The Web Is for Everyone, Not Only for Humans

03 Jun 2025 - tsp
Last update 03 Jun 2025
Reading time 11 mins

Introduction

The web, in its deepest essence, was never meant to be a walled garden for polished front-ends and curated human eyeballs alone. It was conceived as a medium for the free, unbounded exchange of information - built on principles of openness, universality, and machine-agnostic communication. This vision, bold and deceptively simple, rested upon foundational technologies like HTTP and HTML that embody the idea that the web is not just a stage for visual design but a platform for meaning - interpretable and usable by both humans and machines alike.

HTTP and Stateless Openness

At the heart of the web lies HTTP, the stateless protocol that treats each request as independent, thereby promoting flexibility and resilience. It does not assume persistent sessions, nor does it demand identity or intent. HTTP is deliberately kept simple and agnostic of the payload type, allowing anything from HTML and images to JSON and binary data to be transferred without prejudice. Despite its simplicity, it supports powerful mechanisms like content negotiation, enabling servers to respond with different formats or languages based on client preferences. Through headers such as Vary, it offers a way to transparently manage different content representations while still keeping client implementations lightweight.

In addition to safe, idempotent methods like GET and HEAD, HTTP also includes request types that are designed to trigger actions and have side effects - such as POST, PUT, and DELETE. These methods allow clients to submit data, create or replace resources, or remove them entirely. Crucially, these operations can be initiated just as easily from a form in a web browser as from a command-line tool, a script, or a programmatic agent. This universality enables automation and integration in a way that is elegant and predictable. In contrast to modern trends that obscure functionality behind layers of JavaScript, the transparency and directness of standard HTTP methods promote reuse and innovation. When we allow these simple mechanisms to remain visible and accessible, we make life easier not only for developers and systems but for anyone who wants to build upon what others have shared - often in ways the original designers never imagined.

This statelessness and flexibility allow for diverse consumers: a browser fetching an article, a script checking weather updates, or an AI assembling a dataset for research. No distinction is made, and that is its power. It does not matter who or what you are - if you speak HTTP, you are welcome to partake in the conversation.

HTML as a Semantic Language

Likewise, HTML was never meant to be a blueprint for design in the way many modern developers misuse it. Its structure was always semantic at its core. A heading is a heading, not merely a bold and enlarged text. A list is a list, not just indented paragraphs. This design choice was deliberate: by conveying the meaning rather than the look, HTML allows content to be interpreted, transformed, or repurposed in infinite ways. A screen reader can navigate it just as easily as a search engine crawler or a machine-learning model extracting structured knowledge. Semantic clarity is not a luxury - it is the universal language that enables the web to be understood beyond its appearance.

To further support this semantic intent, modern web developers often include structured data formats such as Schema.org annotations, OpenGraph metadata, and RDFa (Resource Description Framework in Attributes). These markup strategies embed machine-readable meaning directly into HTML, allowing crawlers, AI systems, and other tools to better understand and contextualize the content. Whether it’s identifying a product, pinpointing an article’s author, or describing a geographic location, these metadata formats transform documents into rich information sources.

However, even this manually added metadata has its limits. Not all content is consistently annotated, and much of the web remains structurally ambiguous. Fortunately, recent advances in transformer-based neural architectures have enabled systems to extract meaning directly from unstructured content. Today, large language models can process entire articles to generate knowledge graphs, extract structured facts, or summarize the essence of a document. These models unlock a deeper level of comprehension and allow machines to participate meaningfully in the web’s knowledge ecosystem - even when explicit markup is absent.

The Early Web Ethos: Reuse and Mashups

And this is what truly made the early web so revolutionary: its content was not trapped in proprietary formats, hidden in unreadable scripts, or locked behind tightly controlled access schemes. Instead, it was linked, indexable, remixable. You could fetch a page, parse it, extract data, connect it with something else, and publish your own interpretation - without seeking permission, without a license, without being part of a closed ecosystem. This is not abuse. This is not theft. This is exactly what the web was meant to do.

For instance, imagine a simple web service that publishes real-time or semi-real-time data, such as local air quality readings or weather observations. Someone halfway across the world might use that data not only to display it but to derive entirely new insights - like calculating gradients of gas dispersion, identifying microclimate trends, or detecting anomalies in environmental patterns. Another party might archive that data to build a time series, enabling historical comparisons even though the original publisher made no effort to store old values. These are not edge cases or misuses; they are core demonstrations of the web’s open potential - of letting content flow, recombine, and evolve through creative reuse. The original author doesn’t need to predict these applications for them to be meaningful. The web makes them possible.

Modern search technologies no longer require a central registry or authority to list all such data sources. With AI-based search agents and distributed crawling techniques, systems can autonomously locate new data sources as soon as they are exposed to the visible web. If these datasets are published using annotated HTML or simple JSON structures, converters and analyzers can be generated rapidly - in some cases even fully automatically - allowing meaningful information to be extracted with minimal human involvement.

This kind of infrastructure empowers individuals to do what once required large editorial or research teams. For example, a single person can now scrape a wide range of news websites to locate articles, videos, and commentaries on a given topic. Using large language models, they can aggregate and compare how different publishers and communities frame the same subject, identify the emergence and propagation of narratives, and gain a nuanced overview of global discourse - all without the backing of an institution. This is simple in principle, yet increasingly hindered in practice by bot-blocking scripts, labyrinthine cookie banners, and intentionally obfuscated interfaces.

This open potential becomes stifled when data is hidden behind registration walls, scattered across complicated APIs, or requires elaborate login procedures. In such cases, even the simplest extraction effort demands a coordinated team rather than a curious individual. Worse still, if the structure of the presentation changes without maintaining stable annotations or APIs, any integration becomes brittle and costly to maintain. By contrast, when information is openly accessible, semantically structured, and predictable in its representation, even a single individual can build powerful tools that enhance collective knowledge without friction.

Yet today, the dominant narratives seem to have shifted. The rise of monetization-centric platforms, ad-driven revenue models, and copyright maximalism has brought with it a sense of territoriality. Content creators, companies, and platforms often recoil at the idea of their data being scraped, indexed, analyzed, or repurposed. Bots are banned. Metadata is obfuscated. Access is gated. This shift is further accelerated by a combination of political actors seeking tighter control over the flow of information - often under the guise of fighting hate speech or misinformation - and a small number of dominant tech companies attempting to entrench their monopolies. In both cases, the result is the same: a restricted, fragmented web where the natural circulation of knowledge is obstructed by opaque rules, proprietary constraints, or self-serving interests. The flow of information is obstructed in the name of ownership. But in doing so, we forget that the web was designed for reuse. The very act of interlinking - from a hyperlink on a blog post to a mashup that pulls in data from five different APIs - is what gives the web its soul and power. Restricting this is like sealing off tributaries of a river and wondering why the ecosystem downstream withers. It’s not just a matter of ideology - it drains creative and technological energy, placing needless obstacles in the way of those who try to build on existing knowledge. And then, with irony, we wonder aloud why innovation seems to be slowing down, or why it takes more resources and people to accomplish what once needed only a browser, a script, and some curiosity.

Responsible Use, Not Restriction

Yes, there are caveats. One must not flood servers with millions of thoughtless requests, someone still has to pay to operate the machines - they are not purely virtual. One must not abuse infrastructure or violate social contracts by disguising spam as contribution. But these are abuses of bandwidth and attention - not of principle. Fetching, analyzing, repurposing, and presenting information in new, emergent ways - whether by a student, an AI, a startup, or a global company - is not abuse. It is the web, functioning as designed.

And importantly, the internet has always known how to deal with abuse - without requiring sweeping laws or centralized controls. From the early days of Usenet, users could employ killfiles to ignore disruptive participants. Internet service providers routinely cut off peers that propagate invalid BGP announcements or block customers whose machines are compromised and spreading worms. These are decentralized, practical responses enforced across borders and institutions, working effectively through shared understanding and cooperation. The mechanisms to defend against misuse exist, and they work - so long as the intent is to foster openness, not control.

Unfortunately, politics has increasingly caught up with the web, often in the least constructive ways. Rather than supporting the internet’s foundational principles, most regulatory efforts aim to restrict openness, enforce centralized control, and establish mandatory gatekeeping mechanisms that are fundamentally at odds with the way the web was built to function. These laws are frequently drafted without understanding or regard for the technological reality they impact, resulting in frameworks that are not only ineffective but actively harmful - undermining interoperability, chilling innovation, and fragmenting the global web into territories of artificial compliance.

The Value of Non-Human Participants

Consider the value that non-human agents have already added. Search engines index the world and help billions navigate it. Accessibility tools make pages usable for those who cannot see or hear. Academic crawlers compile open-access datasets to democratize science. Machine learning models trained on web corpora push the boundaries of translation, summarization, and even creativity. Tools that gather and analyze product reviews from thousands of retailers allow consumers to make more informed decisions. Aggregators of scientific articles or preprints enable researchers to track developments across disciplines they could never follow manually. Even in crisis scenarios, bots that scan official sites and news outlets for emergency updates or resource availability have saved lives. All of this emerges from the simple premise that information - once published - is part of a greater ecosystem of reuse.

Conclusion: Preserving the Web’s Spirit

To shut this down in fear of losing control is to betray the original ethos of the web. Instead, we should strive to publish better. Use semantic HTML. Structure metadata cleanly. Respect robots.txt where needed - but not out of fear, out of consideration. Build APIs not to silo information, but to share it responsibly. Recognize that every crawler, every aggregator, every synthesizer of knowledge is part of a collective intelligence.

Because the web is not for screens alone. It is not for ad impressions alone. And it is not for humans alone.

The web is for everyone - including the scripts, the tools, the minds, and the models that take what we’ve built and imagine something new.

Further reading

This article is tagged:

Data protection policy

Dipl.-Ing. Thomas Spielauer, Wien (webcomplains389t48957@tspi.at)

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