[HN Gopher] The "Cheap" Web
___________________________________________________________________
The "Cheap" Web
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 266 points
Date : 2023-12-18 12:06 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (potato.cheap)
(TXT) w3m dump (potato.cheap)
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Is that the Comic Sans I've heard so much about?
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| The other day, I was talking to my daughter about where she
| might like to study in future. We happen to went to a big
| University for some showcase event and I asked her if she liked
| that one. She replied, "No! Their logo is in Comic Sans."
| globalise83 wrote:
| "Playpen Sans"
| cxr wrote:
| The thing that makes me disagree with proponents of the
| "smol"/"cheap"/etc Web is their totally misguided insistence on
| personal webpages as a sui generis medium for self-expression wrt
| layout and styling.
|
| > Until we adopt simple and stable building materials, all
| websites will continue to look the same.
|
| Yeah, big deal. Who cares if websites look the same? Wait, let me
| put that another way: we should care whether websites look the
| same in the sense that _more_ of them should look similar to one
| another than they do today--namely, they should look how you and
| I (the readers) wish for them to look for our own comfort and
| convenience--which means _fewer_ dark starry sky backgrounds,
| _fewer_ text drop shadows and typefaces reminiscent of comic book
| speech bubbles, and _fewer_ distracting marquees. Way less
| kitsch, not more.
|
| HN, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, SMS, etc. all have a limited range
| of expression through form. Somehow we get by. Completely
| dissimilar books look a lot more "the same" than websites do, and
| that's not a bad thing. You never see book authors complaining
| about control over the printed page the way that you see self-
| styled web designers insisting on their manifest destiny over the
| user's viewport for the purposes of self-expression. Webdevs need
| to get over themselves, and the wider world needs to stop letting
| them get by with (or encouraging) this kind of narcissism.
| mcluck wrote:
| Authors like Mark Z. Danielewski do more with the layout in
| their books than most and I love them for it. I like seeing
| people try out different ideas and do things that might be
| considered less-than-ideal to view
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You can have all web sites look the same by setting reader view
| as default in your browser. It is a great improvement for
| browsing the web, both on desktop and phone.
|
| If somebody invented a "forum view" to make all forums look the
| same on our browsers, then I think the circle would be
| complete. It shouldn't be too difficult either, since most run
| on similar software.
| anon25783 wrote:
| You should learn about the Gemini protocol! It's an
| alternative to HTTPS that uses a document markup language
| similar to Markdown instead of HTML, and uses a deliberately
| simplified, feature-frozen protocol with the explicit goal
| that anyone should be able to write their own Gemini browser
| "in a weekend". No scripting or styling support, just
| documents with links and images in them.
|
| Here are some informative webpages on the topic, neither of
| them mine:
|
| https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq.gmi
|
| https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I think the Gemini stuff is really neat, and I've already
| experimented with Lagrange and Kristall browsers. However,
| the information I'm interested in isn't published on those
| networks, and I think that's true for most of us. Reader
| view is a seamless way for me to have control of how the
| web is presented to me. An RSS client + browser with reader
| mode is the perfect combo for most online stuff that is
| information (and not function, like an e-shop).
|
| As I understand it, forum functions are not a feature of
| the Gemini protocol?
| surprisetalk wrote:
| Author here! I largely agree with you.
|
| I love Del Taco. I love the speed and consistency I get from
| franchises.
|
| At the same time, my best friend recently sent me a picture of
| a fancy swordfish dish he cooked up, and I'm bummed that we
| don't get to see each other as often as we used to.
|
| And as my daughter grows older, I'm becoming a bit frustrated
| at how difficult it is to purchase foods that were not doused
| in neurotic pesticides. So I'm learning how to grow our food.
|
| Growing food isn't easy, but the farming community is cool, and
| I've been having a good time of it.
|
| And so sometimes I wish building a website could be more like
| learning farming, and I think it could be.
| chias wrote:
| > Who cares if websites look the same?
|
| A lot of books look the same too, but that works pretty well
| for me tbh. I do not find books to be homogeneous as a result.
| awkward wrote:
| We're probably past the point in the web where formative
| experiments with layout are useful for most people, and most
| situations can be handled with a light CMS. That still leaves
| room for massive variance and personal control. Even just
| linktree levels of customization have a lot more spice than
| facebook. I think current big tech is still reacting to myspace
| allowing users to write raw CSS, and there's a lot of space for
| a swing back, especially given the current web's focus on
| "creators".
| anon25783 wrote:
| > Webdevs need to get over themselves, and the wider world
| needs to stop letting them get by with (or encouraging) this
| kind of narcissism.
|
| What a presumptuous statement! Authoritarian, even. It's one
| thing for someone else's website, such as HN, Reddit,
| Wikipedia, etc., to impose a homogeneous form on posts
| submitted by guests on the site. It's quite another thing to
| assert that "the wider world" should "stop letting [independent
| webdevs]" deviate from a similar standard of homogeneity.
|
| If you don't like the appearance of someone else's webpage,
| maybe just don't go to that webpage?
| cxr wrote:
| Ironic take for a comment that exists only as a consequence
| of what started out as someone complaining about how boring
| other people's websites look; there's no way out of this--
| either you agree with the ability to criticize, in which case
| mine is fair, or you disagree, in which case it's not but
| then yours isn't either and neither you nor anyone else
| should bother yourselves or others about the sameness of
| anyone's websites (instead, focus on not going to the ones
| that bother you so much in their sameness).
|
| (And choosing to read my comment as an "authoritarian"
| imposition on "independent webdevs"--not actually stated
| anywhere? How presumptuous.)
| kixiQu wrote:
| > HN, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, SMS, etc. all have a limited
| range of expression through form. Somehow we get by.
|
| Disagreement exists as to how well this is going for us. (cf.,
| content collapse)
| arp242 wrote:
| > the wider world needs to stop letting them get by with (or
| encouraging) this kind of narcissism.
|
| "I want my website to look nice and be creative, you know, like
| people have been doing with magazines and other publications
| since before my grandparents were born"
|
| "No, I don't like it so you are not allowed to do that; I want
| to take away the tools for you to be able to do that; I will
| insult you if you even want to do that!"
|
| Who here is the selfish and narcissistic one here? Not
| everything needs to be to your liking. People are free to do
| things you don't like.
|
| The notion that all printed publication looks the same can be
| trivially disproven by a visit to a bookstore. There are many
| differences and layout choices, especially once you move beyond
| pure fiction. And magazines tend to have tons of layout;
| sometimes pretty radical layouts.
| cxr wrote:
| Can you stop making up quotes? You do it a lot on this site,
| and it's both uncool and against the rules. I'm not going to
| engage with the other, less obvious (but still not
| particularly well-hidden) strawmen in your comment.
| arp242 wrote:
| Eh? I didn't "make up" anything. Quotation marks are
| commonly used for all sorts of things other than exact
| literal text someone else said, and having a dialogue like
| that is one of them. I will continue to use quotations
| marks in this fashion, together with millions of other
| people on the planet, whether you like it or not, because
| it's a common way to use quotation marks and absolutely no
| one is confused this usage.
|
| My post broke zero rules and I _strongly_ encourage you to
| email HN if you think that I 'm a pervasive rule-breaker
| with my alleged "made-up quotes" so you can be told the
| same by the site's moderators so these pointless spurious
| accusations can stop.
| infotainment wrote:
| Love it -- I think something of value was lost when we
| collectively decided in 2005 that everyone's page should look
| exactly the same (i.e. TheFacebook(tm) profiles)
|
| Sadly that, combined with the changes Google made to deprioritize
| results from personal sites like these, all but destroyed these
| neat bespoke pages.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I mean, that's because Facebook Pages are cheap. Businesses
| don't want to spend money on anything they don't have to, and
| people aren't much different. The argument for learning to
| write even basic HTML only to upload it even to something like
| Amazon S3 (free) and direct a web address to it (not free) or
| spend money on hosting to not have to learn how to deposit
| files into an S3 bucket is a LOT of time to spend to accomplish
| this task. Instead, you can outsource all of that time, effort,
| and labor to Facebook who already built a website. And yeah, it
| sucks ass and it's full of undesirable people, but it's free
| and it accomplishes the same goal.
|
| Google, meanwhile, sees that everyone is setting up Facebook
| profiles instead of websites because it's easier, and now
| businesses websites are sometimes quite out of date compared to
| their Facebook pages so they begin prioritizing results from
| network sites over regular pages. And now people can follow
| their favorite businesses on Facebook and be at least somewhat
| assured they'll always know if, for example, they have to close
| up one day unexpectedly and won't be doing business again until
| tomorrow.
|
| This is not meant to be an argument against the cheap web,
| mind: I'm just saying that people trend towards what is the
| lowest-cost option (by money, time, effort, or any combination)
| and use it because it works and gets the job done. I still keep
| a website, because I value my independence and have no interest
| in having my thoughts dumbed down to suit the preferences of
| corporate America. But the vast majority of people do not care
| about that (until they get smacked with a ban-hammer anyway)
| and will just stick to the easy option.
|
| Also, I would state: there is no reason we couldn't have a
| social media site that functions as a public utility instead of
| a for-profit corporation. We could just... have a Facebook that
| doesn't need to piss everyone off to make money. Social media
| without profit motive could be a massive boon to our society.
| ghaff wrote:
| The other conclusion I've come to is that web designers way
| overcomplicate stuff. So I don't want to do a Facebook page.
| What are my relatively low-cost options?
|
| Well, I can have a really basic HTML site but that's a little
| late-90s.
|
| OK, a Wordpress site then. Now I'm dealing with introductory
| rates that shoot up after a year unless I just use a standard
| VPS and now I'm having to do a lot of stuff myself. And, as
| far as I can tell, most of the literally thousands of
| templates/themes out there don't make it straightforward to
| just have a nice homepage with a simple blog post that
| doesn't require a high-resolution photograph to go with it.
|
| I'm probably settling on just sticking with Blogger using a
| new theme. I'm not really happy with that solution--but I'm
| not a web designer. I'm willing to spend some money but I
| haven't really found an answer I love.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > The other conclusion I've come to is that web designers
| way overcomplicate stuff.
|
| I mean, there's a floor right? The floor being that you
| need a server that can respond to HTTP requests, yours or
| otherwise; you need said server accessible from an address
| to which you can map a DNS record to; and you need HTML
| files that can be served in response to that request. Few
| of these are free, but many can be had for very cheap.
|
| > So I don't want to do a Facebook page. What are my
| relatively low-cost options?
|
| Amazon S3 with Cloudflare in front of it and a domain name.
| Probably about $15 per year unless you manage enough
| traffic to get billed by Amazon.
|
| > Well, I can have a really basic HTML site but that's a
| little late-90s.
|
| I think that's a little reductive. HTML sites can be just
| about anything and they can be quite fancy if you're
| willing to put the time in to learn something like Jekyll.
| As a side hustle I maintain a couple of basic HTML websites
| for local businesses, and just bill them for the annuals +
| the time I spend tweaking things for them, which thanks to
| my workflows, isn't much.
|
| > OK, a Wordpress site then. .... I'm willing to spend some
| money but I haven't really found an answer I love.
|
| I mean, that's just the platform-ification of the Internet
| described. There's a floor of technical requirements and
| software experience required to publish on the Internet,
| and the vast majority of people like yourself do not
| possess it and aren't interested in acquiring it. That's
| fine, but it's akin to saying "I want to print a newsletter
| but don't want to learn how printers work." You've selected
| yourself out of your own goal.
|
| HTML, CSS and a bit of JavaScript can make dynamic and
| beautiful websites. But it's not without a learning curve,
| and if your response to that is "well I want to do this
| without learning HTML/CSS/JS" well, that's the central
| conceit of Facebook pages, Shopify websites, and Wordpress.
| ghaff wrote:
| What I've been doing is a homepage on S3 with a few
| static HTML pages and a link to Blogger for the blog. And
| a domain name I've had for ages pointed at it.
|
| But, if I'm going to be on Blogger anyway for blogging,
| my best bet is probably to find a reasonable way to also
| make it my home page destination. Or maybe not. We'll
| see. I'm just not sure I'm especially interested in
| spending a lot of time on tech that isn't my ultimate
| objective.
| rchaud wrote:
| > So I don't want to do a Facebook page. What are my
| relatively low-cost options?
|
| There's some level of complexity in all of those choices
| compared to just having a FB page.
|
| I liken it to taking the bus everyday over buying an
| e-bike. Buying a bike is complicated, expensive, easy to
| make mistakes. But at the end of the day, you'll have a
| vehicle to take you from A to B.
|
| You don't have to buy one, as long as the bus keeps
| running. But one day the bus route or schedule might
| change, and it no longer takes you where you wanted to go.
| This is when having a bike, warts and all, would've been be
| useful.
| goles wrote:
| In retrospect a lot of the customization you could do on
| MySpace was madness by todays standard.
|
| Being able to set your own background, color, font, potentially
| animated, with auto-playing music of your choice was like
| letting the average person be a web developer.
| mouzogu wrote:
| the whole cheap/small web thing has me thinking of those people
| who buy used clothes but think nothing of paying $15 for a coffee
| at hipsterCafe. something virtue signally about it.
|
| maybe it's the "solarpunk philosophy" and the "synthesize
| serendipity"-ies or quoting steve jobs, one of the biggest
| a*holes in the history of tech (imo).
|
| although i agree strongly with everything here
| https://potato.cheap/#cheap
| hotpotamus wrote:
| > people who shop at goodwill but think nothing of paying $15
| for a coffee at hipsterCafe
|
| I don't go in for fancy coffee with any regularity, but I do
| care a lot more about what goes in my body than what covers it,
| so I don't really see a contradiction here. Honestly, the older
| I get, things that may help my health (and I think there's a
| lot of "woo" there, but I think we can all agree that a decent
| restaurant is on average healthier than a McDonald's) are where
| I'm willing to spend money.
| culi wrote:
| > buy used clothes but think nothing of paying $15 for a coffee
| at hipsterCafe
|
| The funny thing is Starbucks is by far the most expensive and
| crap quality coffee you can get most anywhere.
| "hipsterIndependentCafe" is consistently cheaper and better if
| you're a coffee snob.
|
| Also people like me prefer to buy used as much as possible not
| to save money but to reduce waste. The romantics amongst us
| also prefer to have our goods well-storied
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Offtopic - but that is wildly untrue.(for the US, at least)
|
| Starbucks makes consistently good espresso. The amount of
| times I had - "oh, this hipster cafe is number one in the
| area" to just go dump the coffee and dip into Starbucks - is
| very high.
|
| But going back to the topic - the consistency of Starbucks
| and the inconsistency of coffee shops (even in places like
| NYC) is reminiscent of why we gravitated to repeatable
| designs that we see today.
|
| The visually appealing websites, that are not hard to read is
| "Starbucks". Be it visually "extravagant"(TheVerge) or
| simple(Yahoo Finance) they are fairly standard... these
| follow time proven visual standards set out by printed
| magazine, books and newspapers.
|
| This potato.cheap website is a pain to read. Hard to focus on
| the message and the text is way too clumped. So are many of
| the sites it lists as examples.
|
| HN is barebones Starbucks, not a pointlessly overbearing
| hipster cafe.
| foul wrote:
| >the whole cheap/small web thing has me thinking of those
| people who buy used clothes but think nothing of paying $15 for
| a coffee at hipsterCafe. something virtue signally about it.
|
| Very often hipsterCafe commoditizes a demand for quality in
| food by offering something slightly better than average at
| five-fold the price, but I can see that hipster-vegan-bum would
| find themselves in a perfectly coherent way of life buying
| clothes from thrift shops and spending a lot for food, sourcing
| for ethical cooperatives or whatever. It may be a reflection of
| their privilege, it may be a virtue signal-ist modus operandi,
| but aren't contradictory habits.
|
| >maybe it's the "solarpunk philosophy" and the "synthesize
| serendipity"-ies or quoting steve jobs, one of the biggest
| a*holes in the history of tech (imo).
|
| Don't you think that Steve Jobs scammed a lot of artsy people
| selling them a dream of olistic tech and sustainability, and
| that it's perfectly sane and just for them to clasp at that
| dream and trying to realize it, rejecting the evils of the
| false prophet while not throwing the baby with the bathwater?
| shellygoodman wrote:
| > the whole cheap/small web thing has me thinking of those
| people who buy used clothes but think nothing of paying $15 for
| a coffee at hipsterCafe. something virtue signally about it.
|
| This says nothing about the article or topic, but says a lot
| about your mental baggage.
| its-summertime wrote:
| "Most websites should be compatible with screenreaders", and yet,
| the first line of text in the website is ""; With the spoken form
| of: "Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart
| Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart
| Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart
| Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart
| Heart"
| graypegg wrote:
| My browser (Chrome 120) does correctly intuit that the header
| is not a landmark, so it at least won't be included in the
| landmark rotor. (In VO)
|
| Still though, it would be ideal to remove that from a11y tree
| since it's totally useless in there.
| layer8 wrote:
| Seems accurate? ;)
| surprisetalk wrote:
| Ha! Thanks for catching that! I think that demonstrates how
| difficult it is to make even a simple website accessible.
|
| I assumed that since my browser's "reader mode" was all good,
| then screen readers would know how to parse it too.
|
| I do like the heart aesthetic, so how exactly would I make it
| more accessible?
| graypegg wrote:
| role="presentation" will remove it from the a11y tree! Easy
| fix. Most browsers will notice the characters in the element
| are not human readable and make some tweaks to make
| "heartheartheartheartheartheartheartheart" less likely
| though, even in the current version!
| surprisetalk wrote:
| Thank you! I added it.
| graypegg wrote:
| In case you're maybe interested, I wrote up a little
| thing about how I think of accessible interfaces and
| designing for them:
|
| https://graypegg.com/2023/11/25/the-private-definition-
| of-ac...
|
| Edit: decided to post it here,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38683774
| devinprater wrote:
| Thank you!
| jwarren wrote:
| Depends - do you want screen readers to hear something? If
| so, add a `aria-label="heart"` or similar. If not, add
| `role="presentation"` to remove it from the accessibility
| tree altogether.
|
| You might also want to change the element from a `header` to
| something else, like a `div` or a `span` or even a `figure`
| instead. Then put "potato.cheap is home of the... The "Cheap"
| Web" inside the `header` instead.
| varispeed wrote:
| The problem is that accessibility has been treated as an
| afterthought, so designers, UX and people crafting HTML
| usually are not in habit of embedding accessibility into
| their works. It often comes when someone disabled complaints
| or if there is a regulation they didn't know about and there
| is "oh sh..." moment where accessibility is tacked onto
| already done project.
|
| So it's difficult in the sense that people don't think about
| it, there are not so many tutorials available and so on.
| graypegg wrote:
| YES. I think it's this unique form of after thought, where
| people imagine accessibility as a "score" that you can
| "increase". The web developer lowest-common-denominator
| cares about it, but only at this weird surface level. More
| aria tags = more accessibility points. It becomes this
| weird game where we end up with insanely noisy markup,
| which creates a horrible described interface for anyone
| actually using assistive technology.
|
| It's an interface like any other. We'd be weirded out if
| designers graded their screen specs as "visual" enough.
| More pixels are required in this area, think of our screen
| users! They need more pixels!
| jerf wrote:
| How should an interested _personal_ web developer find how
| their website sounds through a screen reader?
| graypegg wrote:
| Voice Over is insanely easy to work with, I recommend it to
| everyone I work with. I would say it takes maybe 20minutes to
| get a hang of the basic shortcuts and navigation modes.
|
| I've been thinking about making a "VO for Web Devs" cheat
| sheet at some point, would that be a useful thing for you?
|
| (Of course, I'm making assumptions about being in the apple
| garden.)
| jerf wrote:
| Well, as it happens I'm not, but I imagine it would be
| useful for people in general, and I'll promise you an
| upvote on HN if I see it. :)
|
| I imagine you can make a solid guide if you really focus it
| on the use case of "here's how to evaluate your site for
| this specific purpose".
| graypegg wrote:
| Noted! I sadly don't have much experience with the
| options for windows / linux flavours, but I'm sure
| something like NVDA [0] could be useful for you to test
| these things! The idea would be to learn the tool first,
| (feel at least capable to open the browser from your
| taskbar and jump around a few tabs for example. This is
| generally a 20min task.) then set up a few goals to do on
| your site. Finding a specific page, or making an account.
| Even with sight, and knowledge of your site, you'll very
| quickly hear the odd-ball places where the descriptions
| give duplicated info or even false info. Just don't touch
| the mouse! Experience the interface, as if this was your
| portal into the internet.
|
| I think I'll get moving on that cheat sheet then! Thanks
| eh! :)
|
| [0] https://www.nvaccess.org/download/
| alexb_ wrote:
| Good accessibility tip: Enable any accessibility options you
| need to, and then turn your monitor off. If you can't
| navigate your website, there's an issue.
| d-lisp wrote:
| In a sense OP wants E-ink screens and org/vimwiki/markdown.
| Styling is where the problem it claims to criticize begins; if
| you want a truly accessible hypertext book, then you don't need
| styling, the user should be in charge of this, and the default
| theme would be whatever easily readable font, black on white,
| headings 36pt bold, paragraphs 14pt regular, every elements as
| blocks. Epub, in usage, is actually a cool format and I almost
| prefer this type of "browsing" experience than what websites
| proposes.
|
| Or maybe OP wants higher level CSS and HTML, and this is a
| problem because this leads to the invention of a new language
| with yet another complex ontology that claims to be "simpler than
| its lower level counterpart" but is not. Of
| course you could create some markdown with basic styling options,
| but I am pretty sure learning basic html and css is not that more
| complex than learning that specific markdown and how to operate
| it to finally get a website served on a specific server.
|
| Web and styling became complex exactly when occurred the
| encounter between what was styling on the web in the 2000s, the
| emergence of the nowadays variety of devices that are able to
| browse it and the actual way people interacted with smartphones.
|
| Today our browsers are almost OSes and it's almost like the
| complexity of what you can share with them is superior than the
| complexity of you could create on a 1990 pc natively. I mean, you
| can run godot engine on your browser : you can develop prototypes
| of projects with your friends just for fun, create your own
| private platform for communicating with people you like.
|
| I notice a lot of hate toward JS, but honestly when I first
| stumbled upon it I felt like a dream came true; it gives you the
| power to create experiences and share them almost effortlessly,
| and the fact that bigTechs decided to make boring websites on
| crazy over-engineered frameworks doesn't change anything to this.
| soerxpso wrote:
| > I notice a lot of hate toward JS, but honestly when I first
| stumbled upon it I felt like a dream came true; it gives you
| the power to create experiences and share them almost
| effortlessly
|
| The complaints about JS are almost never about the concept of a
| programming language that runs in your browser, and the upside
| you describe seems to apply to any language that runs in your
| browser.
| d-lisp wrote:
| That's false, OP talks about that, many people wish the web
| to be static only and many people wants to be able to read
| pages "without js" and complain about the fact that they
| cannot read a page without js.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The only languages browsers should understand are markup
| languages, scripting and programming: no, none of that.
| Documents, not programs.
| marssaxman wrote:
| > it gives you the power to create experiences and share them
| almost effortlessly
|
| That's exactly where the hate comes from: I don't _want_ you,
| the web designer, to have the power to create experiences,
| because you (collectively) use that power to force experiences
| on me that I don 't want to have.
| d-lisp wrote:
| I didn't express myself as "the web designer" nor I implied
| that I wished to share experiences with you. What I meant is
| that I can share experiences to my friends via the browser,
| which act as a kind of a simple prototyping platform.
|
| I want the power to create experiences for some people I
| know, in a niche setting, without intentionally inviting
| anyone else.
| marssaxman wrote:
| Oh, well, that sounds fine! Sorry to mistake your meaning.
| I wish you could have gotten what you wanted in a way which
| did not have to change the fundamental nature of the web.
| nottorp wrote:
| Yeah, the problem is everyone and their mother are
| "creating experiences" instead of giving me the info I'm
| actually looking for...
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Don't visit the website
| getpokedagain wrote:
| I hope we can have a more reasoned debate than this. This
| topic is really important and frankly there's so much to it
| I hope that hearing others I can learn more.
|
| When I read some of the thread above what I am hearing is:
| "I don't want people to be able to run programs on my
| computer without asking explicitly". Which is exactly what
| the modern web and modern web browsers enable.
|
| If you learned computing in the 90's you were very much
| told not to install things you do not trust. Everyone
| remembers downloading some game from the internet and
| suddenly their OS was trashed via malware or non subtle
| virus. The modern web is essentially a giant way to
| circumvent that. Sure only your browser can get shitted up
| but its the same browser you do your finance in and has
| access to your GPU.
|
| Certainly it enables easy sharing of programs but so does
| something like java. Most OS's still recognize a .jar file
| as an executable and ask you about it before you can run.
| They never do that before javascript starts processing in
| your browser.
|
| There are several other issues here such as: - Many
| essential processes such as banking, medical records and
| education all rely upon the modern web paradigm at this
| point. One cannot simply access them on an e-reader or
| using a browser with javascript disabled. Are you saying
| you think that someone should be left uneducated or lack
| medicine if they don't like running an unsecured browser?
| Should those with privacy concerns just incur the cost of
| having one "safe" device and one they do their "interacting
| with the web" one? - The modern web sandbox includes very
| high access to sensitive things. Many people's file systems
| are from a cloud platform all of which malware in the
| browser can access for example. - The modern web can be
| highly performant but generally its not and requires ever
| increasing hardware cost simply to do things like read a
| book.
| TrololoTroll wrote:
| >Are you saying you think that someone > should be left
| uneducated or lack medicine if they don't like running an
| unsecured browser?
|
| ... As opposed to not liking to run an installer for an
| unsecured program?
|
| App stores have the same issue. You just juggle the trust
| from some third party to another third party
|
| If you want to do anything more complex than transfering
| text and images you'll need to trust a _lot_ of things
| getpokedagain wrote:
| Do I need to do anything more complex than exchange text
| and pictures to access my medical bills or records?
| marssaxman wrote:
| > If you want to do anything more complex than
| transfering text and images you'll need to trust a lot of
| things
|
| Yes, exactly; that's why I wish the web were still based
| on the transfer of text and images.
| takluyver wrote:
| Ironically, that decision to run Javascript without a
| prompt was probably a huge step forward for the security
| of most users. The 'do you trust this' model of security
| doesn't work well in practice once you can download
| programs from the internet - there's too much stuff you
| need to or want to trust to get on with things, and even
| if it's not actively malicious, it may be vulnerable.
|
| Because Javascript can run in the browser without the
| assumption that you completely trust it, browser
| developers have put a load of work into restricting what
| it can do, even within the browser. Of course, sometimes
| there are holes in the sandbox - nothing is perfect - but
| I think it's vastly better than giving any program you
| decide to run complete access to your computer.
|
| (Better for the majority, that is. If you're truly
| paranoid and have enough time, explicitly deciding what
| to trust can be better. But I think that's <1% of people
| - certainly not including me.)
| getpokedagain wrote:
| This argument makes sense for the security angle. At
| least as it pertains to getting malware on your local
| machine.
|
| But what about all of the "not security" but bad things
| that happen because we allow people to run code we have
| no choice over on our computer. The attention tracking
| features marked as tools to understand user intents are
| exfiltrating information from you perhaps when you don't
| expect.
|
| Are you happy for example for someone to be logging where
| on a screen you are sitting and reading within a book or
| video. Do you not find it problematic for example that
| you could purchase a subscription to medium, but medium
| finds out you pause your computer to read descriptions of
| guns? Would you mind if they then sold this knowledge to
| Glock who then showed these ads on your work computer?
|
| I get what you are saying for security. But "knowing" if
| and when something is happening is important. I may be
| worse or better at evaluating applications to run on my
| machine than the chrome team. But at least I know when I
| am entering into a risky situation.
| rchaud wrote:
| "Don't visit the website" is as simple as it needs to be.
|
| This is HN. 90% of the time, the nitpicking here isn't
| about computer security, bandwidth efficiency, free
| speech, or whatever the high-minded principle of the day
| might be. People nitpick because they don't like
| something about the website, full stop.
|
| It it wasn't the design, it would be the ideological bent
| of the writer. If not that, it would be annoyance as to
| why they put up an email signup form or use an analytics
| script, as if those aren't present on any of the other
| websites that are featured on the front page every day.
|
| I'd wager that a good chunk wouldn't be happy unless they
| can extract your article into their homemmade RSS reader.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| In real life you have even less freedom. There doesn't
| exist an equivalent of "reader mode" out in the streets.
| You can't mod reality or add a few scripts.
|
| Don't like the topology of a parking lot? Tough luck,
| either navigate it or don't park there.
|
| Hate the hospital's maze-like corridors? Sure they suck,
| but you are still getting operated there.
|
| Your department's bulletin board is an unorganized mess?
| I'm sure you'll not drop out because of that.
| lmm wrote:
| I visit it and use reader mode, it works pretty well most
| of the time. My browser works for me, not them. Shame about
| the bloated filesizes though.
| darepublic wrote:
| How is that different from native apps. I'd take the
| imposition of a website over the imposition to download a
| mobile app anytime
| paulddraper wrote:
| It doesn't. But on HN everything is terrible and get off my
| lawn.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| There's a difference between content that is meant to be
| communicated vs. "widgets" that do something on your screen.
| CSS wants to support widgets, therefore it is complex.
|
| Apps vs. Content. Web is for both but if you can and want to do
| just content it should be easy and simple.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > If you are spending less than $1 per hour on your entertainment
| (podcasts, videos, articles, games, books, etc.), consider
| finding ways to support creators and the infrastructure that
| supports them.
|
| So I should send them extra money because I keep using it? I
| bought the discography of a band (0.2665 EUR / hour according to
| last.fm so far, obviously falling), should I now set up a monthly
| donation just because I keep listening? It seems like advocating
| to only use subscriptions and never owning anything.
|
| This is such a weird take.
| surprisetalk wrote:
| If you get a lot of value from their music, you may want to
| support them via merch and concerts!
|
| I've found that "$1 per hour" is simply a good starting point
| for figuring out which things in my life are worth supporting.
| Obviously, it may be different for other people :)
| Semaphor wrote:
| Going to concerts is sadly not a "want to go" thing, but "is
| there anything that's close by", and I say that as someone
| living in a metal country like Germany.
| majewsky wrote:
| There are other ways besides subscriptions and ownership:
| Patronage is a big and popular one, through platforms like
| Steady or Patreon, or even just direct bank transfers. Another
| big one is commissions, though that's usually more of a thing
| with artists than with musicians or videomakers.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Yes, there are different ways to subscribe. And again, I find
| it extremely weird to be supposed to keep paying indefinitely
| because you keep using something you bought.
| toss1 wrote:
| It's not to keep using something you bought.
|
| It's because you value the artist, and want to support them
| continuing to make new things that you'll like in the
| future.
|
| Rapidly changing economic structures can strip away
| sufficient economic reward via the ordinary way of
| 'purchasing' things, such that continuing to make them is
| no longer viable. E.g., Spotify paying artists $3.3 per one
| thousand streams, but almost no one buying CDs.
|
| They are proposing ways -- in this environment -- to direct
| more of the funds directly to the creator, so that they can
| keep creating. But if continued creation is not of value to
| you, you are free to skip it.
| TeaDude wrote:
| I agree that we need a new - less crufty - standard to replace
| HTML/CSS/JS but there's another point which I feel has been
| sorely missed in previous efforts.
|
| I want a FUN standard. I want to make cool looking sites that are
| relatively scalable based on user hardware.
|
| Alternatives like Gopher and Gemini never really scratched that
| itch due to how sterile they are.
| squidbeak wrote:
| The problem will always be that 'fun' rapidly develops
| complexity to support 'cool looking'.
| jerf wrote:
| The problem you have is that by defining a "FUN" standard,
| you've probably created a basin of attraction [1] for what is
| basically the web today. It doesn't take much before you've
| basically let the ocean in.
|
| There are clearly many points between Gopher/Gemini and the
| modern web... but I'm not sure any of them are _stable_.
| Between the difficulty of keeping out features in a principled
| manner in what will inevitably become a group effort and how
| easy it is to accidentally spec something that turns out to be
| a lot more complicated than you thought it was, you 're pretty
| much working in a space where the Horrors of the Web are
| lurking just outside your door, and you'd be surprised which
| missteps will let them in.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor
| radiator wrote:
| This is very deep. I like this mathematical explanation of
| why we get either Gemini, which nobody uses, or the modern
| web.
| graypegg wrote:
| OH yeah, thank you for saying that. Gemini was a short 1 month
| obsession of mine. I just hit this brick wall of "... oh...
| this is it?".
|
| I do think HTML is a fun standard though. There's so much "big
| business productization" chained to it. Web companies announce
| updates to frameworks as if it's an apple keynote now. I think
| that gives a false impression of the "bones" of the web though.
| HTML/CSS is still fun! :) Nothing beats the visual-focus and
| short lag time between code->website in browser.
| graypegg wrote:
| I'm a bit conflicted, there's some really good points mixed in
| with some odd-ball hurdles that I don't think anyone benefits
| from jumping over.
|
| > Cheap to maintain: Most webpages should work indefinitely
| without falling over.
|
| YES, holy crap this is what I find most annoying about some of
| the things I've made recently. Moving between computers, bringing
| over old projects, and of course dependancies break down and rot.
| Why can't I start this Gatsby 3 app? Who knows, the install
| fails. Aggravating.
|
| > Cheap to leave: Opting-out of the web should be painless.
|
| The age of total anonymity on the web is gone I think. Even if
| you try to be totally anonymous, it's pretty advantageous to have
| successful online media tied to your name. That makes it pretty
| hard to opt-out. It's a good ideal to have though!
|
| > Cheap to access: Most websites should be compatible with
| screenreaders, etc.
|
| Machine readable information is a shallow measure of
| accessibility. Just because everything is labeled doesn't mean
| your website is usable. It's a whole interface you need to
| consider. I would reword as "Most websites should be usable with
| only a screenreader" or "assistive technology".
|
| > Cheap to participate: Interacting with the web should be
| possible on a Wii.
|
| ... what? An old, outdated, version of Opera?
|
| > Cheap to explore: Exploring the web should be pleasant on 1W of
| power.
|
| Why are we measuring power draw? Yeah your website can be intense
| enough to draw more power, but this just seems like an odd
| metric.
|
| > Cheap to contribute: Making/hosting websites should be easier
| than scrapbooking.
|
| Yeah, squarespace, wix, wordpress, etc... facebook?
| RetroTechie wrote:
| _> Cheap to explore: Exploring the web should be pleasant on 1W
| of power.
|
| Why are we measuring power draw? Yeah your website can be
| intense enough to draw more power, but this just seems like an
| odd metric._
|
| Regardless how you'd measure it, a pretty useful metric imho. A
| nice catch-all encompassing:
|
| Complexity of a website + efficiency of common software
| implementations + efficiency of common hardware platforms.
|
| Any content that requires a 'beefy' setup on client side to
| view (or consumes a lot of power doing so), _automatically_
| cuts a large chunk of potential audience.
| graypegg wrote:
| That is a fair point, maybe I'm thinking to concretely about
| it. Was imagining getting a kill-a-watt power meter, and
| making sure my OS + browser + a website is drawing less than
| 1W from the wall.
|
| What you're saying as a more all-encompassing "efficiency in
| general" metric makes sense.
| naglis wrote:
| The link to Marginalia in the "Explore" sidebar should be
| "marginalia.nu", unless this is some alternative Marginalia.
| surprisetalk wrote:
| Thanks! Fixed
| actionfromafar wrote:
| The font (because of the drop shadows I guess) looks jarring
| in dark mode.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| This is the standard tirade^W manifesto about how web users
| forced corporations to ruin the Web.
|
| Oh no. Why did you patron Walmart when you could have gone to
| your local mom&pops. That but for the Web. Petite bourgeoisie
| sentiment.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| What the hell does "petite bourgeoisie sentiment" even mean?
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Reading through I got this:
|
| - Cheap = a pain to read
|
| Good and modern visual design exists explicitly to deliver
| information to a person in the most accessible way. If you show a
| Japanese website to someone who grew up in Ireland, they will be
| overwhelmed. Not catering to different cultures, like the website
| suggests - only makes it worse.
|
| - Cheap = a lot of spam
|
| Having low cost of equipment and almost unlimited anonymity,
| makes fighting against spamming or "enshittification"
| exponentially hard. Just ask anyone who bothered to run their own
| mail server or open forum board. It's just not feasible for us to
| be able to have a nice experience without a level of trust.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| "Good" modern visual design barely exists at all according to
| that definition. Most modern web design exists to jam marketing
| in your eyeballs while drip-feeding information at the minimum
| rate to keep you from closing the tab, which is basically the
| opposite of "delivering information in the most accessible
| way".
|
| Also: The YouTube homepage uses twice the memory of the
| NicoNico homepage to show fewer thumbnails, and has basically
| been unchanged for years, while YouTube can barely resist
| keeping their layouts the same for a single month. Japanese web
| design has quite a few issues with being stuck in the 2000s but
| I'll take consistently bad over rolling the A/B testing dice
| every week to see what page I get.
| flpm wrote:
| Very interesting, thanks for posting!
|
| I am not sure if the way to go is a cheap web, small web, slow
| web, indie web, or maybe some combination of these attributes,
| but something about the current web feels off, mass produced and
| superficial.
|
| The old sites created by people who did cool stuff just for the
| sake of doing it are so hard to find now. I miss them.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| They're hard to find because they're not really linked
| anywhere. We used to have Web directories arranged by subject
| headings that tried to be mostly comprehensive and put some
| serious curation effort into that goal, such as DMOZ.org - but
| there's no modern equivalent to that. People like to complain
| about how the whole SEO issue has made search results useless
| as of late, but that if anything is downstream of the overall
| lack of manual curation.
| flpm wrote:
| That's so true, it's almost like a return to the beginning
| (Yahoo Web Directory). We need to find a way to curate
| content that scales but in a way that eliminates the
| incentive for bad actors to try SEO-like approaches to game
| the process.
|
| That feels impossible without a feasible alternative to the
| ad-based revenue model.
| HotGarbage wrote:
| I always thought search engines could go back to using
| titles, description, and meta tags, but limit the number of
| characters/meta tags accepted.
| Tomte wrote:
| Pinboard and similar bookmarking sites could play that
| role.
| ghaff wrote:
| Blogrolls, folksonomies (tags), etc. just pretty much
| faded away once the web really went mainstream. How many
| people ever really used lists on Twitter?
| rchaud wrote:
| Directories died because
|
| a) Websites change hands frequently and enshittify rapidly.
|
| b) Nobody was getting paid to check in on websites and make
| sure they were still on-topic
|
| c) Most 'good' websites don't update every day, and people
| hate RSS and email signups. So activity and engagement on
| those sites are completely overshadowed by the bottomless
| pit of content that is social media.
| joemi wrote:
| They're also hard to find now because the web has become so
| much more than what it was back then. So many more people and
| companies are on the web now, so _good_ smaller personal
| pages make up a much smaller percentage of what's out there.
| I think this might be a larger cause of this issue than less
| curation.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| That comment about a "simple markup language" is interesting -
| anyone know what OP is referring to? They mentioned they're
| attempting to build one.
| surprisetalk wrote:
| OP here!
|
| I've got a few different competing ideas at various stages of
| development.
|
| One idea builds on the programming language I'm building. I am
| growing more doubtful that it's going to provide the beginner-
| friendly experience I yearn for. It might be as easy as Elm one
| day, but that's not good enough for grandma.
|
| [1] https://scrapscript.org
|
| Another idea is like "markdown, but with a grid model". That
| one also does not feel very good right now.
|
| I've also been toying around with something called "BYOD"
| (bring your own data), where you stitch things together in a
| simple layout format. This ends up feeling like powerpoint via
| plaintext, and surprisingly pleasant.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| Love that - I also have a few competing ideas around
| something that sounds very similar. My goal is to create a
| textual interface that eschews traditional programming
| conventions in favor of a grammar and syntax that feels
| familiar to UI designers. I'm calling the overall effort
| "matry" - right now it's a language but that could change in
| the future: https://matry.design/
| fullstackchris wrote:
| I don't really get this point... HTML is not _that_
| complicated. I mean is:
|
| <h1>this</h1>
|
| <h2>this</h2>
|
| <h3>this</h3>
|
| really "more complex" than something like:
|
| # this
|
| ## this
|
| ### this
|
| You still need to know that '#' means header / title, and that
| more of them leads to a lower header level... and this is just
| for the most basic concept of web pages: headers. Okay, even if
| it's not markdown, no matter what system you cook up, the
| syntactic complexity to support the huge number of elements
| that exist in HTML has to live _somewhere_ right? (Yes, you can
| argue maybe not ALL of the 100+ HTML tags aren't needed, but
| probably most of them are!)
|
| While there is something to be said for mega purists who don't
| even like JavaScript, we're supposed to not even like HTML
| anymore either? I think at some point you have to accept that
| building things for the web involves some minimum level of
| complexity...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Agreed, pure semantic HTML5 with minimal (if any) CSS is
| pretty much equivalent to what Gemini and markdown are going
| for. HTML5 is also a proper standard unlike markdown, which
| exists in a variety of incompatible versions.
| surprisetalk wrote:
| Author here!
|
| If you haven't done it before, try teaching a non-programmer
| how to make and deploy a website. It's easy to forget where
| the sharp edges are because we cut ourselves on them so
| frequently.
|
| I've observed that HTML/CSS/JS sets a minimum level of
| complexity that is a non-starter for most people.
|
| I personally believe that most webpages could be written,
| arranged, and styled in formats easier than markdown (without
| a scripting language). But I could be wrong! Maybe nobody's
| done it yet because it's simply not possible haha
| axblount wrote:
| Has there been a serious attempt to define an html/css subset
| that achieves these kinds of goals? Something that a mere mortal
| could implement and would cover the vast majority of web designs?
|
| I understand the urge to throw out the old and replace it with a
| new system, but that would be a huge blow to accessiblilty and
| adoption.
| eitland wrote:
| I have been asking for a while if it could be a good idea to
| make something like asm.js but for webpages:
|
| Something to put in a meta tag or something early in the page
| that lets the browser know this webpage will only use a known-
| to-be-fast-and-predictable subset of html and css and only use
| js from a standardized library that provides things like
| autocomplete and other actually high value interactions.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| You don't need JS for basic autocomplete in 2023, you can use
| "datalist" in HTML: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/da...
|
| A _lot_ of basic high value interactions are more directly
| encoded in HTML today than a lot of developers expect to need
| JS for. Some other tags to pay attention to: summary
| /details, progress, meter, input
| type="color|date|time|datetime|range".
|
| It's an interesting relearning project, sometimes, how much
| the high level interactivity bits of HTML have changed since,
| for instance, the jQuery era.
| eitland wrote:
| > You don't need JS for basic autocomplete in 2023, you can
| use "datalist" in HTML:
|
| This does not seem to load data dynamically, it seems to be
| a way to show data from a predefined list?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Most "basic" autocomplete isn't all that dynamic and you
| can prepopulate on the server side reasonably well.
|
| Sure, you still need JS to fetch a dynamic changing list,
| but you can also just update datalist options elements
| with JS rather than implement a full separate UX for
| autocomplete today. You are limited in the ability to CSS
| style datalist options so a lot of developers are still
| going to feel pressure in 2023 from "pixel perfect" UX
| designers to continue to reimplement that wheel, but the
| version of the JS that just updates a datalist after a
| fetch is likely much simpler than building a full
| "autocomplete control".
| khimaros wrote:
| i'm interested in the answer to this question as well and did
| a bunch of searching a while back to no avail. maybe the
| world is waiting for us to start?
| khimaros wrote:
| maybe a good starting point would be the subset which is
| supported by dillo or elinks today?
| toastal wrote:
| This is why we should be using decentralized XMPP servers to chat
| since they actually run on potato hardware unlike other chat
| options.
| jacooper wrote:
| Matrix Homeservers like Synapse can run on anything now, and
| there is conduit which should be lighter too.
| olah_1 wrote:
| Last I checked, the way the protocol works still causes a
| huge amount of load for minimal usage. Because of the way
| events need to propagate and the types of events that
| propagate
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| Matrix is not lightweight or simple.
| systems_glitch wrote:
| IRC never died, you know :P
| rchaud wrote:
| Google Chat on my 2008 Blackberry (XMPP client) was the fastest
| IM experience I've ever had. I finally understood the meaning
| of "Crackberry" when I had that setup. The combination of the
| instantaneous speed and keyboard was something I haven't
| experienced since.
| oooyay wrote:
| > Cheap to maintain: Most webpages should work indefinitely
| without falling over.
|
| Simple HTML will do this, so long as a browser that supports that
| version of HTML and CSS is still around. A static Go binary
| serving dynamic HTML will do this. I struggle to imagine Python,
| Ruby, etc being able to accomplish this though. That's to say,
| I'm not sure that's a good rule or could use some reworking to
| make it more achievable.
| collaborative wrote:
| Once upon a time side bars and tool bars were made up of
| iframes that could talk to each other. Those sites wouldn't
| work today for "security reasons"
| dcreater wrote:
| Absolutely lovely read!! Honestly feels incredible to see other
| people feel the things I do when most people don't, don't care
| and don't want to care.
|
| Might be a nitpick, but the point is ruined by the god awful
| aesthetics of the page
| benrutter wrote:
| Weirdly I loved the aesthetics of the page. I know they are
| probably pretty terrible from a conventional design standpoint,
| but they're so full of personality it was a joy to look at!
| tshirthoodie wrote:
| > _As software rots, multinationals may become the only players
| capable of making websites._
|
| They are already the decision makers of who open source software
| is for.
|
| The thing people fail most at realizing is that you can't have a
| lot of rich people with a lot of power without having a lot of
| poor people with no power. The interests of the former will
| always effectively undermine the latter.
|
| Similarly, you can't have software that serves multinationals and
| regular people at the same time because the interests of the
| former will always effectively undermine the latter.
| zackmorris wrote:
| This is great! I can't really endorse most of the web
| "innovations" that have happened since the Dot Bomb. There was a
| time before FAANG when people with low technical knowhow could
| build something on the web and start earning enough residual
| income to pay their rent. Like the eBay store on The 40-Year-Old
| Virgin. Or the Mutiny BBS before that in Halt and Catch Fire. I
| did it with my business partner via shareware in the early 2000s.
| Even though the writing was on the wall even then that this was
| all going corporate.
|
| I think that things started going wrong when the anti-
| intellectual/anti-education movement gained prominence after 9/11
| in the push towards privatization and outsourcing. Before that,
| we could rely on publicly-funded academia to deliver techniques
| designed from first principles to decrease our workload.
|
| But since then, we seem to get leftovers like endless Javascript
| build pipelines handed down to us from the private sector. It's
| almost like best practices today are designed to mire a startup
| in endless red tape. While multinational corporations just throw
| money at it to create a billion dollar pair of scissors that we
| can't afford.
|
| The way to undo all of that is to do the opposite. Realize that
| our freedom and prosperity start with our tools and techniques.
| Find the underemployed exhausted people and give them any
| resources at all to design better stuff and then leave them
| alone. Start funding bottom-up and middle-out policies instead of
| waiting around for trickle-down economics to toss us more scraps.
| Don't let any one person become a cult of personality preaching
| how things should be. And stop worshipping capital and focus on
| getting actual resources (the most important being time) to the
| middle class through automation and recycling to avoid war. This
| stuff is so obvious and evident in history that the main
| challenge is to unlearn one's own programming to be able to
| perceive alternatives.
|
| Edit: we're talking about HTML not macroeconomic policy. But
| after spending my entire career having to do things the "easy"
| way because there's never any time or budget to do things the
| simple way, I view the complexities of the modern web and the
| barriers standing in the way of our self-actualization as one and
| the same.
|
| Edit 2: think scholarships, grants and UBI - not loans,
| investments and contests.
| jacobr wrote:
| There's a shift though, just the last couple of years. Today
| all browsers support native modals with the dialog element,
| accordions with details/summary, everything but Firefox
| supports popovers (dropdowns, tooltips, menus, etc) in plain
| HTML.
|
| I'd honestly love to be a beginner again learning modern HTML
| and CSS today, it's not bad at all.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| What is a slippy mindset? what does slippy mean in this context?
| is it an acronym or something? I couldn't find anything about it.
| sandywotsits wrote:
| There's a link from the page to here[0] and then out to
| here[1], which says...
|
| The tadi web is built with a slippy mindset. We try to be as
| 'slippy' as possible.
|
| _Being slippy means you're not stuck._
|
| When you're slippy, it's easy to change plan, or rebuild
| something from scratch. It means you're not locked in to using
| a certain tool.
|
| If something breaks, you can choose to fix it, or let it die.
| It's ok, because it won't take long to rebuild it from scratch.
|
| Every time you grow back, you'll be a bit different. You might
| be stronger. Or you might be better equipped for your changing
| needs.
|
| [0]: https://www.todepond.com/wikiblogarden/tadi-web/ [1]:
| https://www.tadiweb.com/
| benrutter wrote:
| I love this. I've seen a lot of similar "use HTML as HTML" type
| things recently (probably a lot coming from the HATEOAS crowd).
|
| I'm not a web developer, and I really don't understand how we've
| ended up in this state where:
|
| - web starts as a means to share documents, HTML is built around
| that
|
| - eventually people want to build general applications (a la
| google docs) so they build tools that let you build non-document
| things by pretending they're documents
|
| - everyone thinks those tools are great and starts using them
|
| - 90% of the web is still documents, but now its all built in
| frameworks where you build a non-document by pretending its a
| document, even though in actuality, we're normally just building
| a document in the first place.
|
| The whole thing is a batshit crazy mess and I don't understand
| how as a global engineering culture we view it as anything other
| than completely insane.
| nosefurhairdo wrote:
| HATEOAS = Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State (in
| case this saves a search).
|
| The JavaScript tools for building web applications are nice
| when used correctly. I can't imagine the product I work on
| would be easier to build with HTMX, but perhaps I'm ignorant. I
| wonder though, are there more enjoyable, non-web UI engines out
| there? Given that web app UI was glued together on top of a
| document sharing platform, it makes me think native UI dev
| should be more coherent.
| worldofmatthew wrote:
| I'm guessing Cheap does not count for the blog post with no
| included image weighting over 1MB....... 315KB for HTML and looks
| like your "favicon.ico" is literally a copy of the webpage...
| its-summertime wrote:
| The images are embedded into the CSS.
| worldofmatthew wrote:
| I mean the blog post itself has no images.
| butz wrote:
| What a breath of fresh air is browsing simple websites, where
| content in mainly text and images are sparingly used. All
| "modern" websites are so tiring. Now if website pops up anything
| on screen on first visit, be it newsletter signup, login request
| or just huge image covering whole viewport, I just switch to
| reader view.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| If I can't close it immediately and resume I right-click->Block
| Element. If doing that leaves the page unusable, I usually just
| click off. I'm with you, the web today is exhausting and feels
| hostile to the user in most cases.
| DevAbdul wrote:
| cs professors are happy with this. this is what their "personal
| site" envisions
| sam0x17 wrote:
| I do wish we could go back to how things were in the early 00s
| where view source on any page was extremely telling and would
| show you cleanly formatted code.
|
| Another huge reason for the status quo is a lot of companies
| actively try to obfuscate their frontend code for a variety of
| reasons, and a lot unwittingly do it as part of minification to
| squeeze out a little bit of extra efficiency both in terms of
| payload size and parsing time for clients (every token counts!).
|
| That said, I would love a world where the de-jure frontend syntax
| was less ambiguous to the point where minification is essentially
| a lossless operation other than the actual names of things.
|
| At the browser level we have to make the decision: do we want
| clients to be able to figure exactly what is running in their
| browser? If the answer is no, the current situation is great, if
| the answer is yes, the current situation is pretty bleak, and
| will actually get bleaker with the advent of WASM-based payloads
| where we now need to disassemble on top of everything else.
| FerretFred wrote:
| > view source on any page was extremely telling
|
| Yeah! This was basically how I taught myself to write effective
| HTML. Great fun!
| joemi wrote:
| > to the point where minification is essentially a lossless
| operation other than the actual names of things.
|
| Is that not the case now? I don't do a lot with javascript
| myself, but I always assumed the minification process wasn't
| changing the code itself.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Has anyone proposed CommonMark over HTTP? Like, just shove
| markdown in a GET response with Content-Type:
| text/markdown
|
| And let the client decide how to render it. It'd be like Gopher,
| but modern.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Does Gemini[0] look interesting to you?
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
| arp242 wrote:
| Gemini isn't over HTTP and it's not Markdown.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Gemini is like modern Gopher, but it is also very
| opinionated. The protocol does not support extensions and
| revision, it refuses HTTP, mandates TLS, etc...
|
| That's not the same as having browsers support the markdown
| content type.
| ssss11 wrote:
| "But but but.. how do we shove ads everywhere and track the
| targets?"
| lagniappe wrote:
| That's the philosphy behind Markus Docnet
|
| https://github.com/markusdocnet
| xigoi wrote:
| Could we go with a format that doesn't have so much unnecessary
| complexity?
| lmm wrote:
| Good luck getting the browsers to implement anything so useful.
| They won't even update their default stylesheets.
|
| I set up my blog with that kind of mentality - I just want to
| write some markdown and have the browser render it whatever way
| it needs to - and found a one-liner to pull in some Javascript
| to do that. But the kind of people who like this stuff tend to
| hate Javascript, so I get it from both sides.
| max-throat wrote:
| I've had this idea for something in between Gemini and the modern
| web that's essentially supposed to capture how the web was in the
| late 90s/early 00s. Basically just HTML/CSS with GET and POST, no
| scripting at all.
|
| I don't have the expertise to write this, unfortunately.
| karmakaze wrote:
| > Unfortunately, the HTML source for Apple.com is not so
| "beautiful on the inside", but Apple engineers shouldn't be
| faulted for ugly HTML. Their only option was to wrap a sleek skin
| around shoddy materials.
|
| Can ChatGPT et al make good beautiful HTML/CSS pages? Or take an
| existing one and actually beautify it?
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