3 ms·
I've been dreaming about a text only network for a few years now. Haven't done a damn thing to make it happen but what I envision starts with a search engine th
by jasonkostempski 8y ago
I've been dreaming about a text only network for a few years now. Haven't done a damn thing to make it happen but what I envision starts with a search engine that only indexes text/plain content. I've submitted a feature request to DDG a few times over the years to be able to filter by the content-type header, that would be a great start. There are few tricks you can do with any search engine but it's not enough to ensure what you're going to see is text/plain.
- majewsky 8y agoHow am I going to navigate a text/plain web? Plain URLs inserted into documents? What about text/markdown instead? Sure, having images means having banner ads, but I think it's naive to assume that a restriction to text would help combat ads.
- jasonkostempski 8y agoI've been thinking about that too. Plain URLs, just like you said. Hypertext is out. Copy paste a URL if you want to go there. Bad URLs can't hide behind innocent looking text or attention grabbing images. I'm sure most clients already turn URL looking text into links, which is fine because it can't be disguised. Images would be fine, just not clickable ones, but I don't think we have a standard that specifies that right now. Ads are fine, trackers are not. Edit: HTML/JS/CSS et al. can keep existing and be used where it's actually needed, I'd just like my client to default to telling me I'm about to venture into that hellish landscape first and I'd like a more secure by default standard that doesn't let this stuff get so far out of hand.