Web 2.0 (JS expansion) occurred. TUI is not so vastly inferior to GUI - at least when it comes to reading and writing and sparse multimedia contents. The Web exploded because GUI appears to be more user-friendly. There are vastly more users that need "friendliness" than users that just need honesty ;-) In my mind, if one wants to suggest an alternative to the Web, one either has to go back to the passive, text-oriented web or one-up the current Web with something even more interactive and even more graphical. In my opinion the only way to achieve successfully the latter is to provide a much easier way to make remote interactive graphical applications, with strong security guarantees of course. I believe that something like Squeak could do that job. It kind of already was done with Croquet/Cobalt. As for the former approach, I would suggest 80 columns monospace text as the standard document format, with the footnote-style convention for links - not some oddity that's midway between text and HTML. So in both case I think one has to be extreme in order to succeed. Either extreme sophistication or extreme simplicity.