I think the internet has a furniture problem.
Every website now arrives already knowing where the sofa goes.
Navbar at the top. Large sentence. Smaller sentence explaining the large sentence. Three cards. Something tasteful moving slowly in the background.
Scroll.
More cards.
Footer.
This is fine.
That’s the annoying part.
None of this is particularly bad. Most of it is useful. I have designed these pages. I will design them again. Somewhere there is probably a Figma file with my name on it containing three beautifully aligned cards.
But I keep wondering when the browser became this certain about itself.
Ted Nelson was imagining hypertext before we had really figured out what personal computers were for. His ideas were messy, enormous, occasionally impossible — which is partly why I like them.
Information was allowed to behave strangely.
It could have history. Relationships. More than one place it belonged.
Meanwhile I have 47 tabs open because apparently this is how civilization chose to implement associative knowledge.
Excellent.
There is one website I remember from before I understood what websites were.
My cousin gave it to me as a present.
atlikarincam.com.
I was probably five or six, using one of those enormous HP desktops that took up half the desk.
There was a carousel.
It’s still there.
And, slightly annoyingly, so is the carousel in almost everything I make.
I don’t think I noticed the connection until much later.
Maybe that’s why I never really understood websites as pages.
They were places first.
The early personal web was often ugly.
I’m not asking for that back.
But it had something we lost when we got good at this.
Nobody knew what a website was supposed to be yet.
So it could be a diary.
Or a maze.
Or a shrine to one extremely specific interest.
Or a page that made absolutely no sense unless you knew the person who made it.
I think about this whenever I make something like Mind Museum or Listening Pond and immediately feel the urge to give it a sensible category.
A blog.
An archive.
A player.
The category helps.
Then, very quietly, it starts designing the thing for me.
And I don’t actually want the web to become uglier again.
I want it to become less certain.
The browser can connect, remember, react, generate, rearrange, play, hide, reveal.
It can behave like almost anything.
And we keep giving it a hero section.
Which feels increasingly like owning a time machine and using it to check the weather.