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I wish we had a protocol for articles and text content that couldn't be turned into an application layer with JavaScript. JavaScript took the web in a weird dir

by yason 6y ago

I wish we had a protocol for articles and text content that couldn't be turned into an application layer with JavaScript. JavaScript took the web in a weird direction. Going "HTML 2.0 only" would be a good place to start. I've also longed for simpler world wide web for the purpose of distributing information. Hyperlinks, images, and structured text go a long way for things that do matter. I can't remember the times I've spent evenings and nights reading a huge website, with dozens if not hundreds of long pages of information, and all laid in this 90's hypertext style format that was heavily interlinked so you could jump around and find more and more to read all the time until you fell asleep. Today, Wikipedia comes to mind (and I'm grateful they're still like that), but back then a lot of dedicated resources of information were maintained like that. And with minimal style, with no animated bells and whistles.

nathell 6y ago
Relevant: https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2019/10/07/web-of-documents/ https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2019/10/07/web-of-documents/
- eitland 6y ago
  Yep, I was about to post this myself. Another time I referenced his post I added some ideas of my own: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23250051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23250051 Edit: the site search (which is really fast and good!) tells me I have commented about this a number of times: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Aeitland%20asm.js&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Summary: I hope someone can build a browser that - looks for well-formed pure documents, render them blazingly fast - falls back to another engine for old-fashioned web pages - alternatively there can be something in between that uses preapproved js packages to add some improvements like autocomplete. Make this work, get Wikipedia and a couple of others to optimize their pages for it and maybe we manage to turn the web around again :-)

by yason 6y ago

nathell 6y ago

Relevant: https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2019/10/07/web-of-documents/ https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2019/10/07/web-of-documents/

eitland 6y ago
Yep, I was about to post this myself. Another time I referenced his post I added some ideas of my own: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23250051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23250051 Edit: the site search (which is really fast and good!) tells me I have commented about this a number of times: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Aeitland%20asm.js&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Summary: I hope someone can build a browser that - looks for well-formed pure documents, render them blazingly fast - falls back to another engine for old-fashioned web pages - alternatively there can be something in between that uses preapproved js packages to add some improvements like autocomplete. Make this work, get Wikipedia and a couple of others to optimize their pages for it and maybe we manage to turn the web around again :-)