Hey guys, what happened to websites – The crazy level of complexity and confusion in the seemingly uncomplicated world of web content

What’s going on, how did we get here, what happened? A winding and unnecessarily lengthy story of one Internet-based career.

I’ve been doing it for the long haul, without even realizing it at first. When I started, the Internet was as cute as a button, small and easy to grasp. We all knew the rules, and even when they changed, they were simple to coop back up and carry on.

Back in the day, I was an up-and-coming front-end developer. Yes, I know how unlikely that sounds. And of course, they were not called that then, they were simply ‘coders’, because they created code. Well, of sorts - simple times. I didn’t know much, but it was okay, neither did many. We used HTML 4.0 like there was no tomorrow, I even went as far as doing strict. I know, *wow*.

CSS came, but that was still okay, it was legible. Of course, things cascaded very quickly from there on, and I saw it best to take the back seat – let’s face it, I was never going to be a great developer, probably not even a mediocre one, so no harm done there.

Still, I was in on it, I had a grasp. There was the front page, a clear entry point - and at uni my teachers even saw it best to teach us linear story telling as part of our online communication studies. Mostly linear, moderately cascading, controllable, understandable – the web was still very much human-size.

Almost boring.

So, I looked away for a bit. After all, I got this, right?

When I came back, javascript was fighting Flash, CSS was gushing and HTML came knocking with all sorts. This was great, I thought, now we’re getting somewhere! And I stepped back in.

But hey now, what was going on exactly. This group said we’ll do it this way, that group had its own, completely different ideas. That guy over there decided it was a good idea to mix up a bag of old with the new, and hey presto, look at that metamorphosis! Anything – and I mean anything in the sense of ‘we think we can do everything we desire, but we just don’t know how to desire very much yet’ – was possible. And pretty much anything came out of it… Remember parallax? Yeah.

Remember parallax? Yeah.

At this point my job was mainly to think about content and how it should and could be delivered. We were still living in print, but very much headed towards post-print. At that point in time, it seemed possible that the prevailing method of publishing content could be a digital magazine or book. The Internet was an afterthought, a separate channel for advertising that shiny new digital content. Apps? Well, they existed, but mainly for funny games on the phone.

So, on one side, the Internet was all giddy and going crazy, and on the other there was the slow and very much denied, despised even, digital transfer – perhaps I’ll call it melt-in, although at times melt-down could have been used as well – of the print content and the aforementioned giddy & crazy. I don’t remember ever using the phrase ‘these are interesting times we live in!’, but I could have then.

When I finally came up for air, things seemed less scary and tangled up than could have been expected, but still it was clear that linear was not an option anymore. It had already started with Archie in mid-90s, and with the more commercial-like versions of it even before Yahoo, of course, but now it had grown so big that there was not just search engines looking for websites and information, but a need to optimize those websites specifically for this purpose, so that they wouldn’t be left out of the party.

The start of an era of ‘it’s getting really crowded in here’

Search engine optimization had already started before I got this far. But it was simple, small, quite easy even when I finally did go in. Literally anyone could do it back then, just as it had been previously with the so-called front-end development (we of course called it ‘making web pages’ or ‘hey look what I made for my aunt/neighbor/hobby group’). And so, in I went. I’ve even done white-on-white, for real, and it also worked. *feeling nostalgic*

I’ve even done white-on-white, for real.

But yet again, we were at a junction - and like before, I didn’t see it. Had I done, maybe I would have incorporated some things in my bag of knowledge & know-how a bit earlier, but it’s easy to say that now. Either way, this was the dawn of where we are today: multiverse-wide (or at least so it seems) web of knowledge and data beyond any one’s grasp.

I love systems. Order. Logic. I love it when something can be used for many things or re-used over and over. I adore content that can function in multiple roles and ways, but still deliver equally for all those purposes. And as I sit here, it is very much possible, more so than ever before (I claim at least).

Slice it up, chop it down, but don’t lose the connectors, the points where all the bits and pieces can be attached to one another. This way you have very flexible chunks of information, knowledge and stories that can be used and re-used and multi-used to the power of ∞. Well, almost.

But beware, it is easy to lose track, to make a mess of it.

While websites seemingly struggle to get their act together with HTML5 and structured data & alike, the world of knowledge management looks as if they never even had any problems at all. The classification methods and automatization has grown by leaps and bounds, and they have no problem at all to offer support to the age-old dream of semantic web as well. But this of course could just be an illusion created in the head of someone who is only just slightly peeping in (in awe – just think of the librarians and other classification professionals just a few decades back, how their world must have changed!).

It’s all connected. It should be all connected – and it is, but just not as simply and neatly as (I feel) it should be. It is still the world wide web, a net. But just so much more complex, both technically and content-wise. And while there is beauty in chaos, I still yearn for the calming effect of order.

We’re lucky.

We have AI (coming), a real and logical reason to get as much data and information as possible in such shape and form that it can actually be used to feed them. AI’s smart, but not (yet) a god. We also have the positive problem of big data. Another, and related, reason to kick up the usability of that data.

Websites are small, small examples of all of the above mentioned. They’re like little artificial mini worlds for testing things. Like schemas, taxonomies, vocabularies, ontologies – all that classification of knowledge and information which is still for the most part human-operated, although intended mostly for technical systems and platforms. Still, within grasp. Until it isn’t.

So, here we are, back at the beginning

All this, technical and content development of websites, the evolution of the web itself, the rise of attempts to harness the environment those two have created – such as search engines – and the new dawn of (AI-based/related and seemingly automated) classification of the lot so that there can be successful future attempts to harness all that exponential data and information, all that leads us to – yes, where?

At the moment, I feel I’ll attempt to jump in and swim with what I’ve got. For now at least, I have this survivalist notion that it is possible to create and manage semantics fit for humans and machines. Or I should say co-create, as this time AI is – and especially will be – here too. Some of the tools are very rough still, mainly RDF and human-based vocabularies to create human-managed ontologies, but we also rely e.g. on NLP to do its part. And I’m convinced it’ll get there.

All I know is that the future of the Internet is not manual, single-packed or made of throwaway content

All I know is that the future of the Internet is not manual, single-packed or made of throwaway content – and I’m gonna ride this one out too and learn to grasp it as well. But now it's time to do something new and different, so I predict I'll be busy for a while trying to catch that ball. And no doubt this crazy kid called the Internet will come up with something completely unheard of again. Which I will no doubt try to catch up with again. And so it rolls. □