Today WeChat (China's dominant messaging super-app) took over my feed again with Mini Programs, the "App Accounts" people had been whispering about.
This post isn't about how Mini Programs work, and I won't guess at them (I know them a little too well...),
and it isn't about what they'll do to China's internet (the product managers will get to that...).
Let's talk about the Web. The Web.
The word "Web" is short for "the Web," which is short for "the World Wide Web."
Like "H5" (a common and sloppy Chinese shorthand for HTML5), it's an abbreviation of an abbreviation, and after enough shortening nobody remembers what it stood for.
It's not only ordinary people in China who can't tell the World Wide Web from the Internet. Ordinary Americans can't tell "Web" from "Internet" either.
Plenty of people in the industry who never looked closer aren't much better, and for years Chinese tech writing has translated "Web" into a mess.
Nobody writing in Chinese explains this more clearly, or cares about it more, than @不鳥萬如一 (a well-known Chinese blogger and podcaster).
In a post on his Zhihu column, for example, he wrote:
The Chinese-speaking world has always mixed up the Internet and the World Wide Web. The "open spirit of the Internet" that people keep talking about is really the open spirit of the Web, and the Web's openness comes down to one thing: any article on the Web can link to any other article by its URL. If I want to mention UbuWeb in my article, I just put its URL, ubu.com, on the word UbuWeb. You may think that goes without saying, but in a WeChat Official Account article you can't do it. You can only link to things inside WeChat.
So Ruyi deleted WeChat (Goodbye WeChat) and also wrote WeChat, a de facto LAN. I've been getting more and more hardcore about the open web, and I agree with him.
What Ruyi cares about most is probably writing. What I care about more is apps: web apps.
A web app is the next step in the Web's evolution, from text (hypertext) to media (hypermedia) to software. A strict translation would be "an application built on the World Wide Web," like YouTube, Twitter, Medium or GitHub in your browser. They can still link to each other by URL, they follow open web standards, and you can use them on almost any platform that has a browser. So web apps are open too.
If you've heard of Google's Progressive Web Apps, the name really means Progressive Open Web Apps. That was just too long.
"Open" should already be part of what "Web" means.
(This post isn't a pitch for PWA, but if you're curious, here's my piece on it: The Next-Gen Web Application Model: Progressive Web App)
If hybrid apps were the first compromise web idealism made, React Native shook some people's faith for real. Then came Weex (Alibaba's cross-platform framework, much like React Native), and then, as you've probably guessed, WeChat.
"Build for native platforms the web way" keeps getting more popular. Web front-end developers are supposed to be the winners here, and I'm not sure I should be happy about it.
I'm not saying these are "the wrong technical direction." Taken practically they're great, and they really do solve problems.
But however much they look like the Web, they are not part of the open web.
RN and Weex don't even have URLs (and don't bring up Universal Links or App Links; a URL is not a URI).
And WeChat has been a closed ecosystem ever since its JS-SDK.
The trend started at Facebook, but China is where it's more likely to run wild.
The English-speaking world has plenty of people who are sensitive, even hardcore, about this. Jeremy Keith, who wrote Regressive Web Apps, got into a fight with Alex, who leads Chrome's web platform work, over PWAs not treating URLs well enough. Alex got worked up enough to say:
so, your choices are to think that I have a secret plan to kill URLs, or conclude I'm still Team Web.
Keep in mind that Alex pushed Chrome into PWAs in the first place because he couldn't stand what hybrid apps were doing to the open web.
If Twitter or Facebook worked like WeChat and wouldn't even let you link freely, people would probably leave, and write angry "Goodbye Twitter/FB" posts the way Ruyi did.
In China, meanwhile, you hear every day about "XX powering the HTML5 ecosystem," and hardly anyone notices that these "HTML5 ecosystems" usually run against the Web's. The two couldn't be further apart.
I'm starting to ramble.
In a Chinese-speaking world where "HTML5" and "Web" get misused this badly, I don't know how to raise the alarm anymore.
All I know is that once the Web can only survive as a "markup language" for native, the Web is gone.
And once everyone ignores web standards and builds their own stack, the Web's famous cross-platform reach is gone too.
I've written this before, and Rahul, who leads product for Chrome, said it at I/O too:
Discoverability, linkability, low friction and broad reach aren't the heart of the Web. The heart of the Web is openness and decentralization. That was the whole idea of the World Wide Web, and every one of those other qualities depends on it.
Faith in the open web has brought the browser vendors back together, and they're asking you:
Hey, can we make the web great again?
AI-translated from the original