3 ms·
The web needs to be forked into two distinct standards: One for dynamic content, and one for documents. The first would use basically everything in the HTML5/CS
by russellbeattie 8y ago
The web needs to be forked into two distinct standards: One for dynamic content, and one for documents. The first would use basically everything in the HTML5/CSS/JS toolbox, and the second would be more akin to AMP, but for all docs.
The benefits of this would be a standard for Wysiwyg editors (goodbye million rich text editor projects, Markdown and even Microsoft Word), and more semantic markup for both search engines and accessibility.
Right now it takes millions of man hours to create a performant browser, which is limiting those engines to only the largest organizations. Even Microsoft gave up making their own. And even with all that effort, I still can't create a clean HTML document with an interface as rich as MS Word, or even add bold or color formatting to a Twitter post, or update a Wikipedia page without knowing wiki markup.
We need to pull the dynamic, JS powered side of the web out from the core, limit CSS to non-dynamic properties, and standardize on an efficient in-document binary storage akin to MIME email attachments so HTML docs can be self-contained like a Word or PDF doc.
This document-centric web could be marked off within a standard web page, so you could combine it in regular interfaces for things like social network posts. Or it could be self standing, allowing relatively large sites to be created with indexes, footnotes, etc., but served from a basic static server.
This isn't a technical challenge, it's an organizational one. I've thought for years that Mozilla should be doing this, instead of messing with IoT and phones, etc. It's such an obvious problem that needs addressing, and would have a huge payback in terms of advancing the web as we know it.
- icebraining 8y ago> This isn't a technical challenge, it's an organizational one No, it's an economical one. Who will use that web? You mention Twitter, yet are they not dependent on JS for analytics and ad-tracking? The few sites not dependent on such features are already usable on Lynx and Elinks, and the others simply won't use them. For the advantages, you mention having a good WYSIWYG editor, but the reason you can't add bold or color to a Twitter post is obviously not because they are unable to add those functions, but because they don't want you to do that. Which raises the question: what happens when that editor lets you create something the site doesn't allow you to use? (By the way, Wikipedia has had a visual editor since 2012, you just have to switch using the "pencil" button: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor)