Why the Open Web Matters

Twenty years after its cre­ation, the open web seems to be fac­ing some of its biggest chal­lenges and its sur­vival may make the whole dif­fer­ence between a world where a few large com­pa­nies have most of the con­trol or one where any­one is afforded the oppor­tu­nity to inno­vate online.

Def­i­n­i­tion: What I mean by web

It appears that, as time moves on, many peo­ple have dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tion of the web. Some look at it as a sub­sti­tute for the word inter­net, oth­ers look at it as the sites that are sit­ting at a web address. My def­i­n­i­tion is a lit­tle more tech­ni­cal: to me, the web is a sys­tem that serves up HTML, CSS, and Javascript over the HTTP (or HTTPS) protocol.

Under that def­i­n­i­tion, it means that Face­book or Google can­not be seen as “the web” any more than iphone or android phone apps are.

Def­i­n­i­tion: What I mean by Open

Open is another tricky word to define.

Some peo­ple look to open as inter­op­er­a­ble. To those peo­ple, an open web only exists when a site or page is acces­si­ble by every­one with­out requir­ing any kind of extra reg­is­tra­tion. In those people’s views, sites like Face­book are not open because they require a user­name and pass­word to access them.

To oth­ers, open means that it can be accessed by all. Those peo­ple look to coun­try fire­walls or band­width caps as exam­ples of the kind of restric­tion that keep the web from open. To some, as long as access to the inter­net is unfet­tered, then the inter­net remains open.

A third camp looks at open as relat­ing to open source, mean­ing that the under­ly­ing code can be viewed and reviewed by any­one who so chooses.

When he cre­ated the first web browser, Tim Berners-Lee added one small world-changing (and I’m not using the term lightly here as you will see later) fea­ture: View Source. This item, which allows any web browser user to pull up the HTML source code of any pages on the web. 20 years later, view source is still avail­able in most web browser, still allow­ing any­one who cares to exam­ine the HTML, CSS, and Javascript code that com­pose most of the inter­ac­tions with a web­site. Some of the best web devel­op­ers in the world ini­tially learned their craft through this com­po­nent and it is still one of the best way to learn how web pages are built.

In my view, the last two items are what rep­re­sents open. Unfet­tered access AND abil­ity to look at the innards.

Today’s world

Much of the inter­est around the inter­net field cen­ters on two fac­tors: social media and mobile access.

In the case of social media, peo­ple look to the abil­ity to lever­age one’s offline or online con­nec­tions to aug­ment the value of an appli­ca­tion. In that sense, ser­vices like Twit­ter, Face­book, Zynga and Foursquare have cre­ated appli­ca­tions that would not be ter­ri­bly inter­est­ing with­out peo­ple and their connection.

In the case of the mobile space, Apple has launched an explo­sion of access through mobile devices that was then fol­lowed by Google, with its Android oper­at­ing sys­tem. When it first intro­duced the iPhone, Steve Jobs asked devel­op­ers to develop for the web, telling them that it was the best way to inter­act with the iPhone. How­ever, the next year, he intro­duced the App Store and asked devel­op­ers to start look­ing at devel­op­ing native appli­ca­tions for devices run­ning what came to be known as iOS.

Google fol­lowed suit, push­ing devel­op­ers to develop for their own oper­at­ing sys­tem, Android.

The net result is that a lot of com­pa­nies have devel­oped appli­ca­tions that are run­ning exclu­sively on those plat­forms, bypass­ing the web altogether.

An open web

Pro­po­nents of the open web, how­ever, did not rest on their lau­rels and intro­duced html5 and css3, a set of changes to the build­ing blocks of the web that can make it eas­ier to devel­op­ers richer, more inter­ac­tive appli­ca­tions. Mod­ern web browsers (ie. those that came out since 2010) tend to have some form of sup­port for those changes.

Because html5 rep­re­sents an evo­lu­tion of html, css, and javascript, it goes with­out say­ing that the view-source ele­ment that Tim Berners-Lee had added to browsers 20 years ago can still be used to see how par­tic­u­lar things were implemented.

To date, how­ever, few of the star­tups that have com­mit­ted to devel­op­ing appli­ca­tions for mobile devices have lever­aged the power of html5.

Why an open web mat­ters: Education

For a gen­er­a­tion, web devel­op­ers have learned their craft through a tra­di­tion of enforced shar­ing: the open web, through its view-source abil­ity, allowed any­one who wanted to learn how to develop like the mas­ters to study their code and, in some case, mimic it before evolv­ing it in their own way.

This has cre­ated a vir­tu­ous cycle, where good ideas are evolved and bad ones fall by the way­side. It’s also made it an inter­est­ing chal­lenge as the abil­ity to learn from the basic code has also led to peo­ple copy­ing the code.

Why an open web mat­ters: Evolved busi­ness model

The net result of such copy­ing can be busi­nesses that are basi­cally xerox copies of an orig­i­nal. How­ever, if you believe that the web is only but a com­po­nent of a solid busi­ness offer­ing, then copy­ing of one’s web­site would not nec­es­sar­ily result in a total copy of a business.

If your busi­ness is so sen­si­tive that mak­ing a xerox of your web­site will kill it, it is not yet a viable busi­ness. So the web, because it equal­izes code forces busi­nesses to improve them­selves by build­ing busi­ness advan­tages that are not fully depen­dent on the code. This is a good thing because it results in more reliant businesses.

Why an open web mat­ters: Accessibility

The open web is gen­er­ally eas­ier to make acces­si­ble to peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties. HTML, in itself, has cer­tain built-in facil­i­ties that make it sim­pler to cre­ate sites that can be used by peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties. Text-readers can actu­ally read web-pages and/or inter­act with some web applications.

Fur­ther­more, today’s web can often be back­ward com­pat­i­ble, mean­ing that older gen­er­a­tion web browser can still inter­act with a lot of the con­tent that is pub­lished there or deal with expe­ri­ences that may be a lit­tle degraded com­pared to the lat­est offer­ing but still work­ing. For exam­ple, one can use gmail on a browser from a decade ago. That’s a tes­ta­ment to how endurable an open web can be, that it can be used on devices that stopped being pro­duced BEFORE an appli­ca­tion was made.

Why an open web mat­ters: Freedom

Recently, the Finan­cial Times decided to imple­ment a web ver­sion of their app, lever­ag­ing html5 to bypass restric­tions enforced in the Apple app store. The deci­sion was hailed by many as a sign of things to come because it pre­sented a rich offer­ing out­side of the tra­di­tional Apple ecosystem.

At a recent con­fer­ence, some­one said (and if you remem­ber who it is, please tell as I couldn’t find the exact quote) that devel­op­ers are essen­tially cap­tive of the plat­forms they develop on. As a result, any changes in that plat­form and a devel­oper could find his/her liveli­hood or prod­uct endangered.

Why an open web mat­ters: Shap­ing the agenda

But no one owns the open web, as a result, few changes to the under­ly­ing plat­form can endan­ger web-based prod­ucts. So it may make busi­ness sense, as a hedge against some of the things that could hap­pen on a closed plat­form, to develop a busi­ness that runs on the open web as well as run­ning as an app.

Last but not least, when it comes to free­dom, is the abil­ity to help influ­ence the agenda.

If you develop for iOS or Android, most of the deci­sions as to where the OS is going are being made by either Apple or Google. If you develop for the open web, most of the deci­sions are being made by Apple, Google, Microsoft, the Fire­fox foun­da­tion, and Opera. As a result, it’s more likely that one of them will sup­port new fea­tures in the open web as a busi­ness advan­tage. With 5 major play­ers, there isn’t one that has a chance of becom­ing dom­i­nant for very long. By com­par­i­son, with 2 major play­ers in the mobile mar­ket, it is likely that the com­mu­nity doesn’t get as much of a voice in shap­ing the agenda.

Busi­ness deci­sions vs. intel­lec­tual purity

Of course, I hear peo­ple dis­miss the argu­ment. They might say “But Tris­tan, if you are so enam­ored with the open web, why is your com­pany, Keep­skor, design­ing for plat­forms that are not open?”

It may indeed seem odd that I would tell peo­ple the open web mat­ters while at the same time devel­op­ing on some of the more restrain­ing plat­form. How­ever, I’d counter that argu­ment with two sim­ple statements:

• First of all, open and closed is not a binary issues. In our case, we will be offer­ing an html5 ver­sion of our prod­uct to serve in par­al­lel to the Android and iOS client.
• Sec­ond, intel­lec­tual purity is a fine thing but, as a busi­nessper­son, I must make deci­sions that ben­e­fit our busi­ness and our share­hold­ers. To go with an open-only prod­uct would be to limit the mar­kets we can reach and that’s just short-sighted, from a busi­ness standpoint.

At the end of the day, it’s a tough dilema that most com­pa­nies have to face. I first high­lighted it the chal­lenged faced by iOS devel­op­ers before Keep­skor existed and it seems it’s a chal­lenge that still presents itself. The way I look at deal­ing with this chal­lenge is to develop a web-based ver­sion of our tools that pro­vides sim­i­lar, if not exact, func­tion­al­ity to our iOS and Android clients. To do so is not just a mat­ter of open­ness, it’s also a deci­sion that makes busi­ness sense because it gives us a plat­form to sup­port all the devices for which we do not offer a client. As such, it max­i­mizes our mar­ket expo­sure at a rel­a­tively inex­pen­sive extra cost. And THAT makes total busi­ness sense.