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The "Cheap" Web

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Re: The "Cheap" Web

#201

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

getpokedagain wrote: post #95
Almondsetat wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't visit the website

I hope we can have a more reasoned debate than this. This topic is really important and frankly there's so much to it I hope that hearing others I can learn more. When I read some of the thread above what I am hearing is: "I don't want people to be able to run programs on my computer without asking explicitly". Which is exactly what the modern web and modern web browsers enable. If you learned computing in the 90's y…

Jar files have full access to your file system and no fine-grained checks like location and notifications last I checked.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#202

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

xigoi wrote: post #187
benrutter wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard markdown referred to as unnecessarily complex before. Genuinely curious, what features / complexity would you strip out?

I’d prefer everything to have the same syntax, like in HTML (or I should better say XML). When every feature has different syntax, like in Markdown, it makes parsers much larger and leads to an extreme amount of edge cases that every parser has to handle. For example, when you see an asterisk, you have to decide whether it denotes italics, bold or a bulleted list, which might not be trivial. Generating correct Markdo…

You don't need to escape all your ampersands and quotes. An ampersand that doesn't form an html entity will render as is, quotes are perfectly fine unless used in an HTML attribute. And in an html attribute, less thans are fine. The body of a script tag has different parsing rules.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#203

Post by xigoi »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #202
xigoi wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d prefer everything to have the same syntax, like in HTML (or I should better say XML). When every feature has different syntax, like in Markdown, it makes parsers much larger and leads to an extreme amount of edge cases that every parser has to handle. For example, when you see an asterisk, you have to decide whether it denotes italics, bold or a bulleted list, which might not be trivial. Generating correct Markdo…

You don't need to escape all your ampersands and quotes. An ampersand that doesn't form an html entity will render as is, quotes are perfectly fine unless used in an HTML attribute. And in an html attribute, less thans are fine. The body of a script tag has different parsing rules.

You don’t need to escape them, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. And script tags are generally not a problem when building something from a template, but they are a reason why XML is more “pure” than HTML.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#204

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

flir wrote: post #168
GuB-42 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini is like modern Gopher, but it is also very opinionated. The protocol does not support extensions and revision, it refuses HTTP, mandates TLS, etc... That's not the same as having browsers support the markdown content type.

You might disagree about where to draw the line but you can see why they drew a line in the sand. text/markdown would very quickly grow to be everything HTML is. There's probably a pithy "every internet protocol expands until it can serve ads" lesson in there somewhere.

Markdown generally does include everything HTML is (because you're allowed to write HTML in markdown)

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#205

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

joemi wrote: post #123
sam0x17 wrote: post #120

I do wish we could go back to how things were in the early 00s where view source on any page was extremely telling and would show you cleanly formatted code. Another huge reason for the status quo is a lot of companies actively try to obfuscate their frontend code for a variety of reasons, and a lot unwittingly do it as part of minification to squeeze out a little bit of extra efficiency both in terms of payload size…

> to the point where minification is essentially a lossless operation other than the actual names of things. Is that not the case now? I don't do a lot with javascript myself, but I always assumed the minification process wasn't changing the code itself.

It will shorten variable names, replace true with !0 and many other things. Newer technology might even unroll loops to improve performance but that's a bit different.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#206

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

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.

Sounds like this article is advocating for everyones page to look the same. If every page is built using simple technology, the user can style it themselves, not the developer.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#207

Post by anon25783 »

cxr wrote: post #59
anon25783 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Webdevs need to get over themselves, and the wider world needs to stop letting them get by with (or encouraging) this kind of narcissism. What a presumptuous statement! Authoritarian, even. It's one thing for someone else's website, such as HN, Reddit, Wikipedia, etc., to impose a homogeneous form on posts submitted by guests on the site. It's quite another thing to assert that "the wider world" should "stop lettin…

Ironic take for a comment that exists only as a consequence of what started out as someone complaining about how boring other people's websites look; there's no way out of this—either you agree with the ability to criticize, in which case mine is fair, or you disagree, in which case it's not but then yours isn't either and neither you nor anyone else should bother yourselves or others about the sameness of anyone's w…

I'm going to put a tiled JPEG of an artist's rendition of the night sky in the background of my blog, to assert my liberties and affirm my right to be silly and have fun

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#208

Post by JAlexoid »

YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #139
JAlexoid wrote: post #35

Reading through I got this: - Cheap = a pain to read Good and modern visual design exists explicitly to deliver information to a person in the most accessible way. If you show a Japanese website to someone who grew up in Ireland, they will be overwhelmed. Not catering to different cultures, like the website suggests - only makes it worse. - Cheap = a lot of spam Having low cost of equipment and almost unlimited anony…

"Good" modern visual design barely exists at all according to that definition. Most modern web design exists to jam marketing in your eyeballs while drip-feeding information at the minimum rate to keep you from closing the tab, which is basically the opposite of "delivering information in the most accessible way". Also: The YouTube homepage uses twice the memory of the NicoNico homepage to show fewer thumbnails, and…

I haven't provided any definitions on what is a good design at all, so you'll have to tell me what it is.

Your issue with the content, doesn't negate the designs. Japanese websites are also filled with a lot of junk content.

As for the Japanese websites, they aren't bad. They are bad for you, maybe... they're very much good for people accustomed to Japanese culture.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#209

Post by [deleted] »

anon25783 wrote: post #207
cxr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironic take for a comment that exists only as a consequence of what started out as someone complaining about how boring other people's websites look; there's no way out of this—either you agree with the ability to criticize, in which case mine is fair, or you disagree, in which case it's not but then yours isn't either and neither you nor anyone else should bother yourselves or others about the sameness of anyone's w…

I'm going to put a tiled JPEG of an artist's rendition of the night sky in the background of my blog, to assert my liberties and affirm my right to be silly and have fun

[deleted]

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#210

Post by anon25783 »

carlosjobim wrote: post #64
anon25783 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should learn about the Gemini protocol! It's an alternative to HTTPS that uses a document markup language similar to Markdown instead of HTML, and uses a deliberately simplified, feature-frozen protocol with the explicit goal that anyone should be able to write their own Gemini browser "in a weekend". No scripting or styling support, just documents with links and images in them. Here are some informative webpages…

I think the Gemini stuff is really neat, and I've already experimented with Lagrange and Kristall browsers. However, the information I'm interested in isn't published on those networks, and I think that's true for most of us. Reader view is a seamless way for me to have control of how the web is presented to me. An RSS client + browser with reader mode is the perfect combo for most online stuff that is information (a…

Forum functionality is possible; the protocol allows for user input in the form of prompting the user to enter a string and sending that to the server before loading the page. Example: gemini://chat.mozz.us/
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