JIT-4 The JIT-4 platform

Web 3 — a retrospect

Context: why look again.

We have what we have.

Why look again

In 2008, a translation-first idea—one host per locale via DNS, with a dedicated page per language—worked well. It proved you could coordinate discovery and rendering across regions.

Then the pattern generalized: “we could use that for other things.” Platforms scaled it, layered persuasion UIs on top, and the web became heavier, not clearer.

When COVID-19 hit in 2020 and buying moved online, the model was stress-tested. We doubled down on client-heavy pages and aggregator platforms because there wasn’t a clearer path; distribution grew, precision thinned.

By 2025 the “comet” arrived: Gen X/Y/Z wanted this this month and that next month. Large surfaces— Facebook/Instagram, Amazon, Google/YouTube, TikTok, Shopify, and the app stores—couldn’t pivot at that cadence without breaking ads, logistics, or moderation. The market spawned clones: quick forks and look-alikes that spike, then fade. Their half-life is short.

And all that neat stuff is in the small mom-and-pop websites in small towns around the world—niche forums, local shops, one-maintainer docs. That’s where the freshest answers live, yet they’re the hardest for platforms and crawlers to capture and keep current.

In a world of weekly UI churn and quarterly platform rewrites, the one thing that must not change is the address of the truth. Next, we move from pages to proofs—links that land on the exact line and verify it survived edits—so the long tail is first-class again.

What scaled

  • Links & caching. Stable URLs + HTTP caching/CDNs made distribution cheap and global.
  • APIs everywhere. REST/JSON (later GraphQL) unlocked integration and automation.
  • Tooling maturity. CI/CD, TS/ES modules, component libraries, and design systems.
  • Structured data. JSON-LD/Microdata declared entities, events, products, and offers.
  • Accessibility practice. ARIA + semantic HTML became common—when used correctly.

Where the pattern cracked

  • Rendering concentration. Client-side by default; key text arrived late or not at all on slow devices and for crawlers.
  • Persuasion over proof. Cards, modals, infinite scroll—great for conversion, weak for citation.
  • Fragile deep links. Headings had anchors; sentences didn’t. Moving copy broke references silently.
  • Index/UI drift. What engines crawled diverged from what users saw (tabs/accordions/SPA routes).
  • Locale drift. hreflang mapped pages, not line-true equivalents across languages.
  • Parameter sprawl. Tracking/query params spawned duplicate URLs and diluted signals.

How discoverability broke

Search promised answers; users still scrolled. The core failure: no line-grade addressability and no verifiable freshness.

  • No exact-line links. Citations pointed to pages, not sentences.
  • Drift without notice. Copy changed; old links kept pointing “nearby.”
  • Opaque freshness. No standard changefeed; recency inferred from weak signals.
  • Provenance gaps. Agents/humans lacked verifiable pointers to the specific source line.

What to carry forward

  • Progressive enhancement. Server-render core copy; hydrate after.
  • Structure is strategy. Semantic HTML; expose content in the DOM.
  • Stability beats cleverness. Stable IDs for headings/paragraphs; normalize URLs; tame parameters.
  • Parity is operational. Treat translations as first-class; keep signals and canonicals aligned.

Use what worked—because it did. But in the very next step, you’ve got more to work with: self-describing pages (Web 4) and browser-native, exact-line verification (Web 5).