> Meanwhile the web is trying to make you do the opposite, drawing you in and wasting your time.

What a bizarre thing to say. It's true, in some sense, but it's still bizarre.

Maybe I'm committing a No True Scotsman fallacy, but to me "the web" is, at its core, the thing made of web pages — pieces of human-authored content that very intentionally and manually hyperlink to one another. And these "web pages" themselves are almost always static files — though they could maybe be served by a wiki or CMS backend.

But HTML5 web apps that deliver walled-garden social networking experiences? Not "the web", per se. Loosely affiliated with "the web" at best.

My rubric for what constitutes "the web":

• Does each piece of content have a readable, human-friendly permanent URL, that can 1. be search-engine-indexed and 2. through which the public can access the content, without signing up for the service, or being nagged to sign up for the service? (Remember that? That's the web!)

• If you click on hyperlinks in the content, does the page just send you directly to the link destination — implying that the author of the content is the ultimate arbiter of where they want their links to go? (Oh, that's definitely the web!) Or does the page do tracking things? "Warning, you're leaving the platform" things? Embed-unfurling things? "Trying as hard as it can to make you forget there's an outside world" things? (Definitely not the web!)

• Does accessing content at its permalink URL deliver server-rendered HTML containing the content — such that anyone with an HTML-parsing library could write an "alternative User Agent" to render that content? (That's the web I know and love!) Or is the page a template/skeleton that gets populated with the content via an XHR? (Not the web at all!)

• Are there tags in the preloaded HTML with appropriate fragment identifiers, allowing people to hyperlink to specific relevant parts of the content? (That's extremely "the web.")

Under this definition of "the web", there's no real ability for "the web" to do anything like "drawing you in and wasting your time." The worst it can do is to offer you endless opportunities to explore and educate yourself on trivial topics.

But of course, under this definition of "the web", there's only so much "web" — and most of it was created before the year 2005! (Other than the online arms of traditional-journalism news websites — many of which carry on putting out real new "web" pages every day.)

If you disagree with my definition of "the web" — well, I still think the concept is valuable, so maybe keep the concept but choose your own name for it. (Maybe "the intentional web"? "The artisanal web"?)

But I would argue that this is, explicitly, what "the World Wide Web" originally meant, to anyone who lived through the birth and growth of it. That any other, more expansive definition of the term, has been driven by a process of co-option by the very cathedrals to which "the web" functioned as bazaar. That we shouldn't respect this co-option; that we should continue to use "the web" as a reference to that core of good stuff, while considering all the rest of the stuff as "not the web, just using web technologies."

(This distinction used to be easy, because all that platform-y not-the-web stuff used to be built using Java/ActiveX applets, or Flash, or Silverlight. Now it's all HTML5... but does that matter? It's still, on a semantic level, not "the web.")