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133 weeks agoFixing the Web

There's a number of flaws in the present WWW I want to address. Recent Alertbox article "Users Interleave Sites and Genres" summarizes some of them:

Web-Wide Improvements Needed

The Web failed our user in two ways:

• There's no support for multi-site behaviors, beyond the minimal integration that search engines offer and a few cases of review sites and vendors linking directly to e-commerce sites' product pages. Our user typically had to build her understanding of a given projector by combining information from four sites: the vendor's site, a review site, an e-commerce site that sold the projector, and an e-commerce site that sold the lamps. To improve the total user experience of the Web, we need tools that cut across individual sites.
• The user never found good independent reviews of some products she was considering. ...

Both of theese problems are rooted in the fact that practically everything on the web is a page. It would be different if a product had a canonical URI that would be identifying it. See, it's Universal Resource Locator, not Universal Page Locator. So if each product had a canonical URI, then user's experience in the Jacob's example could be like this:

1. She would locate the canonical URIs for the products she was considering.
2. She would look up reviews for the products by issuing another search for documents typed 'review' having the product in their 'reviewed products' list. This would normally involve right-clicking on the page and selecting 'Find reviews of this' from the menu. Or maybe browser would insert the link right into the page reducing it to one click.
3. She would look up prices by doing exactly the same thing -- just clicking on 'Prices' link that was put there by the browser, not website author (remember she is still on a product page that belongs to manufacturer's site).
4. That's it basically. She has all the info she needed without resorting to manual search after locating the products themselves.

Things you should have noted in my example is that

• Web Resources are 'typed', so a search engine and a browser can tell that the resource is a product or a review or a price quote.
• Browser can insert links, or rather actions according to the type of the resource user is accessing. Sure the user has complete control of the method that browser uses to execute those actions (locate reviews and prices in this example).
• Also it's up to the limitations of the browser and user's preferences if the reviews are shown in the current window, new tab or inline.

What it takes to create this new web?

• Common structured data format that is actually used
• Capable search engines
• Compatible browsers

The need for the new browser can be relieved by extensions and web-apps that act like a converting proxy. Creating the search engine to process the already structured data is rather trivial. So we have the most challenging part of the project left -- having people use some common data format. More on this next time.

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