One thing the article doesn't mention, and that's always intrigued me of the WWW proposal, is the phase 2 of the project, and specifically the first line:<p>> The creation of new links and new material by readers. At this stage, authorship becomes universal.<p>> The ability of readers to create links allows annotation by users of existing data, allows to add themselves and their documents to lists (mailing lists, indexes, etc). It should be possible for users to link public documents to (for example) bug reports, bug fixes, and other documents which the authors themselves might never have realised existed. This phase allows collaborative authorship. It provides a place to put any piece of information such that it can later be found. Making it easy to change the web is thus the key to avoiding obsolete information. One should be able to trace the source of information, to circumvent and then to repair flaws in the web.<p>It envisioned some kind of a collaborative web where readers were also publishers, but it didn't go into much detail. AFAIK this phase was never completed, and IMO this is a major reason why the web is so centralized today, why users have no control of their data, and why it's primarily aimed towards consumers.<p>Had publishing content been as easy as consuming it was from the start, there would've been more tooling built around this concept, and publishing content would've been as easy as consuming it is today. I.e. we would have had publishing equivalents of web browsers, instead of web servers that are only meant for the technically literate. New web users would be educated that the web is a collaborative tool, and not just for consumption, and they would've had tools that would allow them to share their data in a granular way. This would've avoided the need for early web hosting services like GeoCities to exist, ISPs would've had to provide symmetrical internet connections, and the modern web landscape would've been very different.<p>This is something that TBL is trying to correct with his Solid project, but I think it's too little, too late, as that ship has long since sailed. The current way the web works is so ingrained in culture, and giant tech corporations now define its direction, as long as it benefits their bottom line. Easy web publishing is _still_ not native to the web, and users have to rely on 3rd parties.<p>Opera had an interesting project in 2009 with Unite, which allowed publishing right from the browser, but it went nowhere for some reason. The modern decentralized web movement, a.k.a. "web3", is too focused on the technology instead of the user, and I don't see it gaining mainstream traction.<p>In many ways I'm disappointed with how the web turned out. It's ruled by corporations, government agencies, and advertisers. It's hostile to the user on every turn, and it's literally impossible to navigate without software that blocks ads and trackers, which tech corporations are also actively fighting.<p>The sad part is that I'm not sure what the solution might be, or if there is one at all. All signals seem to point to an even more encroaching and hostile experience in the future.