mastodon - Link to source

I long for a world wide web that goes back to basics: Markdown for text, JPEG or PNG for images, *no* Javascript or other client-side execution, designed to be writable by a human being with a simple text editor and no fucking interactive/dynamic bullshit. Make it as advertising hostile as possible. And above all keep it *small* (as in: a large, sprawling web site should fit on 16Mb USB stick).

In other words, web like it's 1996 again.

Esta entrada fue editada (anteayer, 20:25)
in reply to 🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄)
pleroma - Link to source

LisPi

@alice @ArthurClemens XHTML5, purged from the JavaScript support nonsense, actually does a good job of providing the majority of the improvements (insofar as one's user agent is adequate).

Aside from that, as paperclip optimizer (in this case, capital/profit) hazards, we should purge corporations.

@🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄) @Arthur Clemens
in reply to 🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄)
mastodon - Link to source

Raven667

@🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄) @Arthur Clemens
in reply to Charlie Stross
mastodon - Link to source

🔏 Matthias Wiesmann

In 1996, I could copy-paste vector graphics, sounds, animations and even 3D models…

wiesmann.codiferes.net/wordpress/archives/41198

Peak copy paste

One of the most refreshing feature I discovered when my parents bought a Mac classic was copy-paste. My computing experience had been framed by the Commodore 64, where exchanging data between progr…
Thias (Thias の blog)
in reply to Colman Reilly
mastodon - Link to source

Wordstitcher

@Colman
Glad to hear it. Most people have no idea what makes websites work. I do Wordpress sites too, but I don't mess with the code. HTML is easy to fix when there's a screw up - WP is anything but. Fighting with WP minor glitch now with no end in sight. Often it's something stupid and simple - and there are several ways of approaching it, but coding isn't one of them.
@Colman Reilly
in reply to MidgePhoto
mastodon - Link to source

Wordstitcher

@Photo55
I've looked at Bluefish, but it's needlessly complicated and is not wysiwyg. Kompozer (ver 0.7.10 - not the last one) is easy to use, you can see results immediately, tweak it easily, plus there's a tab for the code if you wish to edit that way - as I do sometimes.
I have a WP sub domain I use for video links that Kompozer can't do well.
Simple is still best.
@MidgePhoto
in reply to toolbear#🌶️
snac - Link to source

eeeeeeeeee(mma)

offtopic: suckless are nazis

Yeah :/

I really hate it too, because I have been really inspired by their technical ideas. And, I've personally been emailing FRIGN since before I had any inkling that suckless had this all going on... He's been nothing but good to me, so I'd like to eventually confront him about this mess.

Did you at least try my project 🥺

eeeeeeeeee(mma) (@em@fed.y1.nz)

Please, suckless, just put a "Fuck nazis and fuck fascists" on your website. I'm begging you, you have such good ideas but no one is going to see them unless you do that. The public perception is that you're nazis.
fed.y1.nz
in reply to Colman Reilly
mastodon - Link to source

Tim Chase

@Colman

The problem is that 99.99999% of websites (I might be missing a few more 9s after the decimal point) do *not* use it suitably.

They clutter the page with adverts. They choose fonts (whether font-face, font-size, or color/background-color pairs) that I find unreadable. They have popovers. They do cookie-notification overlays. They do subscribe-to-our-mailing-list overlays. They obscure content on scroll to try and get me to become a paying member. They mine minuscule pence of cryptocurrency using my CPU. They collect my machine/browser/cookie/screen stats to make super-cookies and sell my info to advertising brokers. They auto-play videos. My CPU jumps to 100% on multiple cores just to view a primarily-text article. The vast majority of web security issues come from scripting.

So yeah, if burning all that down would cost me the tiny bit UI/UX "improvement" in the rare cases that it actually improves? I'd make the trade in a heartbeat.

@cstross

@Charlie Stross @Colman Reilly
in reply to Charlie Stross
mastodon - Link to source

Jon

2027-01-01: MiniWeb deployed
2027-01-13: Arguments on best added markup to indicate BLINK peak on MiniReddit
2027-01-15: Markdown Dialect Wars begin
2027-02-03: MarkdownAI closes $273 billion funding round
2027-02-19: Advocates for a simpler TextWeb recommend returning to Usenet markup in USASCII
2027-02-21: UKASCII partisans invade TextWeb discussion forum and £ people they disagree with
...

(1/2)

in reply to Jon
mastodon - Link to source

Jon

Hilariously / sadly, our specification document generation pipeline turns asciidoc into HTML5 for publication on our docs site. Then the catering-to-LLMs pipeline someone thought was a good idea turns the HTML5 into Markdown, so that the LLM can consume it and help people avoid using our docs site at all. I thought "AI"s were supposed to be good at stuff like consuming HTML5 but no. (2/2)
Esta entrada fue editada (anteayer, 20:45)
in reply to Roche Limit
mastodon - Link to source

rcosta

@rochelimit If you're interested in Smallweb, Fediverse and Gemini Protocol look:

archaeo.social/@adele@social.pollux.casa

Adële provide gemini capsules free hosting, creating automatically a html version of your capsule for the www:

pollux.casa/

If your're interested in a good CLI browser/client that supports html and also less common protocols (Gemini, Gopher, Spartan, Finger) you can try Offpunk:

archaeo.social/@rcosta/116556782206014167

RE: archaeo.social/ap/users/115949846129131206/statuses/116556782206014167

rcosta (@rcosta@archaeo.social)

Attached: 1 image Offpunk 🖥️♥️ Browse WWW (HTML), Gemini, Gopher, Spartan, Finger, subscribe RSS feeds, Atom and render images as ANSI/Unicode characters in your terminal. The commands are basic and intuitive.
rcosta (archaeo.social)
@Roche Limit
Esta entrada fue editada (anteayer, 21:16)
in reply to Charlie Stross
glitchsoc - Link to source

☭ Ellie Winters ☭

a while back i made a quick site with just html (and iirc maybe minimal to none css), all something that can be done in notepad or vim or whatever you use, with gifs for pictures, was literally trying to get the 90d aesthetic to the point i made it compatible with old win95 IE versions. slight issues: i literally only had hosting sites like github cuz i dont wanna pay for domains, i already have a vps, just not the domain, and it looks shit on larger displays. no scaling, a site made for 640x480, and doesnt get any bigger for modern 1080p or 4k displays

maybe i should do it all again and fix the latter issues

also must i add the entire thing including images in visuals, and an entire copy of the site but text only for anyone using terminal browsers, literally only weighed in at a few kilobytes, you could fit that on an early 5 1/4 floppy disk

Esta entrada fue editada (anteayer, 20:52)
in reply to WERNERPRISE° /// KI-frei seit 2004
mastodon - Link to source

✶Rayotron✶

@wernerprise
Webp and avif aren't useable on older computers and operating systems. Most of these computers are still fully internet capable except Google, Microsoft, Apple, and even Linux are forcing us to buy new ones just so we can see webp, avif and such. I really hate webp and avif because I'm constantly having to turn them into jpegs and mp4s. Why should hundreds of millions of good computers go into the trash just so people can see webp and avif?
@WERNERPRISE° /// KI-frei seit 2004
Esta entrada fue editada (anteayer, 22:07)
in reply to ✶Rayotron✶
mastodon - Link to source

WERNERPRISE° /// KI-frei seit 2004

@rayotron

I see your point, but there’s lots of Linux distros specifically designed with the old computer in mind and still regularly updated. Which is equally important for security reasons. But hey, that’s me, maybe I’m wrong.

@cstross

@Charlie Stross @✶Rayotron✶
in reply to Charlie Stross
mastodon - Link to source

rcosta

"Markdown for text" totally agree, some kind of human readable standard inspired in Markdown. Gemtext markup language (Gemini) is great for people that publish essays, tales, personal journals or links. Sucks at the rest. Colored text, emphasis and image support are very basic or nonexistent.

Gemtext is simple = Great
Gemtext is also VERY simple = Bad

gemtext.hexdocs.pm/Gemtext.html

Gemtext — Gemtext v0.2.0

gemtext.hexdocs.pm
in reply to Charlie Stross
mastodon - Link to source

NorfolkGreg

You'll like:
gregchapman.uk/winrecorder/index.htm
then!
🙂


[Edit]There's a bit of explanation at:
gregchapman.uk/sundry/

Windows Recorder Home Page

Find out how to use the Windows 3.x Recorder Utility. Beginners Guide, Tips and Tricks etc. Macro Files to Download.
gregchapman.uk
Esta entrada fue editada (anteayer, 22:50)
in reply to Charlie Stross
mastodon - Link to source

mhd

I'd like to have something for cross-page navigation, though. You can easily do a table of contents for the current page by just parsing the headline hierarchy (still surprised that this was/is rare in HTML browsers), but I don't think there's something good in there for doing that across pages.

That's where a lot of effort was wasted throughout the web. From HTML frames to Java/flash tree widgets, to repeating all that with JS. Give me some kind of simple "nav" structure or sitemap include, and the browser/user could decide how to display it.

in reply to Charlie Stross
mastodon - Link to source

Yolfen🐾 🦯

I definitely wouldn't mind going back to a world where most people didn't give a damn about whatever was happening on the internet, leaving the rest of us the hell alone. I don't think we can go back though; I don't think there are enough who want to do the work of decoupling from Web2.0/3.0.
in reply to Charlie Stross
mastodon - Link to source

FluffyLizard

lmao, I remember starting web programming back in those days, as a teen, and wanting to add all sorts of silly stuff to my website. GIFs, a few JS and CSS tricks, etc. Then I learned PHP, and more stuff followed.

We take a lot of that for granted when we say we miss the simplicity. From the backend, it wasn't quite as simple.

Nowadays vanilla languages can do a lot more. I do wish we dropped some frameworks, though.

in reply to Charlie Stross
mastodon - Link to source

Dimly Lit Corners

imho….

Inline pictures were a mistake, let *images* be loaded in a proper image viewer when asked.

Inline tables were a mistake, let *tables* open in a proper spreadsheet viewer when asked

Stop emulating paper!! Use multiple overlapping windows!!!

Webpages should NEVER have been allowed to load files from other websites.
Allowing webpages to load objects from arbitrary locations enabled advertising.
Absolute URLs are exclusively for hyperlinks to other webpages/sites.

Esta entrada fue editada (ayer, 6:26)
in reply to Dimly Lit Corners
mastodon - Link to source

Dimly Lit Corners

also…

Read-only browsers killed what the web could've been as originally envisioned….

Per website style design was a terrible UX and accessibility mistake

#Stylesheets should've been something you install in your own browser such that "the web" would have the uniform look and feel you prefer.

Making the web primary server/client while having to rent a domain name, a server, & a certificate made the web stillborn

Dropping RSS support killed the first revival of the web in its crib

#stylesheets
in reply to Charlie Stross
mastodon - Link to source

Hans Gerwitz

So many replies talking about Gemini here! I find it not quite what I want (needs to allow *some* author design) but all this enthusiasm convinced me to finally launch into Geminispace:
chaos.social/@gerwitz/117342022796131653

Hans Gerwitz (@gerwitz@chaos.social)

I finally have a proper Gemini capsule: gemini://hans.gerwitz.com/ #gemini #gemproto
Hans Gerwitz (chaos.social)
in reply to Charlie Stross
friendica - Link to source

Elena ``of Valhalla''

@Charlie Stross I'm a bit conflicted about the 16 MB limit

For text based content like your blog that's quite a bit, and there are a lot of things that are naturally text based.

But for the craft-adjacent websites I read, images are an important part of the content, and reducing their size via more efficient compression would be fine, but anything that reduces the image quality, be it by making the image smaller, adding visible compression artifacts, significantly reduce the number of colours etc. would make the website less useful.

@Charlie Stross
in reply to Charlie Stross
mastodon - Link to source

Yorci, a hiking picture taker.

It is not just the World Wide Web that could do with having the clock wound back. Customer services could do with going back in time. People no longer have time to deal with people. Instead they would rather use extensive list of predefined options we have to cycle through in the hope we are directed to the correct department. Then we end up in a queue waiting to be served, often to find that they cannot or will not help resolve our issue.
in reply to Charlie Stross
mastodon - Link to source

Yorci, a hiking picture taker.

There are also the bots we have to deal that does not understand a basic question and cannot resolve our query.
Those who invented and introduced these options want the same pay or more, for less work, or to avoid work altogether.
Is this culture and values something they get from their parents? Where do they get this ideology of progression from?
I'd like to see a time where electrical and mechanical devices aid and improve work, not impede it, and make a job or task more difficult.
in reply to lord pthenq1
mastodon - Link to source

Charlie Stross

@pthenq1 Your static website is presumably generated from a bunch of input data by an application that adds the HTML affordances, eg. links, styles, graphics. That's a CMS. All you're doing is ditching the *dynamic* (i.e. runs the CMS every time someone clicks a link) version, which is vastly more CPU-intensive.
@lord pthenq1
in reply to Charlie Stross
mastodon - Link to source

Stephen Bannasch (316 ppm)

And of course you don’t even need to use html. A plain text file displays fine in a browser.

ruby.social/@stepheneb/117328869751077860

Stephen Bannasch (316 ppm) (@stepheneb@ruby.social)

@Wallflower@beige.party … sigh … most things are ok enough … definitely don’t feel “ruined” … but there is so much that’s hard … and for me a great deal of that feeling is how much harder it is for family and other folks I care deeply for … This i…
Stephen Bannasch (316 ppm) (Ruby.social)
Esta entrada fue editada (ayer, 13:37)
in reply to Pau Amma
mastodon - Link to source

Deborah

@pauamma sure, why not. let’s go back to the arguments about whether HTML should always be semantic and yelling at people about `em` and `strong`. Let’s kill modals and have surprise browser windows popping up everywhere. It’s worth it to kill autoplay overlay video, constant tracking, and ad auctions.
@Pau Amma