Robin Rendle — Designer and writer.

This is a visual essay about the Web, And what it could be, inspired in part by HyperCard and what it was.

For those who have never heard of HyperCard it was a way of developing software far ahead of its time. It shipped with every Mac from 1987 onwards for many years.

While I had studied computer science, and learned to program even before that it, was HyperCard that fuelled a passion for building things with software. A passion I have to this day (a passion I took a long time to properly understand–it’s the making of things that excite me–it did when I was 14 and It does now.

It may sound incongruous, after 30+ years of existence, and 20+ years of mainstream dominance, that websites (is that what we should even call them?) “can and should aspire to be so much more than they are today”.

But I think, like I wrote nearly 25 years ago, the “web [needs to] outgrow its origins in the printed page. Not to abandon so much wisdom and experience, but to also chart its own course, where appropriate.”

Ironically we also need to outgrow the idea that the Web as an app platform. an idea that largely emerged after I wrote that. As Scott Jenson put it well over a decade ago now

Native apps are a remnant of the Jurassic period of computer history, a local maximum that is holding us back. The combination of a discovery service and just-in-time interaction is a powerful interaction model that native apps can’t begin to offer.

“Websites can and should aspire to be so much more than they are today”

It’s our opportunity to discover what that can be.