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The "Cheap" Web

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Re: The "Cheap" Web

#171

Post by YoshiRulz »

collaborative wrote: post #134
oooyay wrote: post #67

> 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 achievab…

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"

If they have the same origin, then they should still work. But there's always postMessage[1].

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/post...

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#172

Post by ToucanLoucan »

MrVandemar wrote: post #162
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

Not OP, but the number of "documents" on the web that "require" programming/scripting that bring no value to those documents, is vast. I'm not talking about documents/articles that have useful embedded video, or informative interactive graphs and things. I'm talking about "documents" that require a multiple javascript libraries to load in order to inject a " Hello, it's a nice day and I had waffles for breakfast" int…

> Not OP, but the number of "documents" on the web that "require" programming/scripting that bring no value to those documents, is vast.

I mean, sure. But if our rubric is whether a technology being misused constitutes it having no business existing, that puts a shitload of tech on the chopping block.

> I'm talking about "documents" that require a multiple javascript libraries to load in order to inject a "

Hello, it's a nice day and I had waffles for breakfast" into a DOM.

You're misunderstanding the function. The function is not to distribute documents efficiently. The function is to place documents somewhere they can be distributed in such a way where the business majors can edit them without needing to pay a web developer to do it correctly. Hence the absolute plague of BMS systems, which are sold to the aforementioned manager/consultant vampire class so they can make the website pop and don't need to deal with a 20-something rolling their eyes at them when they ask for that.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#173

Post by YoshiRulz »

khimaros wrote: post #97
eitland wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

The tag is `` and it should be the first line in the file/stream. Doing anything else will enable "quirks mode"[1]. Beyond that, the best thing you can do is avoid features that haven't been standardised yet or that were only standardised recently.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Quirks_Mod...

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#174

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

"... the user should be in charge of this..."

As a user, I choose textmode. I use a text-only browser as an HTML reader, works great for EPUB. No graphical fonts, no Javascript, no CSS, no color. Often I will save to .txt so I can read with less(1).

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#175

Post by lmm »

ryukoposting wrote: post #169
lmm wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't use other browsers so I can't be sure if this is widespread, but Firefox already has a "reader mode" where it cuts out ads/sidebars etc and applies its own very basic stylesheet. Markdown-over-HTTP could very easily use that preexisting frontend. > 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 I made my own blogging pl…

> I made my own blogging platform where I write Markdown, and it transforms the markdown into HTML before delivering it to the client. The only JS involved is highlight.js, and that's only loaded on posts where I specifically ask for it - the whole blog works normally with no JS at all.

There are plenty of platforms that will render markdown into HTML (e.g. Jekyll); I specifically wanted to actually serve the markdown as-is, so that the "source" for any post is always available.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#176

Post by SamuelAdams »

ryukoposting wrote: post #126

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.

This would also be amazing for screen readers and other accessibility software.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#177

Post by perilunar »

I get the spirit of the article, but disagree with some of the specifics.

> HTML remains hostile to beginners.

What? HTML is dirt simple. There are some fiddly bits, but if you are creating simple documents (like this one) you don't need them — just use the subset of HTML that you are comfortable with.

> HTML is generally unkind to people of limited hearing, vision, etc.

Only if you mess it up. Clean and simple markup is usually pretty accessible.

But really, this page is 1.4 MB of code for less than 20 KB of text (300 ms to load!). You want the 'cheap' and simple web, then set an example.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#178

Post by eitland »

khimaros wrote: post #97
eitland wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

I have absolutely no idea about html rendering so my only contributions so far has been to ask/suggest to people who could know.

But it is an idea that I keep getting reminded about.

It could work adoption wise, since if it can be done technically it can be adapted independently of everyone else on backend and frontend:

- backwards compatible, if a browser doesn't take advantage of it it renders completely ordinary and in supporting browsers if a website doesn't use this trick it just renders as any other website

- If just one browser and one website does implement this then there will be a full setup. If the idea worked and for example Firefox supported this and Wikipedia or someone else took advantage of it suddenly everyone who used Wikipedia would se faster load and less battery usage.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#179

Post by bimguy »

perilunar wrote: post #177

I get the spirit of the article, but disagree with some of the specifics. > HTML remains hostile to beginners. What? HTML is dirt simple. There are some fiddly bits, but if you are creating simple documents (like this one) you don't need them — just use the subset of HTML that you are comfortable with. > HTML is generally unkind to people of limited hearing, vision, etc. Only if you mess it up. Clean and simple marku…

I agree with your disagreements. I am really bad with any coding, I have tried to learn Python and CSS several times now and can't remember a single thing. At the age of 12 I was easily able to learn HTML to build functional websites. Despite not having written a website in HTML for over 15 years I am still confident that I would be able to build a website using HTML code only right now.

How is that hostile to beginners when it was the only language that I could ever grasp? Are there coding language out there easier than HTML?

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#180

Post by marttt »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #174
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…

"... the user should be in charge of this..." As a user, I choose textmode. I use a text-only browser as an HTML reader, works great for EPUB. No graphical fonts, no Javascript, no CSS, no color. Often I will save to .txt so I can read with less(1).

I have done the same, very probably with the same browser you're using (links). Just curious, do you handle images (or graphs) in EPUB files in some specific way?

Mostly, ebooks are perfectly fine to use without images, but not 100% of the time.

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