[Discuss] A Web Server is No Longer a Web Server

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On 10/24/25 5:01 PM, Rich Pieri wrote:
> Took me a couple of re-reads to figure they mean the complexity is
> what's unnecessary for serving static content. Ambiguous wording, and
> maybe misstating what Heroku does or has become?

Sorry I was unclear.

They are moving from paying money to have Heroku generate pages on the 
fly, to static pages that are free to host wherever they are parking 
them. And, more secure, etc.

So they no longer need Heroku. Which, to the writer of the thing I read, 
translated into they no longer need a web server.

I was being snarky about how the original thing that web servers used to 
do (serve static web pages), has become so trivial and obscure that the 
software needed to serve them appears to vanish.


A system designed for hypertext has turned out to be the architecture 
for so much of modern life, but it wasn't designed for that. And, if one 
were to design something for user interfaces over a large network, 
hypertext would have been a strange way to go about it. It has turned 
into an OS, kind of.

I do grant that, if one were to design something for the task, if one 
were to build something like a better version of X11, the result would 
probably be a way to build distinct programs. But because of the 
hypertext origins of the web we the result is much more integrated, it 
naturally wants to be a single thing, and there are advantages to that. 
But there are disadvantages, too. Building a secure web site (e.g., for 
a bank) is hard. And the integrated nature means URLs can show up in so 
many places, including places that haven't yet been invented, making 
phishing a serious ongoing problem that it would not have been without 
the hypertext origins of the web.

-kb