A great article on future of the web

I really enjoyed this article by Maciej Cegłowski
Web Design: The First 100 Years | Idlewords | 2014

If you are interested in web culture and the future check it out.

My favourite bits

What people want from computers now is better displays, better battery life and above all, a better Internet connection.

So the world of the near future is one of power constrained devices in a bandwidth-constrained environment. It's very different from the recent past, where hardware performance went up like clockwork, with more storage and faster CPUs every year.
And as designers, you should be jumping up and down with relief, because hard constraints are the midwife to good design. The past couple of decades have left us with what I call an exponential hangover.

We complained for years that browsers couldn't do layout and javascript consistently. As soon as that got fixed, we got busy writing libraries that reimplemented the browser within itself, only slower.

The Internet is full of projects big and small whose defining trait is that they came out of nowhere and captured people's imaginations. It's also full of awesome cat videos. The key part of this vision is that the Internet succeeds by remaining open and participatory. No one acts as gatekeeper, and it is not just a channel for mindless consumption.

Fixing the world with software is like giving yourself a haircut with a lawn mower. It works in theory, but there's no room for error in the implementation.

There is something quite colonial, too, about collecting data from users and repackaging it to sell back to them. I think of it as the White Nerd's Burden.