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I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx
301–310 of 333 posts
Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate on why it's funny? javascript (on it's own) has changed a lot in 20 years and it was originally designed in what, one week due to external time constraints? i think the criticisms are valid if $Your_favorite_language had ~4 days only for language design. From my recollection, there were no frameworks, no tooling, no linters, no jquery. it was a basically a primative language for browsers that had no…
JavaScript was made to add a bit of interactivity to webpages. Like "click the button to expand the text". What is it now? There are whole javascript frameworks being made. Maybe soon web(sites) won't even use HTML anymore but rather render custom UI to a canvas. Browsers are new operating systems running on top OS. Lots of performance wasted by this. Yes, there are webapps using it wisely, although JS is often misus…
No i'm not a fan either. I'd much prefer a site the loads in <50ms.
Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate on why it's funny? javascript (on it's own) has changed a lot in 20 years and it was originally designed in what, one week due to external time constraints? i think the criticisms are valid if $Your_favorite_language had ~4 days only for language design. From my recollection, there were no frameworks, no tooling, no linters, no jquery. it was a basically a primative language for browsers that had no…
It's funny to see attitudes change so dramatically is all I mean. I think you may be blind to the harshest criticisms, though. It was a common view that the web was built for static content (or server-side dynamic content) and code execution by the client is mostly a nuisance at best. And there is some validity to that. When JS was developed, roughly contemporaneous with worse ideas like java applets and ActiveX on t…
Yeah there's some hindsight there... but are you saying that views have gone full circle? Where are these attitudes changing? JS has historically been sandboxed better than Java Applets and ActiveX, which is one reason why it's popular now.
Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx
#304Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's actually because we programmers like to recreate things, because there's this itch and wonder about how stuff works. Http hasn't changed that much. Html did. It was hyper text, and rendering was done for document flow. Then we could script a bit, and soon after we wanted "webapplications". Now, we lost probably 15 years trying to fit in an application-ui and lifecycle model in a document-flow model. Html, or rat…
There's little value in me doing this, but I always have to push back against this idea. This is the hill I'll die on. Most application UIs are not complicated. Most applications are just interactive documents. There is nothing special about 90% of the apps I use on my native computer that means they couldn't be rendered as HTML. The document model is fine for applications. Preferable, even. Heck, a reasonable portio…
Thank you for writing this. I had this feeling that the document model isn't that bad for software in the first place (a feeling that I noticed when I prototyped some of the stuff I was working on in Observable, and realized the prototype in an interactive notebook format fits the problem more than the SPA we were building). But I haven't considered the implications. You might be very right that the document model could support a lot more than we give it credit for, if we just stopped pushing the established "appliance" UI paradigm.
Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then you have to make a choice - do you want to support pushing down the lowest common denominator? Or will you be a person of integrity, and take the most technically simple solutions to build a more powerful and fast tool? Greed and morality can't mix. I personally support morals.
> Greed and morality can't mix. I personally support morals. Hold up, your position is that users that prefer something 'easy to use' as opposed to something 'powerful' are immoral ? What am I missing here?
What you're missing is that I'm talking about developers having a choice between providing the best possible product in a technical sense, or simply going the way of profit and greed. To me, when you knowingly produce a substandard product and seek non-savvy users, that's an immoral act. I believe the goal should be to constantly raise the floor, not lower the ceiling.
Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll be the first (EDIT: third) of six. > If all that stuff works for everyone, why did we invent new stuff? Just because? Or perhaps it wasn't really as amazing as well all remember. To better track people and push ads. It's really mostly just it. Modern web has very little to do with providing value to the end-user; any utility that's provided is mostly a side effect, and/or a vector to lure people into situations…
To say that text browsers are "anchoring" the web to those text only standards would imply that developers are making design decisions based on testing and feedback from text only browsers. There is no way that the percentage of developers doing that isn't vanishingly small. Like 0.1% or less. I always chuckle when 1 person chimes in on a show hn post to complain that the site doesn't work well in lynx... Ya, I'll ge…
You can make that choice. On the other hand, if you decide on not making the situation right on that, you'll alienate not only accessibility-focused users, but also a very loud minority - some of whom are influential across tech (or tech-adjacent) communities.
Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's funny to see attitudes change so dramatically is all I mean. I think you may be blind to the harshest criticisms, though. It was a common view that the web was built for static content (or server-side dynamic content) and code execution by the client is mostly a nuisance at best. And there is some validity to that. When JS was developed, roughly contemporaneous with worse ideas like java applets and ActiveX on t…
Yeah there's some hindsight there... but are you saying that views have gone full circle? Where are these attitudes changing? JS has historically been sandboxed better than Java Applets and ActiveX, which is one reason why it's popular now.
Nope, not saying they went full circle, just that they went from one extreme (client side code bad) to another (client side code as inevitable fact of life and why question that?).
And tangentially, I was pointing out more recently that the grumpy position from older times actually would have prevented some real world problems. (Spectre and meltdown go from being local privilege escalation bugs to "holy shit you can own my machine if I visit a web page")
Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx
#309I feel like many of the text-mode browsers have failed to keep up with changing web standards. We were all mad when IE was holding back the Internet, and I'm not sure we should give lynx and w3m a pass because they're geek tools. (Accessibility is an important concern, but web browsers running under a GUI system support screen readers.) https://www.brow.sh/ is a console-based browser that claims to support modern sta…
I use text browsers because they are efficient and fast. Also Static content shouldn't ideally need js because it is a security concern.
AFAIK most of us don't complain when a dynamic website doesn't work. We just use a modern browser.
Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amen, amen! The ignominous "best viewed in" which we fought in the Second Browser War is creeping back in - except now it says "this hour's current Google Chrome" instead of "MSIE 6".
TBH, I think it's worse than it was with IE6. Targeting just IE was annoying, but, even so, 20 years ago, I could use BeOS as my primary desktop OS, and Net+ was a decent enough browser. Nowadays, the bar to successfully render a modern JavaScript-heavy website is so high that even Microsoft couldn't successfully maintain their own independent rendering engine, and is shifting over to Google's. Anyone who has heard o…
That's a different issue altogether, but still salient.
- 1. you need a beefy device to render in a reasonable timeframe
and
- 2. you need The One Blessed Renderer to even see anything
I do recall the situation 20 years ago, when I could use about 2/3 of the relevant Net, with the rest going "meh, chronic complainer, just use IE. What? Yeah, that's your own fault for not choosing Windows." The second part is far more worrying, as it is not resolvable locally, either by optimization, or by horsepower.