A diarist at Daily Kos, using the nom de web Devilstower, alleges that when (and if) the rumored Apple Tablet is finally announced this Wednesday, the result will be a new online-media dichotomy:

It’s not Apple vs Microsoft anymore.  It’s not even Apple vs Google.

It’s Apple vs the Web.

Just as the web replaced earlier systems, Apple is building an alternative ecosystem that uses the Internet’s backbone covered with their own cross-device platform.

…When this wave has passed, there’s every chance that a lot of people will make their way through the Internet without ever seeing the letters “www” again. It won’t be the web. It’ll be the Orchard.

What doesn’t Apple have in the Orchard? You. They have a massive presence in the media realm, but they don’t have anything to offer that competes with the freewheeling world of blogs and the rapidly changing social media space.

They don’t have it yet. And maybe they won’t. But, fellow resident of Dinoville, I wouldn’t bet on it.

Elsewhere in the piece, Devilstower refers to the “dinosaurs” of old closed-system online networks such as Prodigy and the original America Online, and implies that’s what Apple’s trying to re-create.

I see something else going on here.

The Web, for all its vast expandability and universal, gate-free access, has severe limitations as a presentation tool for professional, packaged content. It doesn’t allow for real typography, at least not without a lot of complex workarounds. It doesn’t allow for standardized page sizes or complex graphic design. Web-based content can’t command a price from readers because (among other reasons) readers subconsciously don’t perceive it as a place for works of value.

The Apple Tablet platform can be all these things that the Web isn’t, or has a hard time being.

The Web won’t go away any time soon. If it ever does, it will be succeeded by something that does what the Web does best, only better.

By “what the Web does best,” I’m thinking of chats, social networking, discussion threads, blogs, real-time information, and the whole ongoing mashup of different media from different places and times.

But fully integrated, depth-heavy works of the communication arts will be better served by the Tablet platform. Until something better succeeds it.