After 25 years we still don’t know what the web is, what it could be

18 April 2025

Here’s some web history trivia for you: it’s been twenty-five years since A Dao of Web Design was published at A List Apart (ALA). Written by Australian product developer, and Web Directions co-founder John Allsopp, the article explored how the web, still seen then as an online variation of print, could find its own path, and evolve into something entirely different.

Reflecting on his ALA article earlier this week, John made the following comment:

The Web is its own thing — but we’ve still yet to really discover what that is. Don’t ask me, I don’t know what that is either. But a quarter of a century on I’m still just as interested in discovering what that is.

I think what we can say now though, is the web is no longer a child of print.

For additional historical trivia, see this article I wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald/The Age, about John and Westciv, a company he established with Maxine Sherrin. Westciv developed tools to assist web designers create compliant CSS, and web pages.

That was twenty-years ago — yes, mind blown — and was one of several articles I wrote for print publications, before becoming more focused on writing online. And while talking of ALA, it sadly appears only to be publishing sporadically nowadays.