The web will always win
There's a curious genius in the simplicity of Tim Berners-Lee's architecture of the World Wide Web.
Since the web began, there have been companies that have broken the way the web works to serve their purposes. Broadvision broke the persistence of the URL, by making URLs session-specific. Flash broke addressability of content and ubiquity of access. URL shorteners have made the URL fragile and unexpected, riding on the back of Twitter.
The web has so few moving parts that breaking the behavior of its addressing system, "view source" content model, or simple protocol results in something that just isn't the web any more.
I believe that over time, the models of use that oppose the principles of the web will die off. Broadvision's approach has largely disappeared. Flash is finding more specific uses, and is generally understood not to be an appropriate tool to create a whole web site in. It's my hope that improved user interfaces will eventually render URL shortening a thing of the past.
I am wondering which other methods of use that operate against the web have died or should die? REST vs RPC is perhaps an obvious one for developers, though I'm unsure the battle is quite won. The rise of rich Javascript application frameworks could also lead us away once more from the URL as a truly universal locator, but I think the value of a single address for a document will maintain its utility throughout. Will I be wrong this time? Is my faith misplaced?
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