stating the obvious

The current World Wide Web consists almost entirely of pages that are either stories or tools. A few ambitious sites combine these two types of pages in varying ratios, with results that range from unsatisfying to disastrous. But the next stage of the web is going to come from the native form that evolves from, and incorporates elements of, these two existing structures. Even after this form emerges, however, the web will still be populated with plenty of stories and tools, of course, just as television retained the idiom of an anchor at a desk authoritatively reading us the news, even after the invention of the situation comedy and the game show.

If you take a look at the pages we have today, one thing becomes clear: Stories on the web just plain work. The obvious, and so far ultimate, display of this is The Fray, which sets out in its very mission to tell stories. It's the definitive example. But less obvious examples are abundant and instructive. Every news item proffered on whatever portal or provider you prefer is presenting a story. The content presented in web interfaces to Usenet and even Wikis are largely story-oriented. In a medium originally designed to present structured documents, the natural divisions and regular formatting of stories was destined to be a good fit, even if they technically fell outside the precise realm envisioned by the web’s creator.