This paper reframes work on Webstrates in terms of a critique of today’s ubiquitous software model, which separates apps from documents and renders the former opaque and immutable. Apps are monolithic and can’t be generally recombined or reprogrammed by users, except through limited, ad-hoc channels. The authors suggest we should revive the classical aspirations of Hypermedia, which unify program and document into a negotiable medium:
- Documents are built out of a shared medium with rich inter- connections to both manage and manipulate documents;
- Links can be used to join, navigate, group, compare, tran-
sclude and annotate documents.- Systems should support the different roles and (information)
needs of collaborators;- Systems should not distinguish between authorship and con-
sumption of media;- Remixing existing material is a common task;
- To manage document volatility, systems should employ ubiq-
uitous versioning.