It occurs to me that, much like the web, what’s absent from the next wave of AI tools are any sort of concept of transclusion. Translcusion would have the sources of data traveling along the same pipes as that data itself, and make attribution actually possible. Can you imagine if LLM were actually accountable for providing the root of each source?

Ted Nelson never quite cracked that technological nut, and we are so well past it that nobody even thinks about it anymore.

I was reading about the latest experiment from Google, an AI-powered research tool called NotebookLM and I came across the name Steven Johnson. After doing a bit of digging I found that it was the same Steve Johnson who co-founded Feed magazine and wrote many books, including Interface Culture, which gave subtextual meaning to the hyperlink. Anyway, you can read Steven’s perspective on the whole thing over on his Substack.

There are a lot of stories about companies or tech scenes that spawned really intricate web pedigrees as former employees made their way into the world and started new companies that had lasting impacts. The PayPal Mafia is the most cited example, but Silicon Alley also comes to mind.

Anyway, in my research for Coldfusion, I was surprised to find that Allaire, the company which created Coldfusion, is one of those places as well.

I’ve been interested in Coldfusion for a while, as this language that was (and in some ways still is) very popular, but never quite made the headlines. I like what its creator, JJ Allaire, had to say about his goal when he created it though:

We built a language that had as its at its heart expressiveness… let’s let the developer express as succinctly as possible their intention and have that come come to life in a web application

It used to not be all that common for some teenager to be borderline (internet) famous for just totally killing it at web dev. I’ve written about Lissa Explains it All and then recently came across this post about Nick Heinle, who wrote a book about JavaScript for O’Reilly when he was 17 years old. I know that’s still happening, but the gap between digital natives and the rest of the world was so much wider at the web’s birth that this was a semi-regular occurence.

I was reading over a 1997 article in the Economists about the current state of what was still being called Electronic Commerce and I was struck by how simple its goals were:

And since a shopper’s every step through a Web site can be traced, an online merchant can quickly put together a clearer picture of each shopper’s interests and preferences than an army of survey-takers in a department store.

That’s it. Take a shopper’s interests and see if you can show them some other stuff they might like. Not exactly the follow-them-around-the-web-and-aggregate-their-preferences-with-millions-of-others-to-manipulate-purchasing-decisions-and-robotize-personal-interactions mentality we have floating around these days.

A compendium of important historical links compiled by Zach Leatherman (the ones that haven’t succumbed to link rot anyway). For a quick demo site, there’s a lot of interesting stuff there.

Thinking of The Straight Dope today (earliest possible archive link). It started as a weekly column in the Chicago Reader, and then other newspapers, and then way back in 1996, on the early web. In some ways, its perfect for the web. Every week, it would answer some new, offbeat but still practical and relatable question, like how they get teflon to stick to a pan or how bread got invented. Its author wrote under the pseudoynm Cecil Adams and to this day, we don’t quite know who they are.

In 2018, it ceased to be with a final post from Cecil. Sucked up, I assume, by the gravitational pull of social media’s walled gardens. For many years, the site was paired with a message board filled with lively discussion from a large, but still kind of small, group of people obsessed with finding answers. In that final post, Cecil addresses the message board directly:

Notwithstanding newspaper comment sections, Twitter, Facebook, and so on, no online arena comparable to the SDMB [Straight Dope Message Board] has emerged for the clash of ideas of the sort we’ve tried to encourage – no forum where ordinary people with fundamental disagreements can duke it out provided they remain civil. I thought, and still think, providing a home for such debates is a critical role for us in the news media. The SDMB is a model in that respect. I acknowledge it hasn’t caught on widely so far. One can only hope.

I’m still hoping Cecil.

Recalling the still-simmering Browser Wars in 2002, Steve Champeon makes a pretty good point.

The past six years have brought enormous change, standardization, and stability (not to mention top-notch implementations) from the major browser vendors. And that isn’t just because “Microsoft won the war.” We all won the browser wars. Compromises were made on both sides, and the Web of tomorrow will bear as much resemblance to the antebellum days of Mosaic as your desktop resembles that of Bartleby the scrivener.

When browsers compete, we all win. When services and software and platforms compete, we all win. Innovation can’t happen in a vacuum. It’s a lesson that today’s web is starting to remember again.