It's a classic case of engineers thinking they can solve people-problems with technical solutions. Both the thing that makes the web so important (a critical mass of adoption) and the things that are ruining it (Google's monopoly, adtech, product-over-engineering mentality) are societal. You can make pristine new monuments to your personal vision for the web all day long, but no amount of engineering by itself will have the tiniest impact on this status-quo. Changing things requires changing minds - of product managers, of legislators, etc.

> It's a classic case of engineers thinking they can solve people-problems with technical solutions.

Linux, Wikipedia and a number of other proves this is not the entire story.

If the new <x> is good/fast/cheap enough people will sometimes start using it.

Often this is gets great help from the incumbent solution being either really bad and/or slow and/or expensive.

This way of thinking is not just not entirely correct but more importantly it is demotivating. Maybe what we do won't succeed but for me it sure beats watching more TV :-)

Does Wikipedia count as a technical solution? I don't think the tech does anything without the people editing it. I believe it's the policy ("everyone can edit") that made the advancement, not the specific system they built to allow it.

I agree on the second point, but it's more by accident in my opinion. If the technical solution leads to people finding it easier or cheaper to do something, they'll adopt it. Whether it's new, good, pristine, perfect, free & open etc, doesn't matter. It has to make their life easier, save them time and/or money or otherwise enhance the experience, that's what counts.

I don't think that's necessarily true. What is true is that the impact of new technology is not determined by tech visionaries alone and not even mostly by them.

But new technology has had a dramatic impact on societies in the past, disrupting monopolies, creating new ones, confronting society with new choices, opportunities and challenges.

Technology can force a rethink. It cannot force outcomes.

The same is true for operating systems and programming languages. It‘s not the best ones that win. Economics is the most important factor.

"are societal"

Structural, not societal.

And Google's monopoly is not good, but it's not really the root cause of the issues articulated in the article.

Indeed it does come up often, but your linked blog post doesn't state a single reason why "forking HTML doesn't make sense". First, nobody is "forking" anything. Second, you assume the role of a "web developer" as a given. If I, as a web "user" (reader) want to read some text (say, about gardening), then I sure want that text to be written by an expert rather than a "web developer". If in doubt, I can live with the presentation being plain; but there's no point in reading stuff about gardening by a dilettante gardener who happens to know HTML, CSS, and JS. As a corollary, "the web" fails to deliver for the domain expert as a simple means for self-publishing; instead a self-referential man-in-the-middle snake oil industry has been build.

The greatest gardener and the worst gardener in the world can self-publish equally well on the web, unfortunately proving to others which is which is outside the area of self-publishing and they cannot do this easily. This problem is also a general one for people publishing books or anything else.

It is very very easy for self-publishers to publish plain static HTML content on the Web. A good modern solution is Github Pages, but there have always been good solutions for this.

Yes, people have gravitated to centralized platforms for various reasons, and those platforms tend to make it difficult to publish entirely handwritten raw HTML/CSS, but it's not because the alternatives ceased to exist.

Every time my browser's Reader Mode works, it's a better experience. Some day it will work often enough that I won't look back.

At some point the Web will be so slow and bloated that it won't attract revenue or developers. A clean slate is possible then.

You would need something that turns a SPA into a much smaller standalone app by only implementing 80% of the spec.

> persuading Web developers to use it is where the real problem lies, and that is immensely difficult and no-one has any good ideas for how to do it

Let the different subsets compete. You'd have multiple different simple browser that each support a different subset. Developers would have to choose which one they agree with and make their sites compatible. They would all render properly in full browsers. You can find the sweet spot over time.

Competition doesn't work in the presence of network effects.

We lived through browser fragmentation before, with IE support vs other web standards. It just meant that developers had to make a version for everything except for big critical things like banks and .gov will be 'ie-only' (or maybe 'chrome-only', now).

It's way better to have one jankier universal platform with a few good implementations.