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The "Cheap" Web

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Re: The "Cheap" Web

#81

Post by d-lisp »

soerxpso wrote: post #70
d-lisp wrote: post #18

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 fo…

> 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.

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.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#82

Post by graypegg »

RetroTechie wrote: post #78
graypegg wrote: post #25

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.…

> 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 co…

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.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#83

Post by surprisetalk »

fullstackchris wrote: post #73
danielvaughn wrote: post #47

That comment about a "simple markup language" is interesting - anyone know what OP is referring to? They mentioned they're attempting to build one.

I don't really get this point... HTML is not _that_ complicated. I mean is: this this this 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 comp…

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

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#84

Post by olah_1 »

jacooper wrote: post #77
toastal wrote: post #57

This is why we should be using decentralized XMPP servers to chat since they actually run on potato hardware unlike other chat options.

Matrix Homeservers like Synapse can run on anything now, and there is conduit which should be lighter too.

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

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#85

Post by benrutter »

dcreater wrote: post #80

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

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!

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#86

Post by goles »

infotainment wrote: post #8

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™ profiles) Sadly that, combined with the changes Google made to deprioritize results from personal sites like these, all but destroyed these neat bespoke pages.

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.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#87

Post by gunapologist99 »

jacooper wrote: post #77
toastal wrote: post #57

This is why we should be using decentralized XMPP servers to chat since they actually run on potato hardware unlike other chat options.

Matrix Homeservers like Synapse can run on anything now, and there is conduit which should be lighter too.

Matrix is not lightweight or simple.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#88

Post by WorldMaker »

eitland wrote: post #72
axblount wrote: post #55

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.

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.

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.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#89

Post by Tomte »

flpm wrote: post #49
zozbot234 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ov…

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.

Pinboard and similar bookmarking sites could play that role.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#90

Post by Almondsetat »

marssaxman wrote: post #74
d-lisp wrote: post #18

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 fo…

> 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.

Don't visit the website
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