The World Wide Web is Broken

The problem is that the idea of making information available to the general public has been tied to the particular computer systems used to store that information and that doesn't really work. There are lots of problems, but the main ones are:

  1. The information that is made available can depend upon who or what is accessing the information. This is built into the way web servers are configured. Just because one person sees a certain page on a web server there is no particular reason to believe that another person accessing that server from another device will see the same thing.
  2. The fact that the information is stored on one particular web server means that that server is a single point of failure in the delivery chain. If your web server is down nobody can see the information on it.
  3. To disseminate information widely requires a large amount of bandwidth and correspondingly a large amount of server resources.
  4. Access to the information depends crucially on having network access to the web server on which that information is hosted. This means that information can be taken off-line easily simply by denying network access to the web server on which it resides.

There are many different ways to get around these problems, but none of them have stood the test of time.

If we want to be able to communicate in a civilized manner then we need a better way to do it than the World Wide Web. 

See for example this post:

e-mail is broken too.

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