Of all the rotten luck! No sooner do I publish my new, fancy, dynamic site than I discover that <a title="Wired Magazine" href="http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1" target="_self"><em>Wired</em> magazine</a> has deemed my efforts for naught because the <a title="The Web is dead" href="http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1" target="_blank">Web is dead</a>. No bones about it, when the Web answered the knock at its door, the Grim Reaper appeared in the form of mobile apps. And <em>Wired</em>'s got a <a title="Chart of the web's demise" href="http://www.wired.com/magazine/wp-content/images/18-09/ff_webrip_chart2.jpg" target="_self">colorful graph</a> and a <a title="The Web is dead: A debate!" href="http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip_debate/" target="_blank">debate featuring good ol' Tim O'Reilly</a> to prove it.

Normally I ignore such proclamations, especially from the same doomsayers who (1) publish the article on the medium they declare dead and (2) within the past 12 years, predicted that both the <a title="Push! (Kiss your web browser good-bye...)" href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.03/ff_push.html" target="_blank">web browser</a> and the <a title="The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete" href="http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory" target="_self">scientific method</a> would undergo similar fates. But the proclamation has sent a storm through the blogosphere, and as a "maturing" Webmaster who started a blog to comment on such things, I feel it is my duty to throw my sword into the fray.
<blockquote>"I'm not dead." -- The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't, <strong>Monty Python and the Holy Grail</strong></blockquote>
Needless to say, I don't believe the Web is even near comatose and, if you examine <em>Wired</em>'s article for a bit, it's fairly clear that they don't believe the Web is completely dead, either. Rather, they assert the Web is no longer the wild west that it used to be. Folks are abandoning their private ranches and settling down into larger communities, such as <a title="Facebook" href="http://www.facebook.com" target="_blank">Facebook</a> or <a title="YouTube" href="http://www.youtube.com/" target="_blank">YouTube</a>. Folks also aren't relying on web browsers as their workhorse of choice; instead, they've chosen, or appear to be choosing, specialized software on their mobile devices to get at their content--i.e. "there's an app for that." Indeed, <em>Wired</em> asserts, the Web is simply becoming one  point of interest on a much larger landscape, something that they call "the Internet". Not only that, according to the aforementioned <a title="Chart of the web's demise" href="http://www.wired.com/magazine/wp-content/images/18-09/ff_webrip_chart2.jpg" target="_self">colorful graph</a>, the Web is increasingly being abandoned in favor of other Internet features such as video, peer-to-peer file sharing, and the mysterious "Other" category.

Unfortunately, if one takes a closer look at the graph, such as <a title="Is the Web really dead?" href="http://boingboing.net/2010/08/17/is-the-web-really-de.html" target="_blank">Boing Boing did</a>, one might notice that <em>Wired</em> focuses on the proportion of Web traffic to Internet traffic as a whole. Keeping this in mind, it's no surprise that the increasingly popular service video downloads and peer-to-peer file sharing (which is often used to download videos) are taking up more than their fair share of bandwidth. After all, videos tend to be slightly larger in size than web pages, in much the same way that the Sun is slightly larger than the Earth. And if one is to believe the graph, then it appears that email died off a few years ago, which I find confusing since I still receive a dozens pieces of spam every day.

So I'm sticking to my belief that Web is not dead. It may have matured and it may be finding a new niche among the countless other applications on the Internet, but the Web is still happy and healthy and alive. When the clarion call of "Bring out yer dead!" reaches my door, I won't be throwing out my browser for a ninepence any time soon.