A Minimalist Design Ontology for Document-Centric Web Systems: HTML as a Primary Artifact

This paper develops a minimalist design ontology for document-centric web systems, grounded in the treatment of HTML as a primary artifact rather than as a transient output of program execution.

Historically, HTML functioned as a self-contained document format whose structure stabilized meaning across tools, contexts, and time. Over successive architectural shifts, however, HTML increasingly came to be treated as an ephemeral byproduct of layered generation pipelines, with semantic primacy reassigned to underlying data models and execution frameworks. While this shift enabled new classes of dynamic systems, it also obscured the ontological role that markup had already acquired as a medium for organizing, modulating, and preserving meaning.

The paper revisits early document-oriented assumptions of the web and examines the transition toward generation-oriented models. It argues that this transition should not be understood as a mistake, but neither should it be treated as the exclusive or inevitable form of web dynamism. Instead, the paper articulates a document-first perspective in which dynamism is expressed through declarative structural constraints—such as conditional presence, repetition, and data binding—applied to an existing document rather than through the construction of documents from scratch.

The contribution of the paper is definitional rather than prescriptive. It proposes a minimalist ontology that clearly distinguishes between stable artifacts and contingent execution processes, aligns execution with interpretation rather than generation, and situates the executor as a Unix-style tool with a sharply bounded responsibility. A conceptual reference design is provided in an appendix to illustrate how this ontology may be operationalized without introducing secondary languages, opaque generation stages, or expansive execution responsibilities.

The paper does not seek to replace contemporary web frameworks or to generalize beyond its intended domain. Instead, it delineates an alternative design space for document-centric systems—such as forms, reports, and administrative interfaces—where durability, inspectability, and graceful degradation are primary concerns.