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The Reduced Form

What the Form Carried

By Sevda Polat— July 23, 2026

Feature image for article: What the Form Carried

A U.S. military pocket purchase order once had four color-coded carbon copies. White went to finance. Blue went to the vendor. Pink served as the receiving and accounting record. Green stayed with the purchaser. Tear along the perforation and the institutional workflow was already in motion — the object was the process. When HTML formalized the <form> element in 1995, it reproduced the data-collection surface with real precision: name/value pairs, a destination URI, a method. Everything else was left out of scope. No authority. No routing. No accountability structure. Automated agents now fill out what remains.

The Reduced Form

What the Form Carried

By Sevda Polat— July 23, 2026

A U.S. military pocket purchase order once had four color-coded carbon copies. White went to finance. Blue went to the vendor. Pink served as the receiving and accounting record. Green stayed with the purchaser. Tear along the perforation and the institutional workflow was already in motion — the object was the process. When HTML formalized the <form> element in 1995, it reproduced the data-collection surface with real precision: name/value pairs, a destination URI, a method. Everything else was left out of scope. No authority. No routing. No accountability structure. Automated agents now fill out what remains.

The Carbon Copy

The Colors Were the Routing Table

A three-part carbonless invoice created three institutional records the instant a pen touched paper. White to the customer. Yellow to accounting. Pink to the field technician. The colors were routing instructions embedded in the physical structure of the document itself. You could audit the form set at a glance: are all parts present? Who has them? Distribution was something the paper did, not something someone remembered to configure afterward.

The web form replaced this with a database write and, if a developer wired it up, a confirmation email to one party. The agent's equivalent is a log entry designed for debugging a failed session, not for answering the question a stranger might ask years later: who authorized this, and who holds the record?

Every step in this progression was reasonable. And every step quietly turned "who has a copy?" from a property you could read off the document into a question that requires knowing where to look.

The Carbon Copy

The Colors Were the Routing Table

A three-part carbonless invoice created three institutional records the instant a pen touched paper. White to the customer. Yellow to accounting. Pink to the field technician. The colors were routing instructions embedded in the physical structure of the document itself. You could audit the form set at a glance: are all parts present? Who has them? Distribution was something the paper did, not something someone remembered to configure afterward.

The web form replaced this with a database write and, if a developer wired it up, a confirmation email to one party. The agent's equivalent is a log entry designed for debugging a failed session, not for answering the question a stranger might ask years later: who authorized this, and who holds the record?

Every step in this progression was reasonable. And every step quietly turned "who has a copy?" from a property you could read off the document into a question that requires knowing where to look.

TAKE NOTE

1806: Ralph Wedgwood patents carbon paper — originally to help blind people write

1870s–1980s: Carbon copies in wide commercial use, driven by typewriter adoption

1950s: National Cash Register invents carbonless (NCR) paper — color-coded plies route copies by design

Standard 3-part set: white + yellow + pink, each color mapped to a designated recipient

1995 (HTML 2.0): Web forms define data submission methods but no record distribution or designated holders

2026: Visa's agentic commerce rules require order confirmations kept 120 days — effectively trying to reinstate the customer's white copy

The Forms Designer

An Interview with the Woman Who Designed Systems That Happened to Fit on Paper

The Forms Designer

An Interview with the Woman Who Designed Systems That Happened to Fit on Paper

Restoring the Furniture

What the Approval Chain Was Holding Together

For decades, enterprise workflow systems painstakingly rebuilt institutional process in software: approval chains, role assignments, audit trails, digital signatures. Each layer reconstructed authority that screens had quietly stripped away. Then bots arrived and navigated those surfaces without inheriting any of the logic underneath. A GSA Inspector General audit showed what that looks like in practice: security plans written for human users that never once mentioned the bots clicking through them.

Restoring the Furniture

The Newest Furniture

Visa and Cloudflare, solving different problems in different industries, independently arrived at the same structural move: re-deriving paper-era governance concepts for automated actors. Mandate scope. Purpose classification. Delegation ceilings. A notarized letter from 1950 carried these elements without trying. Now they are being spelled out as API fields and HTTP-layer defaults, because the actors occupying these systems carry less institutional context than any that came before.

Restoring the Furniture

What the Approval Chain Was Holding Together

For decades, enterprise workflow systems painstakingly rebuilt institutional process in software: approval chains, role assignments, audit trails, digital signatures. Each layer reconstructed authority that screens had quietly stripped away. Then bots arrived and navigated those surfaces without inheriting any of the logic underneath. A GSA Inspector General audit showed what that looks like in practice: security plans written for human users that never once mentioned the bots clicking through them.

Restoring the Furniture

The Newest Furniture

Visa and Cloudflare, solving different problems in different industries, independently arrived at the same structural move: re-deriving paper-era governance concepts for automated actors. Mandate scope. Purpose classification. Delegation ceilings. A notarized letter from 1950 carried these elements without trying. Now they are being spelled out as API fields and HTTP-layer defaults, because the actors occupying these systems carry less institutional context than any that came before.

Restoring the Furniture

What the Approval Chain Was Holding Together

For decades, enterprise workflow systems painstakingly rebuilt institutional process in software: approval chains, role assignments, audit trails, digital signatures. Each layer reconstructed authority that screens had quietly stripped away. Then bots arrived and navigated those surfaces without inheriting any of the logic underneath. A GSA Inspector General audit showed what that looks like in practice: security plans written for human users that never once mentioned the bots clicking through them.

Restoring the Furniture

The Newest Furniture

Visa and Cloudflare, solving different problems in different industries, independently arrived at the same structural move: re-deriving paper-era governance concepts for automated actors. Mandate scope. Purpose classification. Delegation ceilings. A notarized letter from 1950 carried these elements without trying. Now they are being spelled out as API fields and HTTP-layer defaults, because the actors occupying these systems carry less institutional context than any that came before.