Copyright © 2009 What The Hell? Security
Not sure about you, but I’m heartened by the fact that phishing and drive-by malware are working so well today. It means the Web is in tip-top shape.
Think about it. A Web that doesn’t display persuasive content, or execute retrieved code, would be irrelevant to commerce. It would be reduced to “a place [...] for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards” to quote Tim Berners-Lee back in 1989, six years before Web commerce commenced.
Tim did a kick-ass job, and anybody who criticizes him for creating a non-secure Web is at best not a Web historian and at worst an ingrate. Not many people get it, but the Web wasn’t supposed to be secure. Security was out of scope. A simplifying assumption. And it’s a damn good thing, otherwise you’d be dialed into Prodigy right now reading something far less riveting than this. (If you don’t know what Prodigy is, well was, consider my point proven.) There’s a reason the Web sports two billion pages and eighty billion links: it does what it was designed to do. Painting barns it leaves to others.
Hypertext is 55 years old, HTML is 20. Rounding up a Hollywood decade, hypertext is Harrison Ford to Shia LaBeuf’s HTML. No offense Shia, you’re good, but Han Solo was a friend of mine, and you’re no Han Solo.
By the way, if you see HTML tell him I still haven’t received his homework. Y’know, that two billion page report on why we should put him in charge of a trillion dollar marketplace.
