What if the Web was not hypertext?

Translated from ¿Y si la web no fuera hipertexto?

Starting Point

The state of education and general culture regarding the internet and the World Wide Web is, to say the least, worrying. The cloud, web applications, social networks, and other byproducts of the latest evolutions of the Web (with the recent incorporation of generative AI services) form an ecosystem that people without a technical background rarely escape. Users are trained in specific interfaces to use specific products, and there are very few software tools outside this limited set that users are willing to learn. When your judgment is limited to user-level knowledge, the reasoning is understandable: why learn an alternative if I already know how to use something and it’s easier? This is the main reason why Linux and much Free Software have failed to achieve broader adoption. This is the problem we continue to face when offering free alternatives: a barrier to entry created by user-experience design and an ecosystem hostile to alternative technologies.

However, there is one exception to this rule: a type of software that is not used as a means to an external task, but as an end in itself—video games. These are not tools used with the expectation of producing results; they are run for playful, aesthetic, or purely curious interest. For this reason, they are a perfect gateway for educating the population, just as they have also been used for manipulation. Not only because the gamified content format predisposes users to absorb it, but because the game itself belongs to the very medium one wants to teach about. There is no better way to explore the possibilities and risks of a computer than from within one.

Development of dw3nd3

With this framework, the history of dw3nd3 becomes easier to understand. Initially, it was born as a lightning project after discovering twtxt. I have long been interested in web decentralization, and it was twtxt that helped me rediscover the possibility of connecting decentralized content through protocols implemented in local clients. I had known about RSS for a long time, and of course HTML; but I had forgotten the fundamental principle of the web, because every time I considered writing my own browser, I realized it was an almost unmanageable task. An RSS reader would be simpler, but it would still require a complex XML parser. By contrast, I could implement a twtxt browser in a matter of hours. After successfully doing so and rediscovering the potential of protocols based on simple rules and grammars, the question arose: couldn’t a video game be created using the same underlying idea?

It was at this point that the story of dw3nd3 truly began. When thinking about a video game that navigates web content, it made sense to think of that game as a browser. I needed a simple format—easy to implement, understand, and replicate. I drew inspiration from twtxt, as mentioned, but also from 100 Rabbits’ work on the minimalist uxn stack, from minimal educational environments such as toolbox.academy, and from digital toys like the Tamagotchi. I decided to adopt the philosophy of using constraints as a creative springboard and informally defined the principles of dw3nd3: a functional client should be implementable in at most a couple of days, for an extensible data format that prioritizes backward compatibility. In this way, future users of d33 could create their own content without fear of it becoming obsolete, or experiment with modifications to the standard in their own clients without much effort.

Then came the idea of hiding the contents of this web inside HTML pages. From there, the symbol of the duende emerged as something small and hidden; instead of web pages, the central concept would be that of duende rooms. Because the language was so small, a room could even fit inside social-media posts or comments. Later on, this idea expanded to include rooms embedded in other polyglot formats, so that the network of duende rooms could propagate not only through HTML pages, but also through code, documents, images, and more.

As I refined an initial version of the standard while working on a proof-of-concept client, I realized that a browser needed a plugin-oriented architecture to fully unleash user creativity and take advantage of the standard’s flexibility. With this in mind, I designed the first version of tr4sg0, intended as a definitive reference for other clients.

Lessons from dw3nd3

When I finished this work, I did not feel that I had truly learned something new, but rather that I had reconnected with a series of essential fundamentals as a computer scientist:

• The complexity of formal languages matters.
• The fundamental pillar of how the web works is standardization.
• Everything that exists on the web can have something hidden inside it.

In my case, this project has had a re-educational value in addition to a creative one. If I could experience these truths from scratch thanks to d33, I thought that encouraging other users to create their own rooms, plugins, and even clients could do the same for them.

We need to understand the web again, to revalue simple, replicable, and standardized software, and to understand the nature of the information that travels across the network. In all of this, dw3nd3 is only a small personal, creative, and experimental project—but it is born from that same awareness and aims to make its own small contribution.