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1. A website's value is the amount of information that it provides to the end user. I would argue that the entirety of the works of Shakespeare or the 1911 Brit

1. A website's value is the amount of information that it provides to the end user. I would argue that the entirety of the works of Shakespeare or the 1911 Brittanica Encyclopedia provides more information than a high-definition picture of Donald Trump grimacing at EU leaders or an autoplaying ad for Doritos Locos Tacos NEW AT TACO BELL. As far as supplemental uses, at the end of the day, people are using plaintext to communicate with other people. Images and videos are secondary. If that ever changes, then society is already doomed as literacy is fundamental to the maintenance of technology. 2. Raw text is the highest value data/information return that can be transmitted over the internet. There's a reason that Morse Code and APRS are still around: they're reliable, appropriate tech, and require little to no middlemen outside of the transceivers themselves. 3. If wantonly (namely, for no enduringly good reason) increasing the amount of entropy in the universe isn't tautologically bad to you, then I really doubt that any argument would sway you to the contrary. Concerning the relative value of HTML and CSS, yes, you could argue that UX matters in that department, but even the most bloated static HTML/CSS page is going to pale dramatically in comparison to the size of what's considered acceptable throughput today.

fyrabanks 8y ago
In response to #2, there is also a reason that photojournalism exists--unless you believe in a world where everyone imagines what important figures and historic events look like based solely on textual descriptions. This is completely ignoring the fact that I, nor most of society, would never attempt to receive the day's news via Morse Code.
- cheezymoogle 8y ago
  Hint: TCP/IP & UTF-8 are fundamentally along the same principles as APRS. So yes, really you are. As far as photojournalism goes, I can think of thousands of reasons why the predominance of photojournalism has been pernicious to civil society. The strategic use of the identifiable victim effect in atrocity propaganda being the most obvious. However, with that said, I'm not arguing that visual media is entirely unnecessary, but rather against the idea that every user needs to download a 1680x1050 image when a default 600px width image or even the horror of having the image as an external link would be more than adequate for the overwhelming majority of users, particularly those in rural and developing areas that can't afford to waste their total allotment of monthly mobile data on "What Chance the Rapper’s Purchase of Chicagoist Means". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocity_propaganda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocity_propaganda [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifiable_victim_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifiable_victim_effect [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/opinion/culture/chance-the-rapper-chicagoist.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/opinion/culture/chance-th...
_louisr_ 8y ago
1. Well how is the format of plaintext the best method of getting information to the end user? What if you added a thin indexing layer on top of the plaintext? That would allow people to jump through huge documents with ease, but it's no longer plaintext. Sounds more valuable to me. Where is the line? What's the ideal? 2. Fair enough 3. Referencing "increasing the entropy in the universe" isn't a good argument because the amount of entropy increase due to humans is much, much less than how much entropy is increased by particles being blasted out of all the stars in the universe (unless I fundamentally misunderstand what entropy is). I think that stars blasting out particles is a much larger contributor to entropy than humans not using computer bits effectively. And also what does entropy as a concept have to do with anything, anyway? Why should human engineering tasks have such considerations? If being super efficient with an abundant resource has a large cost (of some sort), but low efficiency has no business- or environmental- downside, then why be efficient with it? In your last bit you argue that it's acceptable to send a site that is bigger than even the most bloated HTML/CSS page; I don't think that's true for any site/app that wants to be fast. It slows you down and people notice and stop using your service unless it's required of them. I think that in general things are not as bad as you make them out to be, and your arguments have some merit but are mostly revealed as nonsense when the rubber hits the road. Universe entropy is completely unrelated to modern software engineering and web sites that have a lot of devs and are not SalesForce are not _that_ bloated.
- cheezymoogle 8y ago
  As far as #1 goes, I'm arguing that plaintext is the ideal to strive towards, not the living practical reality. As far as indexing and access, the Gopher protocol and Teletext are great options to look at. As previously noted, if you don't find that waste is fundamentally wrong on a moral level, there's no point forward from here. I view myself on a planet of dwindling resources, vanishing biodiversity, and warming at increasing rates. If you think the energy that goes into computation is free or lacking external environmental downstream effects, then at the root of it, you carelessly shit where you eat and I don't. That's a fundamental disagreement. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_protocol [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext

fyrabanks 8y ago

In response to #2, there is also a reason that photojournalism exists--unless you believe in a world where everyone imagines what important figures and historic events look like based solely on textual descriptions. This is completely ignoring the fact that I, nor most of society, would never attempt to receive the day's news via Morse Code.

cheezymoogle 8y ago
Hint: TCP/IP & UTF-8 are fundamentally along the same principles as APRS. So yes, really you are. As far as photojournalism goes, I can think of thousands of reasons why the predominance of photojournalism has been pernicious to civil society. The strategic use of the identifiable victim effect in atrocity propaganda being the most obvious. However, with that said, I'm not arguing that visual media is entirely unnecessary, but rather against the idea that every user needs to download a 1680x1050 image when a default 600px width image or even the horror of having the image as an external link would be more than adequate for the overwhelming majority of users, particularly those in rural and developing areas that can't afford to waste their total allotment of monthly mobile data on "What Chance the Rapper’s Purchase of Chicagoist Means". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocity_propaganda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocity_propaganda [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifiable_victim_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifiable_victim_effect [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/opinion/culture/chance-the-rapper-chicagoist.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/opinion/culture/chance-th...

_louisr_ 8y ago

1. Well how is the format of plaintext the best method of getting information to the end user? What if you added a thin indexing layer on top of the plaintext? That would allow people to jump through huge documents with ease, but it's no longer plaintext. Sounds more valuable to me. Where is the line? What's the ideal? 2. Fair enough 3. Referencing "increasing the entropy in the universe" isn't a good argument because the amount of entropy increase due to humans is much, much less than how much entropy is increased by particles being blasted out of all the stars in the universe (unless I fundamentally misunderstand what entropy is). I think that stars blasting out particles is a much larger contributor to entropy than humans not using computer bits effectively. And also what does entropy as a concept have to do with anything, anyway? Why should human engineering tasks have such considerations? If being super efficient with an abundant resource has a large cost (of some sort), but low efficiency has no business- or environmental- downside, then why be efficient with it? In your last bit you argue that it's acceptable to send a site that is bigger than even the most bloated HTML/CSS page; I don't think that's true for any site/app that wants to be fast. It slows you down and people notice and stop using your service unless it's required of them. I think that in general things are not as bad as you make them out to be, and your arguments have some merit but are mostly revealed as nonsense when the rubber hits the road. Universe entropy is completely unrelated to modern software engineering and web sites that have a lot of devs and are not SalesForce are not _that_ bloated.

cheezymoogle 8y ago
As far as #1 goes, I'm arguing that plaintext is the ideal to strive towards, not the living practical reality. As far as indexing and access, the Gopher protocol and Teletext are great options to look at. As previously noted, if you don't find that waste is fundamentally wrong on a moral level, there's no point forward from here. I view myself on a planet of dwindling resources, vanishing biodiversity, and warming at increasing rates. If you think the energy that goes into computation is free or lacking external environmental downstream effects, then at the root of it, you carelessly shit where you eat and I don't. That's a fundamental disagreement. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_protocol [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext