3 ms·

I'd be pretty happy to manually decide which animated diagrams to enable, too. A lot of those animated diagrams chew up resources on my computer, and may or may

I'd be pretty happy to manually decide which animated diagrams to enable, too. A lot of those animated diagrams chew up resources on my computer, and may or may not be interesting to me. There've got to be a zillion ways to do a spinner that wouldn't fall afoul of this blocking.

chrisseaton 8y ago
Right some people want to disable animated GIFs, but this is no different so it's not really a new conversation, and 'If I wanted video, I'd turn on my TV' shows confusion because it's a silent animated diagram in the middle of a document is not like turning on the TV is it.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  I guess. TBH, the way that it's so hard to even say, "All this moving stuff annoys me" without being reminded that it's impossible to opt out of the more annoying bits of the modern web without also making front-end developers cry blood kind of makes me want to opt out of the whole steaming compost heap and go back to using Gopher. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if, 5 years from now, someone is telling me I can't disable WebAssembly to keep people from mining Bitcoin on my phone because that would also disable clicking on hyperlinks on modern websites. edit: And the way that I'm getting downvoted for expressing a legitimate frustration kind of speaks to the extent to which the original vision that hypermedia should give the user-agent control over how the content is to be consumed is just straight-up dead. 25 years ago, we had alt strings for in case people couldn't or didn't want to view images. Now we have pages that won't even render if you try to disable extraneous animations that some people can't even see, and apparent hostility toward someone pointing out that this doesn't work for them.
  - bad_user 8y ago
    Few people here ever heard of Gopher. I’m 36 and while I’ve heard of it, I never used it. The Internet moved on, it’s time to adapt, otherwise you sound like a grandpa missing the good old days, which are never as good as people remember. Yes I remember the web of year 1996, of 1999, or of 2004 and it was shit.
    - nulbyte 8y ago
      I'm 34, I've used gopher, and it's awesome. There is something far more special about publishing files on the Internet and links launching specialized native applications, instead of some one-size-fits-all experience that never leaves the browser. We could totally do that with the web, but the masses want their devices to keep getting smarter so they can stay dumber.
      - bunderbunder 8y ago
        There's that angle. The other one I was thinking about is, it's just increasingly difficult for me to think that allowing anonymous third parties to run arbitrary code on your system is a great idea. It's convenient as heck, sure, and it does allow for creating some really interesting tools, but it's also begging for abuse. It reminds of the late '90s fad for embedding a scripting language inside every single document format, and how that ended up being a can of worms. When I hear that it's basically impossible to disable arbitrary auto-playing video alongside the text you planned on reading, because someone will just implement a canvas-based video player in JavaScript, and it turns out you can't disable JavaScript, either, because then the whole page will simply fail to load because Vue.js or whatever can't even fathom the idea of a user-agent that seeks to be something other than a glorified application runtime environment, I think, "Wow, it would appear that HTML has irretrievably ceased to be a hypermedia format, it's now more like Google's answer to XAML. Where can I go to find actual hypermedia?" And the only thing I can think of that fits the bill is (the admittedly relatively primitive) Gopher.

chrisseaton 8y ago

Right some people want to disable animated GIFs, but this is no different so it's not really a new conversation, and 'If I wanted video, I'd turn on my TV' shows confusion because it's a silent animated diagram in the middle of a document is not like turning on the TV is it.

bunderbunder 8y ago
I guess. TBH, the way that it's so hard to even say, "All this moving stuff annoys me" without being reminded that it's impossible to opt out of the more annoying bits of the modern web without also making front-end developers cry blood kind of makes me want to opt out of the whole steaming compost heap and go back to using Gopher. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if, 5 years from now, someone is telling me I can't disable WebAssembly to keep people from mining Bitcoin on my phone because that would also disable clicking on hyperlinks on modern websites. edit: And the way that I'm getting downvoted for expressing a legitimate frustration kind of speaks to the extent to which the original vision that hypermedia should give the user-agent control over how the content is to be consumed is just straight-up dead. 25 years ago, we had alt strings for in case people couldn't or didn't want to view images. Now we have pages that won't even render if you try to disable extraneous animations that some people can't even see, and apparent hostility toward someone pointing out that this doesn't work for them.
- bad_user 8y ago
  Few people here ever heard of Gopher. I’m 36 and while I’ve heard of it, I never used it. The Internet moved on, it’s time to adapt, otherwise you sound like a grandpa missing the good old days, which are never as good as people remember. Yes I remember the web of year 1996, of 1999, or of 2004 and it was shit.
  - nulbyte 8y ago
    I'm 34, I've used gopher, and it's awesome. There is something far more special about publishing files on the Internet and links launching specialized native applications, instead of some one-size-fits-all experience that never leaves the browser. We could totally do that with the web, but the masses want their devices to keep getting smarter so they can stay dumber.
    - bunderbunder 8y ago
      There's that angle. The other one I was thinking about is, it's just increasingly difficult for me to think that allowing anonymous third parties to run arbitrary code on your system is a great idea. It's convenient as heck, sure, and it does allow for creating some really interesting tools, but it's also begging for abuse. It reminds of the late '90s fad for embedding a scripting language inside every single document format, and how that ended up being a can of worms. When I hear that it's basically impossible to disable arbitrary auto-playing video alongside the text you planned on reading, because someone will just implement a canvas-based video player in JavaScript, and it turns out you can't disable JavaScript, either, because then the whole page will simply fail to load because Vue.js or whatever can't even fathom the idea of a user-agent that seeks to be something other than a glorified application runtime environment, I think, "Wow, it would appear that HTML has irretrievably ceased to be a hypermedia format, it's now more like Google's answer to XAML. Where can I go to find actual hypermedia?" And the only thing I can think of that fits the bill is (the admittedly relatively primitive) Gopher.