The world wide web, according to Danny Hillis, has a problem:

• "...these depositories of knowledge (Wikipedia or even the World Wide Web) are designed to be read directly by humans, not interpreted by computers. They confound the presentation of information with the information itself. The crucial difference of the knowledge web is that the information is represented in the database, while the presentation is generated dynamically. Like Neal Stephenson's storybook, the information is filtered, selected and presented according to the specific needs of the viewer."

This is similar to the problem in programming, but reversed: the programs are written to be read by computers, not humans.

We need to separate presentation from information, and then generate the correct form on the fly, in a number of areas, now that we store all our information on computers.