The web, originally built to enable a simple transaction between two parties-a client fetching a document from a single host server-would be broken open by new standards that could be used to repackage and redistribute entire websites through a variety of channels. One theory was that the web was about to be revolutionized by syndication. In the late 1990s, in the go-go years between Netscape’s IPO and the Dot-com crash, everyone could see that the web was going to be an even bigger deal than it already was, even if they didn’t know exactly how it was going to get there. The second is a story about how a collaborative effort to improve a popular standard devolved into one of the most contentious forks in the history of open-source software development. The first is a story about a broad vision for the web’s future that never quite came to fruition. The story of how this happened is really two stories.
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