The ‘Form’ Element Created the Modern Web. Was It a Big Mistake?

The web was born to publish documents—in particular, physics papers from CERN, the great laboratory where Tim Berners-Lee, the very first web developer, was employed to do smart information things. If people evolved like technology, you’d be 6,000 lizards, 30 chimps, and a couple Neanderthals all glued together with an anguished human face stretched across it as a “visual refresh.” </digression> WIRED Software Review Welcome to WIRED Software Review, where we publish critiques of the defining cultural artifact of our time. Point to anything driving us all to distraction and you’ll find <form> at the root: Elon Musk’s tweets, for example, and his bid to buy Twitter? But that’s today; <form> also made Musk’s first fortune at PayPal, by allowing people to set up accounts and pay. Twitter’s many disasters, Amazon and its global megapower, Facebook’s wall, Google’s search box, the Netflix password you share, every forum conversation, every eBay bid, every web-based banking system that logs you out after 10 minutes, pretty much all of Salesforce, every blog post, every leak and hack—all of it comes back to <form>.