7 ms·

I'd really love (and have toyed around with) a modern reimagining of Gopher, targeted toward mobile devices and maybe e-readers, and with a focus on accessibili

I'd really love (and have toyed around with) a modern reimagining of Gopher, targeted toward mobile devices and maybe e-readers, and with a focus on accessibility. Just the content, please, and as quick as you can get it on my screen. I'll pick the styling options that make it easiest for me to read.

themodelplumber 11y ago
That would be terrific. Can you imagine the decrease in data costs vs. increase in usability / experience once a few popular services were available?
- jimktrains2 11y ago
  Or, you know, people could just write webpages that worked without loading 10s of megs of (useless) assets.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    "Love" the latest fad there, where JS is used to turn a site into a flip book as you scroll down. This by having new "content" come up and cover the old stuff as if you were flipping pages.
  - huuu 11y ago
    Agreed. I had to create a 'modern' design website for a client with all the fullscreen images included. I hate those websites but had to do the job. So I decided to do it all myself. And guess what: 80% compression for a fullscreen image is enough, people don't notice it. All animations were done in CSS. And then I wrote some small javascripts for those hide on scroll, paralax images and other scripts. Kept the page size below 1MB, server time around 0.3s (ProcessWire), onload below 3s. It's still not optimal, but when you dump all those bloated Javascripts and compress images a page should not be 10MB.
vmorgulis 11y ago
The protocol is very simple (delimited with cr+lf). It's a kind of extended "ls".
johansch 11y ago
You could just use 1993-style HTML...
- vonklaus 11y ago
  So, html then?
  - sdenton4 11y ago
    With tables and frames for layout!
    - mwfj 11y ago
      Tables? Frames? That stuff didn't exist in 1993. (Tables first arrived in Mosaic 2.0 Alpha 8 in December 1994, according to http://www.barrypearson.co.uk/articles/layout_tables/history.htm http://www.barrypearson.co.uk/articles/layout_tables/history...)
      - vonklaus 11y ago
        That pales in comparison the the real innovation in ~94. The blink tag, so legit
marssaxman 11y ago
I love Firefox "reader mode" and wish there were some way to turn it on by default, because it always provides a better experience than whatever the page designer intended.
- cmurf 11y ago
  Unfortunately most sites I visit don't offer reader view as an option.
  - marssaxman 11y ago
    Is it something the site has to offer? I thought it was just something the browser was doing on its own, for any page meeting some (undocumented?) criteria.
    - mintplant 11y ago
      You're correct, the browser extracts and reformats the content. Firefox only shows the Reader View icon for pages where it thinks it can do a good job of that.
      - digi_owl 11y ago
        I find myself wondering if it relies on the "for printing" reformating of various sites. This because i was browsing one site i could have sworn had the icon earlier using desktop Firefox, but it didn't show up. That is until i enable the JS of s third party printing framework in Noscript. After that it showed up.
        mintplant 11y ago
        It's using this code: https://github.com/mozilla/readability/blob/master/Readability.js https://github.com/mozilla/readability/blob/master/Readabili... which is a descendant of the original Readability.js published by Arc90, before they decided to turn it into a proprietary Instapaper clone. It extracts what looks like article text from the page markup. DOM elements included for a printer-friendly view could possibly be helping, but it doesn't target that directly.
theoh 11y ago
That sentiment brings me back to the old days of unix geeks writing structural html with no concern for appearance. The separation of structure and formatting is not practical for serious media of any kind. You can't separate form and content. Nor would most people want to, because (visual and other) complexity is an inevitable and rewarding part of human experience...
- mintplant 11y ago
  Instapaper? Reader View? RSS readers? Ebooks? Separation of form from content is both practical and commonplace. Your blog post may be beautifully styled, but that makes no difference if I can't even load it, or the fonts are so thin I have to squint to try to read, or the glaring white background makes me see floaters. A blind person doesn't care about the whizz-bang of $framework if your JS-only site breaks their screen reader.
  - iamphilrae 11y ago
    Likewise I read all Hacker News links and comments over an iPhone HN app. Absolutely don't miss the form at all except in the cases where the source HTML is not semantic and so the reader mucks it up. But that's an issue with structure relying on form.
  - tater_sent_me 11y ago
    That's why I force all fonts to be comic sans.
  - crispyambulance 11y ago
    The problem for authors is accommodating all the different modes which readers may consume their media. Well-styled hypertext presented in the way the author intends/imagines is never going away, there will always be a place for that and it is very important. For other use-cases... that's why we have HTML and stylesheets. The problem has been solved, mostly sort-of.
  - tuxracer 11y ago
    Most screen readers look at the output of the DOM. They aren't trying to parse RAW HTML from the server. Really wish this myth would go away :/
cbhl 11y ago
The question that all the writers are asking is: in such a world, how do I make a living wage and put food on the table?
- tokenizerrr 11y ago
  By writing things that are worth paying for?
  - nine_k 11y ago
    Did you pay for any content recently? What kind of content was it?
    - mbrock 11y ago
      I paid for download links to Louis C.K's latest thing, Horace and Pete. And too many Kindle books... I haven't ever paid for any blog-type content, but I probably would if someone marketed it right. With advertising, I don't see why everyone's assuming it would be impossible on a plain text medium. I listen to podcasts that have sponsors. They just talk about their sponsors in the middle of the show. They try to make it sincere ("I use this product myself" etc). It seems to me like this is a very high quality type of advertising, compared to blockable little ad server banners.
    - tokenizerrr 11y ago
      I pay for ebooks and audiobooks mostly. I've never been interested in any of that blog-type content and don't really consume any of it for free, other than what's posted to HN. It may as well stop existing for all I care to be honest. And even without ads there'll always be all kinds of blogs because sharing is caring.
- mintplant 11y ago
  I don't think a streamlined content delivery model would necessarily preclude ad serving.
- hoodoof 11y ago
cbd1984 11y ago
You're trying to solve a social problem with technology. That can work sometimes, but I seriously doubt it will work here. The problem with this is that the content producers have incentives to add content they get paid for, and people who pay to have others shove content in front of readers have an incentive to make that content as eye-catching as possible. So first it's just text. Then it's bold and underline, both of which have legitimate uses in real content but both of which are also obviously useful for ads. Then it's blinking, and to hell with light-sensitive epileptics. Then it's all over. The alternative is the old radio trick of weaving all of the content together as tightly as possible, so it all gets consumed in one big gulp. That has implications for long-term credibility, but that's a long-term problem beyond the time horizon of the bills your financial people just got today, and then there's payroll...
michaelbuckbee 11y ago
Accelerated Mobile Pages is kind of along those lines. https://www.ampproject.org/ https://www.ampproject.org/
- cmdrfred 11y ago
  Beat me to it, I'm working on a implementation of this myself currently. I like the idea so far.
- sbochins 11y ago
  AFAIK there really isn't a story for clients to configure how to view the content. It is really just a way of removing bloat on pages, so they render faster on mobile.
  - greglindahl 11y ago
    Given the way that AMP standardizes markup, it's easy for a client to do whatever it wants instead of using the "official" javascript.
rlander 11y ago
That was pretty much the idea behind Rebol IOS or X-Internet [0, 1]. I love the idea of a half-megabyte runtime, zero-install, cross-platform that can run on Linux, Android, HaikuOS, Windows and Mac. Here's a Rebol one liner that opens a GUI, reads web page and sends it as email: view layout [u: field "user@rebol.com" h: field "http://" btn "Send" [send to-email u/text read to-url h/text alert "Sent"]] Too bad it never caught on. Anyone who's ever dealt with JS will identify with Rebol's motto: Most software systems have become needlessly complex. We rebel against that complexity, fighting it with the most powerful tool available, language itself. [0] http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/the-rebol-ios-distributed-filesystem/184405152 http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/the-rebol-ios... [1] http://www.rebol.com/ios-intro.html http://www.rebol.com/ios-intro.html
- vmorgulis 11y ago
  Rebol is not dead yet. I expect a new bounce with the Red language.
kayamon 11y ago
Isn't that what CSS is supposed to achieve?

themodelplumber 11y ago

That would be terrific. Can you imagine the decrease in data costs vs. increase in usability / experience once a few popular services were available?

jimktrains2 11y ago
Or, you know, people could just write webpages that worked without loading 10s of megs of (useless) assets.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  "Love" the latest fad there, where JS is used to turn a site into a flip book as you scroll down. This by having new "content" come up and cover the old stuff as if you were flipping pages.
- huuu 11y ago
  Agreed. I had to create a 'modern' design website for a client with all the fullscreen images included. I hate those websites but had to do the job. So I decided to do it all myself. And guess what: 80% compression for a fullscreen image is enough, people don't notice it. All animations were done in CSS. And then I wrote some small javascripts for those hide on scroll, paralax images and other scripts. Kept the page size below 1MB, server time around 0.3s (ProcessWire), onload below 3s. It's still not optimal, but when you dump all those bloated Javascripts and compress images a page should not be 10MB.

vmorgulis 11y ago

The protocol is very simple (delimited with cr+lf). It's a kind of extended "ls".

johansch 11y ago

You could just use 1993-style HTML...

vonklaus 11y ago
So, html then?
- sdenton4 11y ago
  With tables and frames for layout!
  - mwfj 11y ago
    Tables? Frames? That stuff didn't exist in 1993. (Tables first arrived in Mosaic 2.0 Alpha 8 in December 1994, according to http://www.barrypearson.co.uk/articles/layout_tables/history.htm http://www.barrypearson.co.uk/articles/layout_tables/history...)
    - vonklaus 11y ago
      That pales in comparison the the real innovation in ~94. The blink tag, so legit

marssaxman 11y ago

I love Firefox "reader mode" and wish there were some way to turn it on by default, because it always provides a better experience than whatever the page designer intended.

cmurf 11y ago
Unfortunately most sites I visit don't offer reader view as an option.
- marssaxman 11y ago
  Is it something the site has to offer? I thought it was just something the browser was doing on its own, for any page meeting some (undocumented?) criteria.
  - mintplant 11y ago
    You're correct, the browser extracts and reformats the content. Firefox only shows the Reader View icon for pages where it thinks it can do a good job of that.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      I find myself wondering if it relies on the "for printing" reformating of various sites. This because i was browsing one site i could have sworn had the icon earlier using desktop Firefox, but it didn't show up. That is until i enable the JS of s third party printing framework in Noscript. After that it showed up.
      - mintplant 11y ago
        It's using this code: https://github.com/mozilla/readability/blob/master/Readability.js https://github.com/mozilla/readability/blob/master/Readabili... which is a descendant of the original Readability.js published by Arc90, before they decided to turn it into a proprietary Instapaper clone. It extracts what looks like article text from the page markup. DOM elements included for a printer-friendly view could possibly be helping, but it doesn't target that directly.

theoh 11y ago

That sentiment brings me back to the old days of unix geeks writing structural html with no concern for appearance. The separation of structure and formatting is not practical for serious media of any kind. You can't separate form and content. Nor would most people want to, because (visual and other) complexity is an inevitable and rewarding part of human experience...

mintplant 11y ago
Instapaper? Reader View? RSS readers? Ebooks? Separation of form from content is both practical and commonplace. Your blog post may be beautifully styled, but that makes no difference if I can't even load it, or the fonts are so thin I have to squint to try to read, or the glaring white background makes me see floaters. A blind person doesn't care about the whizz-bang of $framework if your JS-only site breaks their screen reader.
- iamphilrae 11y ago
  Likewise I read all Hacker News links and comments over an iPhone HN app. Absolutely don't miss the form at all except in the cases where the source HTML is not semantic and so the reader mucks it up. But that's an issue with structure relying on form.
- tater_sent_me 11y ago
  That's why I force all fonts to be comic sans.
- crispyambulance 11y ago
  The problem for authors is accommodating all the different modes which readers may consume their media. Well-styled hypertext presented in the way the author intends/imagines is never going away, there will always be a place for that and it is very important. For other use-cases... that's why we have HTML and stylesheets. The problem has been solved, mostly sort-of.
- tuxracer 11y ago
  Most screen readers look at the output of the DOM. They aren't trying to parse RAW HTML from the server. Really wish this myth would go away :/

cbhl 11y ago

The question that all the writers are asking is: in such a world, how do I make a living wage and put food on the table?

tokenizerrr 11y ago
By writing things that are worth paying for?
- nine_k 11y ago
  Did you pay for any content recently? What kind of content was it?
  - mbrock 11y ago
    I paid for download links to Louis C.K's latest thing, Horace and Pete. And too many Kindle books... I haven't ever paid for any blog-type content, but I probably would if someone marketed it right. With advertising, I don't see why everyone's assuming it would be impossible on a plain text medium. I listen to podcasts that have sponsors. They just talk about their sponsors in the middle of the show. They try to make it sincere ("I use this product myself" etc). It seems to me like this is a very high quality type of advertising, compared to blockable little ad server banners.
  - tokenizerrr 11y ago
    I pay for ebooks and audiobooks mostly. I've never been interested in any of that blog-type content and don't really consume any of it for free, other than what's posted to HN. It may as well stop existing for all I care to be honest. And even without ads there'll always be all kinds of blogs because sharing is caring.
mintplant 11y ago
I don't think a streamlined content delivery model would necessarily preclude ad serving.
hoodoof 11y ago

cbd1984 11y ago

You're trying to solve a social problem with technology. That can work sometimes, but I seriously doubt it will work here. The problem with this is that the content producers have incentives to add content they get paid for, and people who pay to have others shove content in front of readers have an incentive to make that content as eye-catching as possible. So first it's just text. Then it's bold and underline, both of which have legitimate uses in real content but both of which are also obviously useful for ads. Then it's blinking, and to hell with light-sensitive epileptics. Then it's all over. The alternative is the old radio trick of weaving all of the content together as tightly as possible, so it all gets consumed in one big gulp. That has implications for long-term credibility, but that's a long-term problem beyond the time horizon of the bills your financial people just got today, and then there's payroll...

michaelbuckbee 11y ago

Accelerated Mobile Pages is kind of along those lines. https://www.ampproject.org/ https://www.ampproject.org/

cmdrfred 11y ago
Beat me to it, I'm working on a implementation of this myself currently. I like the idea so far.
sbochins 11y ago
AFAIK there really isn't a story for clients to configure how to view the content. It is really just a way of removing bloat on pages, so they render faster on mobile.
- greglindahl 11y ago
  Given the way that AMP standardizes markup, it's easy for a client to do whatever it wants instead of using the "official" javascript.

rlander 11y ago

That was pretty much the idea behind Rebol IOS or X-Internet [0, 1]. I love the idea of a half-megabyte runtime, zero-install, cross-platform that can run on Linux, Android, HaikuOS, Windows and Mac. Here's a Rebol one liner that opens a GUI, reads web page and sends it as email: view layout [u: field "user@rebol.com" h: field "http://" btn "Send" [send to-email u/text read to-url h/text alert "Sent"]] Too bad it never caught on. Anyone who's ever dealt with JS will identify with Rebol's motto: Most software systems have become needlessly complex. We rebel against that complexity, fighting it with the most powerful tool available, language itself. [0] http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/the-rebol-ios-distributed-filesystem/184405152 http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/the-rebol-ios... [1] http://www.rebol.com/ios-intro.html http://www.rebol.com/ios-intro.html

vmorgulis 11y ago
Rebol is not dead yet. I expect a new bounce with the Red language.

kayamon 11y ago

Isn't that what CSS is supposed to achieve?