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A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

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Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#41

Post by coding123 »

jerkstate wrote: post #37
coding123 wrote: post #35

My wife gets increasingly pissed off when she searches for various materials she wants to purchase. A specific site keeps coming up for her that she absolutely hates and starts with an E. And there's nothing special about the links, and likely nothing important about the specific products other than the domain name that starts with E has billions of cross-links all over the web. It makes the random long-tail search t…

I have a similar problem with SEO for recipes. There are tons of recipes SEO'd to a certain site that has a registration/paywall that frequently appear at the top of search results. Luckily they are relatively easy to avoid in the search results.

We have installed a few blockers in chrome to help with the mess, but no luck for my phone's browser which she uses quite a bit too.

It's just sad that all content for a given domain of interest is quickly aggregating on just a few domain names.

Also as a non-facebook user I am so saddened by the user experience facebook gives to people that are trying to look at a Restaurant menu where the idiotic restaurant decided to put their site up on Facebook. No employee of facebook or 66% of the users are going to complain about entering a Facebook CAPTCHA every damn-f-ing time because they are all logged in already.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#42

Post by chubot »

coding123 wrote: post #35

My wife gets increasingly pissed off when she searches for various materials she wants to purchase. A specific site keeps coming up for her that she absolutely hates and starts with an E. And there's nothing special about the links, and likely nothing important about the specific products other than the domain name that starts with E has billions of cross-links all over the web. It makes the random long-tail search t…

Hm, what about searching Amazon? Or Bing or Duck Duck Go? Do they have the same problems?

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#43

Post by austincheney »

If you really want to rescue the web find a way to restrict adware, spyware, and the like. I upgraded internet at my house to 1gbps (about 890mbps down and 920mbps up) and I hardly notice any speed difference surfing the web. Sad. Everything else is fast as hell though.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#44

Post by ashark »

unit91 wrote: post #31
ashark wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML with great default styles and better built-in form and interactive elements (date picker, sortable tables) would be ideal. Screw CSS, it slows everything down, just have good defaults and don't let pages mess with them much. If we must have CSS at least jettison the complex parts with animation and such. Make it very, very simple and weak. No Javascript. Can't be trusted if it has the ability to initiate connect…

> it'd feel lightning fast compared to what we have now I disagree with this completely. So much of what JS does is increase the (perceived) speed and sanity of the user experience. For example, in a scriptless world, your HN up/down vote can't be done without a full page load, which would come with the added headache of changing the state of the world on your page because stories and comments have changed their orde…

> I disagree with this completely. So much of what JS does is increase the (perceived) speed and sanity of the user experience. For example, in a scriptless world, your HN up/down vote can't be done without a full page load, which would come with the added headache of changing the state of the world on your page because stories and comments have changed their ordering. Solution? Return of the chronological thread (no thanks).

Counterpoint: when JS/Ajax-free versions of sites are available, they're usually faster in practice. Gmail, Google Calendar. Tried them in their low- to no-AJAX versions lately? I use basic HTML gmail because I got friggin' sick of how slow AJAXy gmail and Inbox were on my stupid-fast MacBook. For the specific case of upvotes on HN, IIRC this would be solvable with the appropriate 2xx response (I forget which), signaling success but not triggering a page load, without requiring any modification to current web clients. Obviously this hypothetical user-focused web successor would be well served by more flexible linking options (more method support, mostly) and built-in form capabilities—which happen to be things the current web really ought to have too, for that matter—but I don't think HTTP itself would need to change.

IMO email and chat with notifications and such belong in their own programs, if you want stuff like live notifications instead of a static page. I'd rather bloat and code that can communicate with the outside world when I haven't specifically told it to not be included with my document browser, because it makes every operation on said browser slower, (way) less safe, and less predictable.

Or hey, how about RSS/Atom for new mail notifications?

> I don't know if you are old enough to remember webmail when the refresh button was how you checked for new mail.

I was on the web well before Gmail existed, so yes, I remember the bad old days of webmail before AJAX. Most of the improvements we've seen in it would be served about as well by smarter, better client-provided form elements, and some other, smaller modifications to the client side, save update pushes. I don't think what we've gained from mixing traditional web stuff with the huge set of things a page might now do to/for you with Javascript and CSS has been even close worth the cost in trust, security, privacy, and predicability. Quarantine that stuff somewhere else, plzkthx.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#45

Post by zeveb »

unit91 wrote: post #31
ashark wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML with great default styles and better built-in form and interactive elements (date picker, sortable tables) would be ideal. Screw CSS, it slows everything down, just have good defaults and don't let pages mess with them much. If we must have CSS at least jettison the complex parts with animation and such. Make it very, very simple and weak. No Javascript. Can't be trusted if it has the ability to initiate connect…

> it'd feel lightning fast compared to what we have now I disagree with this completely. So much of what JS does is increase the (perceived) speed and sanity of the user experience. For example, in a scriptless world, your HN up/down vote can't be done without a full page load, which would come with the added headache of changing the state of the world on your page because stories and comments have changed their orde…

> For example, in a scriptless world, your HN up/down vote can't be done without a full page load

You're incorrect. The up/down vote can be a form POST, which receives a 204 No Content in response. The only thing one would lose would be the change in the vote arrow.

Even that could be achieved in a world in which HTML allows PUTs: PUT to the page URL the specific bytes required to select an arrow, and return a 204 No Content or 206 Partial Content. In the first case the browser would know exactly which bytes to update, because it PUT them; in the second it'd know exactly which bytes to update, because the server sent them.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#46

Post by mr_spothawk »

soared wrote: post #33
quickben wrote: post #28

Funny. Before DRM, spam, i-have-to-monetize daily 5 minute of bloging into a full time pay, unskipable 30s YouTube ads, profiling every possible user behavior and other shady shit like that: We wondered how can we improve the web. Now, we wonder how to save it.

Spam, scams, and bad ads have been around since the start, what internet were you using?

Spam, scams and badvertizements have been around seemingly since long before the internet.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#47

Post by tzs »

unit91 wrote: post #31
ashark wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML with great default styles and better built-in form and interactive elements (date picker, sortable tables) would be ideal. Screw CSS, it slows everything down, just have good defaults and don't let pages mess with them much. If we must have CSS at least jettison the complex parts with animation and such. Make it very, very simple and weak. No Javascript. Can't be trusted if it has the ability to initiate connect…

> it'd feel lightning fast compared to what we have now I disagree with this completely. So much of what JS does is increase the (perceived) speed and sanity of the user experience. For example, in a scriptless world, your HN up/down vote can't be done without a full page load, which would come with the added headache of changing the state of the world on your page because stories and comments have changed their orde…

> For example, in a scriptless world, your HN up/down vote can't be done without a full page load, which would come with the added headache of changing the state of the world on your page because stories and comments have changed their ordering. Solution? Return of the chronological thread (no thanks).

I don't see why it would have to change the state of the world on your page. Sites like HN in a scriptless client world would still be programmatically generated on the server, and presumably could still keep track of state via cookies or via adding parameters to links when they generate the page.

Up/down vote could reload the same view you had before voting, with only the effects of your vote added.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#48

Post by niftich »

romaniv wrote: post #10

The reason the Web needs rescuing is because it's not a particularly well-designed system that has been patched over and over again for the last quarter century. And now it has been degraded to a delivery layer for JavaScript apps, a poor RPC protocol and an overly complex UI rendering toolkit. It should have had protocol-level technologies for preserving historic data, for search, for offline use, for authoring and…

> protocol-level technologies for preserving historic data, for search, for offline use, for authoring and publishing

It does [1][2][3]. It's not the most elegant, it's not without flaws, but it's there, and enough to build against. Proprietary services weren't bound by having to code against a standard, so they cranked out something quick (and mutually incompatible), skinned an attractive interface, offered it for free (!) and attracted lots of users, who in turn attracted more users with the network effect. This is why Facebook, Wikipedia, Google Docs, Github won, and protocols like WebDAV lost.

This future was crafted by the makers of web browsers themselves: first by shifting the focus onto rendering arbitrary mediatypes delivered by HTTP from focusing on the intrinsic builtins of HTTP as a protocol, and later by trying to "standardize" the rich interactivity offered by the likes of Shockwave, Flash, and Silverlight, creating more and more APIs inside the browser that allowed client-side Javascript to communicate with the underlying system. Web developers aren't blameless, but today's web is exactly how Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft, in reverse order, steered it since the late 1990s.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4918 [2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3253 [3] https://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link-relatio...

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#49

Post by pjmlp »

unit91 wrote: post #31
ashark wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML with great default styles and better built-in form and interactive elements (date picker, sortable tables) would be ideal. Screw CSS, it slows everything down, just have good defaults and don't let pages mess with them much. If we must have CSS at least jettison the complex parts with animation and such. Make it very, very simple and weak. No Javascript. Can't be trusted if it has the ability to initiate connect…

> it'd feel lightning fast compared to what we have now I disagree with this completely. So much of what JS does is increase the (perceived) speed and sanity of the user experience. For example, in a scriptless world, your HN up/down vote can't be done without a full page load, which would come with the added headache of changing the state of the world on your page because stories and comments have changed their orde…

Users don't have any idea what they want.

They weren't the ones creating Ajax to try to fit Outlook into the browser, and everything that came after that.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#50

Post by mr_spothawk »

whimful wrote: post #2

scuttlebutt is my main social media these days... oh and in case you're looking for git that's not wedded to github via your comments and issues, scuttlebutt plays really well with git - you push comments and code into your gossip-cloud together

likewise, scuttlebutt is my primary digital social resource, and the #solarpunk community generally is incredibly inspiring to me.
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