Do you think plain text will exist in 100 years? If so then it's not that much a stretch to say that HTML will. It astonishes me that people think that only code, and not data, will be transported over networks. That seems to be what you are claiming -- that it's preferable to transmit code than data in all circumstances?

The argument isn't symmetric because I fully believe that VMs are necessary for the web. I just don't agree with Kay that the designers of the web are idiots (he really says this) because they didn't start with a VM. VMs will come and go as hardware and devices and circumstances change. Data has much more longevity; it encodes fewer assumptions.

Assumptions that are no longer true are generally the reason a technology dies. It is pretty easy to imagine a VM (unknowingly or not) encoding preferences for keyboard and mouse input; that technology would have died with the advent of touch screens. Likewise, a VM that provides affordances for touch screens will likely be dated in 10 years when we're using some other paradigm.

HTTP and HTML are foundational to the web. They are basically the simplest thing that could possibly work. You can reimplement them in a few days using a high level language. They will be around for a LONG LONG time.

More complicated constructs like JS and VMs will have shorter lifetimes. I guarantee you that HTML will be around long after whatever comes after JavaScript, just like HTML will outlive Java Applets and Flash.

They layered architecture of the web is absolutely the right thing. Use the least powerful abstraction for the problem, which gives the client -- which necessarily has more knowledge -- more choices. You could distribute all text files as shell scripts, but there's no reason to, and a lot of reasons why you shouldn't.

Currently the features are mandated by the W3C, then implemented by all browser vendors. The browser vendors send out updates to all users. Instead what will happen is that some future version markup language that's better than the then current HTML will be distributed as a library, running on top of the VM. This way if you are a site owner, you can immediately start using it. You do not need to wait until (1) the W3C recognizes that this markup language is a good thing and standardizes it (2) the browser vendors have implemented it (3) your visitors have updated their browser. You simply include the library, and start using the new markup language.

Note that this is already happening in the small. Javascript libraries like knockout.js are already changing the fundamental model of building web applications. Instead of waiting for the W3C to standardize some kind of web components with data binding, people implemented it as a library. 20 years ago people would have thought such a thing impossible. They would have thought that something like that surely has to be built in to the browser. As JS gets more powerful, more and more features can be implemented this way, instead of through standardization. Note that things are still flowing over the network in markup language (in this case, knockout.js template language). A similar thing happened with form elements. Remember the xforms standardization effort? Nobody cares anymore because JS libraries offer far better rich forms elements. The thing that changed is where it's implemented: ON the web, rather than IN the web. This organic model is far more in line with the principles of the internet, rather than the centralized way it's done with the web standards. Instead of giving somebody a fish, give him the tools to fish.

> HTTP and HTML are foundational to the web. They are basically the simplest thing that could possibly work. You can reimplement them in a few days using a high level language.

A few days?! This is absolute nonsense. You can't even read the spec in a few days, let alone all the specs it depends on, like PNG, JPG, etc. Maybe you can implement some tiny subset of HTML in a few days, but the whole thing is massively complicated. In comparison a VM is far far simpler.

100 years is a very long time. The web is 23 years old.

Plain text has existed for 50+ years; I'm sure it will exist in 100. I'm pretty surprised you don't think so. Actually Taleb's Antifragile talks about this exact fact -- things that have stood the test of time will tend to stick around. For example, shoes, chairs, and drinking glasses have been around for thousands of years; they likely will be around for thousands more. An iPad has maybe another decade. HTML has already stood the test of time, because it has gone through drastic evolution and remained intact.

Your knowledge of how web standards are developed isn't quite correct. The W3C didn't invent SSL, JavaScript, XmlHttpRequest, HTML5, or HTTP 2 (SPDY), to name a few. Browser vendors generally implement proprietary extensions, and then they are standardized afer the fact.

I agree that the JS developments you list are interesting. JavaScript is certainly necessary for the web because it lets it evolve in unexpected directions. AJAX itself is a great example of that.

I'm talking about HTTP and HTML 1.0 -- they are conceptually dead simple, and both specs still use the exact same concepts and nothing more. I don't know if HTML 1.0 had forms -- if it did not then you could certainly implement HTTP + HTML in a couple days. I'm talking something like Lynx -- that is a valid web browser that people still use.

Lynx can still view billions of web pages because the web degrades gracefully, because semantic information is conveyed at a high level. The problem with VMs is they don't degrade. Suppose everyone gets sick of CSS. You can throw out all your CSS tomorrow, and write MyStyleLanguage, but your HTML will still be useful. If you encode everything in a VM, then the whole page breaks. It's all or nothing.

An analogy is that HTML vs VMs is similar to compiler IR vs assembly language. You can't perform a lot of optimizations on raw assembly code. The information isn't there anymore; it's been "lowered" in to the details of machine code. Likewise the client is able to do interesting things with non-Turing languages, because it can understand them. Once it's lowered into a VM language, the client can't do anything but slavishly execute the instructions. The semantic info that enables flexibility is gone by that point.

If you think markup will still exist in 100 years, then it's not too much more of a claim to say that markup will be transmitted by web servers and browsers. Do you agree with that? If that is true then TBL is not an idiot. Alan Kay's claim is basically ridiculous. A weaker version of it is still untrue.

I would say that in 100 years, HTML will still exist -- i.e. a thing that lets you separate plain text in to paragraphs, make it bold, etc. In contrast, we will have already gone through dozens of more VMs like the JVM, Flash, JS, Dart, etc. Certainly the JVM and Flash will be gone long before that point. They will have lived and died, but HTML will still be there.

The fact that some things stood the test of time has no predictive value. It's just confirmation bias. There are plenty of things that existed for far more than 50 years that did not stand the test of time. The horse cart, the abacus, and the spear for example. I believe that as IDEs and other programming tools become more sophisticated, it starts to make more and more sense for them to work directly on abstract syntax trees rather than plain text strings. But this is another discussion.

I'm well aware that the W3C has not have original started the standards (including the original HTML), but it's how they evolve, accumulate cruft, and it's how we get stuck with them. Standardization can only ever accumulate complexity on the web. Things cannot easily, or at all, be removed. With an organic model, as soon as things fall out of use they disappear from consideration.

Perhaps you can implement HTTP and HTML 1.0 in a few days if you are a hero programmer. I'm not sure what your point is. We are living in 2013 not 1989.

Yes, the client can't do as much high level optimization, and that's a good thing. That kind of optimization belongs be at the library level, not at the client level (and certainly not duplicated several times for every different browser vendor each with a slightly different and inconsistent implementation).

I agree that markup will be transmitted in 100 years, and I'm pretty sure so does Alan Kay. He, like I do, simply believes that the building blocks should be inverted. The thing that interprets the markup doesn't belong hard coded in the client. The client should simply be universal (i.e. Turing complete) and the thing that interprets and renders the markup should be built on top of that.

I agree that in 100 years we can still separate text into paragraphs and make things bold, but there are plenty of things that let you do that which are not HTML, and neither is the main point of HTML separating text into paragraphs and making things bold (certainly not in 2013). So this is no reason why HTML will exist in 100 years.

One quote is, "this is what happens when you let physicists play with computers" -- but that's not all. I am paraphrasing "idiot", but he certainly heaps scorn on them for not understanding something obvious and fundamental, when he is the one who doesn't understand something obvious and fundamental.