The birth of our system for describing web content

The future of the web is firmly moving in the opposite direction of DC values around transparent approaches for information discovery. Large commercial tech platforms work hard to keep users in their walled gardens by utilising in-app black-box algorithms rather than linking out to external locations. Generative AI tools are incentivised to replace exploration of the open web, and almost none of the current text-based generative AI tools cite their sources.

These changes mark what is often described as the end of the open web, where corporations centralise services and invisibly control what you see when you try to find something, with business models that are ever more incentivised to move away from interoperable web standards. The historical period of the open web, which arguably began with Mosaic 30 years ago, is already receding, and perhaps has already ended; the story of DC bookmarks the historical moment of when this era was new, and when the web was a source of almost pure optimism.

The year ‘1995 was an amazing time, just between two worlds,’ Caplan remembers. ‘There was a strong sense that a new information environment was emerging, something like a new dawn,’ Dempsey adds. That environment is now gone, with DC tags acting as a still-functional artefact. As one DC participant told me: ‘That environment, which was just emerging, has disappeared, along with that sense of a movement combined with a standard – what we’re left with is the standard.’