You want a website, because "want is logically prior to need" (Dark Ecology. Timothy Morton.), and we all, or most of us, are fairly sure that "the terror of value" depends on a "shared understanding" (Mike Amundsen) that grounds trust: what we monitor, what we observe, what we learn, how we grow with the art of business. Indeed, Jack, once CEO of a website, himself admitted: "apps have distracted me from the power of the web." Ah, but was it (just) apps and a market surface?
Oh, "graceful degradation"? "Progressive enhancement"? "Mobile-first"? "Design-first"? "API-first?" "TDD"? "domain-driven design" (or should these be capitalized D's)? IoT"? "Captioning?" "Localization"? "BIPS"? "Smart" contracts, "smart" that? "handshake wallets"? "the ecological impact of hash-cracking"? Is the browser war still on? "timbl invented what?!" "rms hates javascript!?" How ever does one decide what to do in how things are going in the web of things, or the "most hostile development environment imaginable" (Douglas Crockford, programmer)?
What other way would you define a "dark age" if not that a majority of our semantic web of belief is inaccessible (even the apps too!), with vendors locking-out widely available talent?
Let's be frank, Andy Clarke-style: web design was and is a mistake. The very "stuff happening" between "you" and "I", client and creator, is grounded in metaphor: "all memories are screen memories"[3], and the screen is nothing like paper, I assure you. But you need to transact — and transform your business, not (just) let somebody else mind it. Indeed, "transformative" is not (just) another buzzword. And all education is violence[1]. You're not paying "me," one who "leverages" an open source and/or free software movement, just to hit the market surface when 90% of the web is inaccessible. Mobile website speeds have not increased in 10 years yet our ISPs have improved "our" download and latency performances, you ask? As all the major developer teams in their Major Company Developer Developer Developer Developer Shops have their own Way, as any "tech recruiter" is only authorized to say? (career of 15 years going strong!, but what do I know?)
(We see you Comcast, SAP, VMWare, Dun & Bradstreet, Microsoft selling personally identifiable data to ICE, advertising "REST APIs", not "RESTful"; i.e., "transformative", and hey, please articulate why MUST hypermedia control not be used in GraphQL again, for "conveyor-tube" messaging "data APIs"?)
A regular tragedy of the commons, if you ask me. And who really asks anything about anything anymore, all the Major Companies giving no feedback due to their security policies — lacking ODRL? GDPR? Even jazz was "conceived to be about something"! They're all doing the "best for the best customers with the best tools at the best times in the best SDLCs"? But then, accessibility is security and privacy; elsewhere: almost none of it is built ("buidl'd"?) "on" "transformative APIs"[6]; that means no sandwiches[15] for you! You're aware of who Jeff Bezos is, and how his API Mandate has constrained your business "validation" logic's capabilities, hindered interrelations among and between others in the web and its search engine results pages and your peers, obscured and obfuscated the attributes, semantics and meaning-making potential of your business -- to the point of seeming to house it in a digital time capsule whereof you set it and "forget it". Why should "designers" be giving humans static web junk like debris in space, lacking any possibility of semiotic autopoiesis? Ah, we're all just slingin' "clever" poetic licenses in this wild, wild web, is it? How would you honestly know, if not but for true belief and the right to ask about "the terror of value"[2]?
You're paying me because you want to show good faith and good will here on earth. We're not going to dance about secularization or its opposite.
You're not going to lecture me about your cultural religions nor political ableisms as a means to smuggle in Business Requirements you didn't think of until last minute. You're not going to tell me anything I say is "simply unfair." You're not going to pay me (just) to solve "your" "problem", if for no other reason than that you know you need someone other than yourself to even articulate your problem. And you know I've been called not nothing but other than "articulate". You're not suspicious of "grifts" or scams, for no other reason than what we know about how the empire of law codes capital for everything we perceive in virtual stores and otherwise[15], from cans of soup to NFTs to our personas as products. You're not feeling intimidated, as you have no idea what it is like to make a living in a web that is 90% inaccessible, a web where Roy Fielding's research has been jacked. No, someone else being informed in historical and political facts of the distribution of ownership is not "intimidating" you. You probably don't even have the language to communicate what or how you feel, and you know this society show has propped itself up on finding innocent victims to cry about, fancifully associating freedom feelings with whatever or whomever it needs to invent to "get the job done". Well, now we know I am vetted by constituents of the W3C. You acknowledge standards and their technologies all around you: so now why are you coming just to kick me in the history with a "time to market" mantra? We're people of and for good will as much as we are from good faiths, many of them. And now you know that "unconscious price deranges social value"[3].
It's not (just) about code. You should be worried if your engineer or developer, web or full-stuck, cannot reason about complex things nor articulate without code in view, as if good programming is not about design-first, data structures, and relationships, for "beauty is the givenness of data."[4]
And if you don't care if your engineers can articulate the philosophy of the web[5]? And you expect them to secure your business logic?
Do you really want a website, if "want is logically prior to need"? Or if trust is logically prior to desire?
And certainly I've said a bit here. "You" and "I" might even think
this document's style has broken with the original stylistic constraints
laid out by Clarke, in his rejection of legalese. You may not think
the neoclassical, Sisyphean economy's formula[11], P=R+W+I, has anything
to do with your bottom-line —
Because it's all (just) math, right? Software is eating the world[7], ya say?
Let's not go about misdocumenting as if concern for "everyday racial coding"[8] and "pattern discrimination"[9] are just as much valid concerns, just as valuable, as a game theory no one wishes to admit bit the dust long ago[10]. To say the least, it's not all (just) about game theory, a world as a hare-hunt.
Because we're playfully serious, when we must be; maybe even reasonable in our goals, and seriously playful when we can, "you" and "I" should hope.
Tell us again, like when we saw the earth floating in space for the first time[13], what did we take away when Aaron Swartz impressively took a stand for the fragility of knowledge, showing us the depth of our work to be done?
[1] Critique of Economic Reason. Andre Gorz.
[2] The Empire of Value. Andre Orlean.
[3] Abstract Market Theory. John Roffe.
[4] Contingent Computation. Beatrice M. Fazi.
[5] One serious but aging question: "Isn’t there a need for cacheing the results of the
various reasoners in a FOL form?"
[6] "When we work on projects with more and more services involved the big
revelation was the people who build HTTP and use Hypermedia know what they're
talking about — and we should listen to them." (James Gregory, Lead Consultant
at ThoughtWorks)
[7] "There Is No Software". F. Kittler.
[8] Race After Technology. Ruha Benjamin.
[9] Pattern Discrimination. Clemens Apprich, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Florian
Cramer, and Hito Steyerl.
[10] Against Game Theory. Gale M. Lucas, Mathew D. McCubbins, and Mark Turner.
[11] "The Sisyphean Economy". Stephen I. Ternyik.
[12] The Code of Capital. Katharina Pistor. (Also review The Legal Theory of Finance.)
[13] Outer Space, Expansive Sustainable Development, and the Future of the Environmental Humanities. Brad Tabas.
[14] Simply put: you should be able to View Source on a webpage (and even in
native apps, technically, if they would be a bit more open about all this,
since most of them are built using HTTP and other web technologies offered by
the W3C, anyway), then *see* the "layered" composition of an API response:
typically as it should be minimally composed of actions (capabilities), (link
or "relating") relations, attributes or "properties" (as Amundsen notes; and
again, here, they are modal, contextual, etc., sometimes!), presentational
modalities of and for hypermedia control (think accessibility; see above!), and
some sense of *whose time it is* — maybe think of OWL-Time prefixing the
standard link relations' strings in the <link> tags viewable in the HTML
source code; or W3C mementos or W3C timegates, even! There is quite a bit to
all this, and we haven't even mentioned the demands of cryptosystems, semantic
hashing for speedy lookups, availability vs consistency, metastability and
"meta APIs"!