A Brief Overview of Webstrates # This is an updated copy of the 2019 Medium article “A Brief Overview of Webstrates.” Introduction # We’ve very quickly gotten used to real-time collaborative software on the Web. We can write together in Google Docs, make interface mockups in Figma, edit computational notebooks in Observable, and we can share our documents simply by copying a URL. We’ve also gotten used to applications working across our devices.
Webstrates
Webstrates # A Platform for Modern Computational Media Overview # Webstrates is a platform to explore software as computational media (read more in the “Background” below). Webstrates is a webserver where the pages it serves are collaboratively editable. This means that modifications to the Document Object Model (DOM), for instance, using the developer tools of a web browser, are synchronized with the server and with all other clients currently visiting the same webpage.
01 - Decentralized Web: An Introduction - Resource Guide
This resource guide was created to accompany Session 01 of the Webinar Series Imagining a Better Online World: Exploring the Decentralized Web. This session introduced essential DWeb concepts to library workers through demonstrations, resources, and examples of decentralized technologies in action. A video recording of this session has been archived by the Internet Archive and it can be viewed here.
Between Principle and Pragmatism: Reflections on Prototyping Computational Media with Webstrates
Computational media describes a vision of software, which, in contrast to application-centric software, is (1) malleable, so users can modify existing functionality, (2) computable, so users can run custom code, (3) distributable, so users can open documents across different devices, and (4) shareable, so users can easily share and collaborate on documents. Over the last ten years, the Webstrates and Codestrates projects aimed at realizing this vision of computational media. Webstrates is a server application that synchronizes the DOM of websites. Codestrates builds on top of Webstrates and adds an authoring environment, which blurs the use and development of applications. Grounded in a chronology of the development of Webstrates and Codestrates, we present eight tensions that we needed to balance during their development. We use these tensions as an analytical lens in three case studies and a game challenge in which participants created games using Codestrates. We discuss the results of the game challenge based on these tensions and present key takeaways for six of them. Finally, we present six lessons learned from our endeavor to realize the vision of computational media, demonstrating the balancing act of weighing the vision against the pragmatics of implementing a working system.
<i>Webstrates</i>: Shareable Dynamic Media
Shareable Dynamic Media is our vision for an interactive computing environment that blurs the distinction between documents and applications, characterized by three key properties: malleability, so that users can appropriate and repurpose media in ...
An introduction to Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs)
Put State in the Right Place - Delaney Gillilan | SSW 2026
Web of the People — Open Indie
Whether you think of web3 as the advent of peer-to-peer protocols, coin-operated blockchains or autocomplete-AI synthesizers, change is c...
Web Engines Hackfest 2025
Web Platform: What are we working on?
Web Platform What are we working on? Simone Onofri WebEngineHackFest 2025
Lee Byron (OpenAI) - Teaching Models to Collaborate
surrealdb/surrealdb
A scalable, distributed, collaborative, document-graph database, for the realtime web