A Man Who Keeps Predicting the Web's Death (tedium.co)

Jeffrey Zeldman revisits a recurring industry claim — “the Web is dead” — prompted by renewed chatter after OpenAI’s new browser, Atlas. Zeldman focuses on George Colony, Forrester’s founder, who has been declaring the Web obsolete since 1995: first because it was “not interactive” (mistaking Java for the eventual client-side revolution), then proposing XInternet/XML-era middleware, predicting an app/edge takeover in the 2010s, and more recently arguing that AI will “organize” the chaotic Web. The piece argues these proclamations repeatedly underestimated the Web’s ability to absorb new layers (client-side scripting, Web 2.0, cloud services) rather than being supplanted. For AI/ML practitioners the story is a useful corrective and a roadmap. Atlas and LLM-driven agents can reshape discovery and present curated answers, but they are more likely to augment — not annihilate — the Web: success depends on structured data, machine-readable APIs, semantic metadata, provenance and content attribution, and agent-friendly interfaces. Technically, that means investing in standards, richer metadata (schema.org, JSON-LD), reliable APIs, and hybrid cloud/edge architectures so models can fetch, verify, and interact with live sources. The past thirty years show the Web evolves; AI will change how we navigate and index it, but interoperability and provenance will determine whether AI organizes the Web or merely overlays it.