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I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

theguardian.com

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Re: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

#22
If Tim Berners-Lee really wanted to save the web, he wouldn't support DRM in our web standards.[1] It's absolutely disgusting as well that they would argue that "fake news" is somehow a threat to the internet, provide no evidence whatsoever to explain why, and then link to a panel run by a media company considered untrustworthy by about half of American voters.[2]

[1] https://www.w3.org/blog/2017/02/on-eme-in-html5/

[2] http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/gene...

Re: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

#23

If Tim Berners-Lee really wanted to save the web, he wouldn't support DRM in our web standards.[1] It's absolutely disgusting as well that they would argue that "fake news" is somehow a threat to the internet, provide no evidence whatsoever to explain why, and then link to a panel run by a media company considered untrustworthy by about half of American voters.[2] [1] https://www.w3.org/blog/2017/02/on-eme-in-html5/…

Agreed. He should have clearly opposed this EME garbage, instead of endorsing it.

Re: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

#24
post #2

I would truly love a new "web" which is effectively style-free. I think the existing one is fine to continue for the general public, online shopping, social networks, etc.. but a parallel information-dense system that uses ultra light weight browsers that work on every device and platform, accessing machine-readable data with some standard stylesheet that concentrates in readability, and the "good" bits of the modern…

Vannevar Bush had this kind of idea back in the 40s. I'd love it.

Re: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that the author doesn't realize nobody else wants this, or people would be styling their sites like that.

The rise of "readability" features appears to differ with your assessment.

Readability is driven by (a minority of) consumers. The fact of the matter is that if the producers want to deliver crap by default, they will deliver crap by default.

Creating a new thing for producers to use when they could just do that with their existing medium changes nothing.

It's like devising new receptacles for discarding unused apple cores so people don't throw them on the ground. It's not going to help. People don't litter apples because they have to.

Re: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

#26

If Tim Berners-Lee really wanted to save the web, he wouldn't support DRM in our web standards.[1] It's absolutely disgusting as well that they would argue that "fake news" is somehow a threat to the internet, provide no evidence whatsoever to explain why, and then link to a panel run by a media company considered untrustworthy by about half of American voters.[2] [1] https://www.w3.org/blog/2017/02/on-eme-in-html5/…

Yes, and he wouldn't endorse WebAssembly either (which is just a different, and even worse avenue towards DRM).

Re: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

#27
post #2

I would truly love a new "web" which is effectively style-free. I think the existing one is fine to continue for the general public, online shopping, social networks, etc.. but a parallel information-dense system that uses ultra light weight browsers that work on every device and platform, accessing machine-readable data with some standard stylesheet that concentrates in readability, and the "good" bits of the modern…

There's already a proliferation of minimally styled sites and blogs like this one. There's also a proliferation of tools—particularly static site generators—that are meant for creating that kind of site. Finally, there's a proliferation of browsers that "work on every device and platform." (Admittedly, they're not lightweight, but they're not that bad if the sites are lightweight.)

Can you elaborate on what creating a parallel, information-dense system would achieve? I mean, I agree the web could be more efficient and lighter weight, but there's nothing stopping us from doing that on the web.

Re: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

#30
post #6
post #2

I would truly love a new "web" which is effectively style-free. I think the existing one is fine to continue for the general public, online shopping, social networks, etc.. but a parallel information-dense system that uses ultra light weight browsers that work on every device and platform, accessing machine-readable data with some standard stylesheet that concentrates in readability, and the "good" bits of the modern…

I work on Beaker Browser. Version 0.7 will have markdown sites. Here's what that looks like: https://twitter.com/pfrazee/status/840228255529590784 If you ask a layman to differentiate between "the browser" and Facebook, they might not know the difference. In a lot of ways, Facebook is a browser for a set of content types like posts, videos, business pages, etc. Same logic applies to say YouTube: it's a specialized "s…

Could Beaker be distributed as a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome?
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