Alan Kay on "Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?"

Alan Kay argues that browsers should have become far more capable than document viewers, not remained focused on reproducing static media such as text, images, and recordings. He sees the web’s early reliance on simple formats and limited links as a foundational mistake that later hardened into lock-in. Instead, web content should support the full range of interactive computer media, including both reading and authoring. HyperCard offered a model for an approachable, scriptable experience in which readers could also create. Beneath that experience, however, browsers should have worked like operating systems: safely running independent, encapsulated programs from the network, rather than providing a fixed set of features for unencapsulated content. Kay sees the challenge as balancing consistent, usable interface conventions with freedom for new kinds of content and functionality.

He connects this design to Unix’s small, protective kernel, which leaves most services replaceable, and argues that the web has become a poorly planned operating system without adequate foresight or user-oriented tools. A lesson from early printing systems is to send programs rather than rigid data structures when requirements are unpredictable: PostScript allowed documents to describe their own rendering while keeping printers independent of the software that created them. In response to a discussion of Sun’s Network Extensible Window System (NeWS), Kay praises its use of PostScript imaging but says it lacked a sufficiently high-level, comprehensive programming environment. He suggests that NeWS, like the web, fell short of its potential despite promising ideas.