Revisiting Hypermedia, The Forgotten Web Application Development Paradigm

World Wide Web, or just the web, is the largest application platform of our time, although it was never designed as such, but has evolved as one. This evolution resulted in development practices allowing the creation of complex web applications with little effort. Unfortunately, this evolutionary nature of the web led to a state where the size of web applications keeps growing steadily. For this reason, new approaches are needed, and in this article, I will revisit an old paradigm-hypermedia. Hypermedia was introduced to web developers by Fielding in his doctoral thesis in the early 2000s as the form of a hypermedia constraint (HATEOAS) for REST APIs, but unfortunately, this specific part of his work went overlooked until recently. Lately, hypermedia-oriented frameworks have begun to challenge the status quo by reintroducing hypermedia to the web through different strategies. Based on my findings, it seems plausible that the time is right for broader adoption of hypermedia for the web, as its ideas are timely since they address recent challenges related to the rising complexity of web applications and their agentic usage while allowing personalized user interfaces. It also seems there may be tangible benefits in terms of maintainability, conceptual simplicity, performance, and security over mainstream approaches. This article provides an initial indication of the usefulness of this old yet new paradigm for web development and highlights hypermediadriven web development as an option to mainstream approaches.