Webstrates

Summary

Webstrates is a research project that explores a new kind of computational medium in which documents and applications are no longer separate entities, but shareable, editable, and continuously evolving environments. It builds on the vision of personal dynamic media articulated by Alan Kay, extending it with real-time collaboration and distribution across devices. Its central idea is that a web page should be more than a container for information — it should be a flexible computational substrate that users can reshape, extend, and share.

At its core, Webstrates transforms ordinary web pages into shared objects. Changes to a page's content, structure, appearance, and embedded code are automatically saved and synchronized across everyone viewing it. This means users can collaboratively modify not only a document, but also the tools and interfaces used to work with it. Different people can use their own editors and preferred ways of interacting with the same underlying content, while changes remain synchronized. Through a mechanism called transclusion, documents, tools, and interactive components can also be embedded and recombined without losing their connection to the original.

Webstrates proposes a more open and malleable relationship between people and software. Instead of treating applications as fixed products and documents as passive files, it brings content, computation, and interaction together into a medium that can be continuously adapted. In doing so, it revisits an important idea in the history of personal computing: that computers should not simply provide tools for working, but environments that people can reshape around their own needs, share with others, and use as a foundation for creating new tools and ideas.

Modern software is not very soft at all, and it's a bit ironic that it's even called software. We use purpose-built applications with little room for appropriating them beyond what the designers intended them for, and very few of us actually modify our software. We've come to take the concept of applications for granted. We use one-size-fits-all applications — applications that are difficult to adapt, so we have to adapt. They are incompatible with each other, so we have to compromise when collaborating with people who've made other choices in tools than we have ourselves. Applications are also rooted in a tradition that strongly separates developing and using software. There's developers and there's users. Users don't change their software. They just conform.

Key concepts

• Shareable dynamic media Webstrates treats documents and applications as parts of a single, evolving medium. Content, computation, and interaction can be combined, modified, and shared rather than remaining confined to separate software environments.
• Malleable substrates Users can modify not only the content they work with, but also the tools and interfaces used to manipulate it. Webstrates makes software itself editable at runtime, blurring the boundary between using and creating applications.
• Real-time collaboration Changes to documents, interfaces, and embedded code are automatically synchronized across users. People can work together while maintaining different tools, editors, and personal ways of interacting with shared content.
• Transclusion Documents and tools can be embedded within one another while remaining connected to their original sources. Changes to shared content are reflected wherever it appears, allowing information and functionality to be recombined without simply copying them.
• Cross-device distribution The same computational environment can extend across multiple devices and platforms. A document can be edited on a laptop, sketched on a tablet, and presented on another screen while remaining part of one shared system.

Webstrates challenges the traditional separation between documents, applications, and the tools used to create them. By making the web itself a shareable and malleable computational medium, it allows people to modify software as naturally as they modify the content within it. Its deeper contribution is a vision of computing in which tools are not fixed products designed entirely by others, but evolving environments that people can appropriate, personalize, extend, and share.

This idea was originally published as Webstrates: Shareable Dynamic Media. See also the project website, which demonstrates the underlying environment and its approach to collaborative, malleable web applications.