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Web Applications and Web Documents

a mental model for doing stuff on the internet

2024-09-10

A mental model that I have been using a lot lately distinguishes between two types of content: web applications and web documents.

Web applicationsā€”like other kinds of applicationsā€”require an operating system to run them. In this case that OS is the web browser. Anything that I explicitly need to fire up firefox forā€”banking, shopping, etcā€”is a web application. (Often this is synonymous with anything that makes heavy use of javascript.)

Web documents on the other hand are the purview of bloggers, wikis, threads, etc. They are served over gopher, gemini, and http/s. I consume the majority of this content via an rss feed reader. Or if Iā€™m looking for a quick answer to a question, Iā€™ll hit duckduckgo in w3m or lynx and skim a stackoverflow page or reddit thread.

This has provided me a vocabulary similar to ā€œsmall webā€ vs ā€œlarge web,ā€ but which feels both more natural and more useful to me. I prefer to read web documents via text browsers and other CLI/TUI tools. And when I need to do some kind of web application work, thatā€™s when I tell myself I need to leave the land of text and documents, and go boot up my webOS.