End Users
Intertwingler was designed primarily as a substrate for communicating complex topics. It's made to maximize linking between small pieces of information, in a style called dense hypermedia. This helps you gain comprehension while only having to read the parts you need to.
To achieve this effect, Intertwingler maintains tight control over the addresses (URLs) it exposes. This means links managed by Intertwingler never break.
Self-Hosters
Intertwingler is designed to ship as a single, stand-alone, open-source package that you can run on your personal computer, your server—whether in your house or in a data centre—or your cloud account. Eventually, a version of Intertwingler will run on your phone.
Intertwingler is designed to federate with other instances of itself, not only for scale but also for balancing security and availability. With Intertwingler, your single source of truth can be virtualized and spread across multiple physical locations, for a single, seamless information space.
Web Makers
Intertwingler is made to handle vast numbers of tiny objects, each with their own durable address. Whereas in creating a conventional website you focus on making pages, with Intertwingler, your job is to fashion Lego parts. The focus with Intertwingler is on what things are, rather than where they go on the website.
When your website is Lego, you can rearrange and reuse the pieces. Content that is referenced rather than copied has a better chance of staying up to date. There is still the matter, however, of getting the content into the website. Here, Intertwingler serves as probably the first new general-purpose structured data entry interface since the spreadsheet. And finally, there's all the other work attendant to building a website
—like styling, scripts, media, metadata, APIs—Intertwingler helps with those, too.
Extenders
The Lego-like philosophy that pervades Intertwingler is extended further to its insides. Those looking to extend its capabilities have an extremely precise development target. Everything in Intertwingler, including the Intertwingler engine itself, is a thing called a handler. This is just a microservice that obeys a certain protocol. Handlers can (eventually, as is the plan) be written in any language and interface with the engine over ordinary HTTP.
Another way to extend Intertwingler is with a special kind of handler called a transform. Transforms operate over HTTP message bodies and manipulate them as ordinary byte segments. Splitting the task of serving Web content between handlers that originate it and transforms that modify it, results in both being much more concise.
Porters
Rather than being a particular Web development platform for people writing in a particular programming language, Intertwingler is intended to be a blueprint for porting the engine to whatever language you're most comfortable with.
The engine itself is a modest piece of code. The value is all in how it's arranged. The instance data, moreover, is totally portable. Assuming your target language has all the dependencies, you could probably cook up a port of Intertwingler in a few weeks.