On the Nature of Hypertext

The original web was a thing of beauty. It was documents, linked together. You could view source on any page and learn how it worked. There was no build step, no bundler, no framework. Just HTML.

Tim Berners-Lee imagined a web of interconnected knowledge. A place where any document could reference any other document, where the sum of human understanding could be woven together through simple blue underlined links.

"The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect — to help people work together — and not as a technical toy." — Tim Berners-Lee

Somewhere along the way, we decided that wasn't enough. We needed interactivity, state management, virtual DOMs, hydration strategies. We built entire ecosystems of tooling to avoid writing HTML.

What We Lost

The simplicity of the early web wasn't a limitation — it was a feature. A page that loads instantly, works on every device, and can be understood by reading its source code is not primitive. It is elegant.

Consider the humble <a> tag. It is perhaps the most powerful element in all of computing. With a single tag, you can link to any resource, anywhere in the world. No API key required. No authentication. No CORS headers. Just a URL.

The Path Forward

I'm not suggesting we abandon modern tooling. But I am suggesting we remember why we build for the web. The web's superpower has always been its openness, its linkability, its view-source ethos.

Every time we reach for a framework, we should ask: could this be a document instead?

The answer is more often than you'd think.