5 ms·

While I get the intention behind simplifying the web and the way we author documents on it, just like gemini this misses the mark by simplifying to a degree tha

While I get the intention behind simplifying the web and the way we author documents on it, just like gemini this misses the mark by simplifying to a degree that gives as less capabilities we have now in the medium of html/text. For one thing, I think common mark is really the worst form of markdown and especially considering the whole angle of hacker culture and DIY these kind of projects clearly aim at, I am always baffled that something more feature rich and easy to interoperate with like pandoc flavored markdown is not chosen. And tables are optional? That does not sound great for many Text documents to be honest. I would rather argue, forcing browsers to not only implement tables but sortable and filterable tables would give such a standard an immediate leg up over the existing web and browsers and is absolutely something people working with text documents would gain benefit from. But to this point, I always fell a way back to a more text focused web should also have even more a focus on hypertext than the original web did. The real value besides having it run in simpler browsers would be to offer features that were never realized on the web but could revolutionize how we work with text. I like to see more inspired be Engelbart or Nelson and really bring forward a new, more useful sort of web. Of course, that adds complexity and that has to be careful managed, but besides the community around it, gemini, and looking at it also this, are mostly not more featured than swapping text files over ftp, and I feel this is really a shame.

tluyben2 5y ago
Maybe web without any frontend dynamic? So without JS and the all the complex dynamic features of css?
- gbanfalvi 5y ago
  Without JS means without any dynamic behaviour or interactivity. But it also depends on what the goals of this new system are. Are we trying to make a simpler, faster, read-only web? If we're going that way, I'd love to limit CSS to a minimal subset (or maybe nothing?), minimise support for embedded content types, remove input elements, and remove stuff like cookies.
  - Induane 5y ago
    Kind of - and I mentioned this earlier so sorry for the repeat - but taking HTMX and making it's tools standardized parts of browsers would be amazing.
kitsunesoba 5y ago
I think the primary concern of these projects is feature creep, where you end up “why notting” your way back to the web as it currently stands: something originally intended to be incredibly simple that over time turned into a pile of hacks. There is probably value in a project that aims to create a more intentionally designed and capable version of the web with standard rich interactive widgets, etc, but those would need to be separate projects with their own approach to keeping scope sane.
- rglullis 5y ago
  But who said it was "intended to be incredibly simple"? It seems that some people look at the designs from the past and think "oh, whatever the designer came up with was the true final form of the idea" when in reality it was just that what they came up with was to deal with the constraints they were dealing with (costs, time, resource, etc).
  - Cyberdog 5y ago
    I am the author of the document. KyuWeb is intended to be incredibly simple.
    - rglullis 5y ago
      I meant in relation to the "original web" creator. I don't think at any point in time TBL's just went on to say "oh, HTTP and HTML are set in stone and no more use-cases are going to be added or promoted". The protocol was not designed to satisfy some subjective notion of "incredibly simple", it was made to satisfy the possible use-cases within the constraints of the time. Which leads me to ask you: why do you think that you believe that other people should be limiting themselves to what basically amounts to your idea of "incredibly simple"?
      - Cyberdog 5y ago
        > I meant in relation to the "original web" creator. Okay, my mistake. I do think simplicity was a goal for Sir Tim, though. Check out this old Usenet post introducing the "WorldWideWeb" (emphasis mine): https://groups.google.com/g/comp.archives/c/CfsHlSNYPUI/m/DTs60INnuzcJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.archives/c/CfsHlSNYPUI/m/DT... > A simple protocol ("HTTP") is used to allow a browser program to request a keyword search by a remote information server.… > Making a web is as simple as writing a few SGML files which point to your existing data.… -- > Which leads me to ask you: why do you think that you believe that other people should be limiting themselves to what basically amounts to your idea of "incredibly simple"? I think the phrase "should be" bothers me here. I just had an idea and I'm gonna try to implement it. Most likely I will be the only person to do so, but if someone else thinks it's a good idea, they can implement it too if they wish, and that would be cool. I'm sure many people who are interested in KyuWeb's goals will read my proposal and my arguments in this thread and still decide that Gopher, Gemini, or the modern web is still the better route to take, and that's fine.
Starlevel001 5y ago
> For one thing, I think common mark is really the worst form of markdown and especially considering the whole angle of hacker culture and DIY these kind of projects clearly aim at, I am always baffled that something more feature rich and easy to interoperate with like pandoc flavored markdown is not chosen. Or something even better than MD, like reStructuredText.
- brabel 5y ago
  OMG no. RST has such a random syntax it's impossible to remember anything. I really hate it (have to use it at work, its processor is slow as hell, just a horrible experience).
  - tetris11 5y ago
    Org-markdown?
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      How about we just stick with HTML?
      - Cyberdog 5y ago
        If I ever decide against Markdown, some sort of strictly-defined subset of HTML would probably be my second choice. As someone who's been building web sites since 1996, though, I find HTML unpleasant to use for writing prose, and less readable when unrendered than Markdown.
  - snek_case 5y ago
    Agreed, the RST syntax is truly awful. At least Markdown is easy to understand and work with.
Induane 5y ago
Taking what the HTMX project has done and making it standard in browsers (without a library) would go light-years towards bringing back the hypertext focus of the web.
- traverseda 5y ago
  I think everyone has there own set of killer features for something like this, here's mine. * HTMX build in, gives 99% of modern page interactivity with no javascript * No javascript. * Yes images and videos, no custom video controls. * Simplified CSS, all layout done via flexbox? The goal is to be able to not use HTML as part of your layout, but instead have HTML model your data as closely as possible. Looking at how simplified the HTML is for modern bootstrap compared to previous generations I think this is possible. * Simplified HTML. There are a lot of older tags that probably shouldn't get used. Everyone has their own set of killer features though, so it's a hard problem to coordinate on. I think something very much like that could be really powerful as a native GUI toolkit if you included an HTML5-canvas equivalent, maybe something similar to wayland's protocol, for native apps only of course.
- knighthack 5y ago
  HTMX is such a killer library, especially with Django. I use it for almost everything now, and with a touch of Alpine JS.
hombre_fatal 5y ago
> I always fell a way back to a more text focused web should also have even more a focus on hypertext than the original web did. This is something that struck me with Gemini. What happens is that since there are no inline links, you are basically penalized for adding links because you have to disrupt your prose with a stack of links, each on their own line, before resuming your content. It focused so much on the text-only part of the early web that it forgot about the part where people linked to each other heavily. It's like it imagines the ideal web as just a bunch of online books rather than interconnected documents.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > What happens is that since there are no inline links, you are basically penalized for adding links because you have to disrupt your prose with a stack of links, each on their own line, before resuming your content. Just use footnotes.[0][1] [0] Like this [1] Or this[1a] [1a] Or even this.
  - IgorPartola 5y ago
    So a PDF.
  - afavour 5y ago
    Which is objectively worse than an inline link.
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      I find it far less disruptive for actually reading a text, in which you want to follow references after you've read the text. If you do that while you read the text, you're no longer actually reading the text.
Cyberdog 5y ago
> I think common mark is really the worst form of markdown How so? > And tables are optional? That does not sound great for many Text documents to be honest. I would rather argue, forcing browsers to not only implement tables but sortable and filterable tables would give such a standard an immediate leg up over the existing web and browsers and is absolutely something people working with text documents would gain benefit from. There are two issues with tables: One, they are not in the CommonMark spec and as such many parsers will not support them out-of-the-box, and two, the syntax as implemented in GitHub-flavored Markdown (which is what is commonly understood as a "Markdown table") is incredibly complex compared to any other standard or not-standard-but-common Markdown feature. Thus, I would not expect very resource-limited systems to be able to support them. That said, I'd expect that any KyuWeb browsers that reach widespread use on modern every-day systems would support tables, so unless you're interested in browsing KyuWeb on old IBM PC systems or the like, the issue is largely moot.
- IgorPartola 5y ago
  I think you answered your own questions as to why common mark is bad :)
  - Cyberdog 5y ago
    Did I? How so? Please be specific. Was it that it doesn't support tables?
  - davidjytang 5y ago
    Only because the spec lacks table?

tluyben2 5y ago

Maybe web without any frontend dynamic? So without JS and the all the complex dynamic features of css?

gbanfalvi 5y ago
Without JS means without any dynamic behaviour or interactivity. But it also depends on what the goals of this new system are. Are we trying to make a simpler, faster, read-only web? If we're going that way, I'd love to limit CSS to a minimal subset (or maybe nothing?), minimise support for embedded content types, remove input elements, and remove stuff like cookies.
- Induane 5y ago
  Kind of - and I mentioned this earlier so sorry for the repeat - but taking HTMX and making it's tools standardized parts of browsers would be amazing.

kitsunesoba 5y ago

I think the primary concern of these projects is feature creep, where you end up “why notting” your way back to the web as it currently stands: something originally intended to be incredibly simple that over time turned into a pile of hacks. There is probably value in a project that aims to create a more intentionally designed and capable version of the web with standard rich interactive widgets, etc, but those would need to be separate projects with their own approach to keeping scope sane.

rglullis 5y ago
But who said it was "intended to be incredibly simple"? It seems that some people look at the designs from the past and think "oh, whatever the designer came up with was the true final form of the idea" when in reality it was just that what they came up with was to deal with the constraints they were dealing with (costs, time, resource, etc).
- Cyberdog 5y ago
  I am the author of the document. KyuWeb is intended to be incredibly simple.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    I meant in relation to the "original web" creator. I don't think at any point in time TBL's just went on to say "oh, HTTP and HTML are set in stone and no more use-cases are going to be added or promoted". The protocol was not designed to satisfy some subjective notion of "incredibly simple", it was made to satisfy the possible use-cases within the constraints of the time. Which leads me to ask you: why do you think that you believe that other people should be limiting themselves to what basically amounts to your idea of "incredibly simple"?
    - Cyberdog 5y ago
      > I meant in relation to the "original web" creator. Okay, my mistake. I do think simplicity was a goal for Sir Tim, though. Check out this old Usenet post introducing the "WorldWideWeb" (emphasis mine): https://groups.google.com/g/comp.archives/c/CfsHlSNYPUI/m/DTs60INnuzcJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.archives/c/CfsHlSNYPUI/m/DT... > A simple protocol ("HTTP") is used to allow a browser program to request a keyword search by a remote information server.… > Making a web is as simple as writing a few SGML files which point to your existing data.… -- > Which leads me to ask you: why do you think that you believe that other people should be limiting themselves to what basically amounts to your idea of "incredibly simple"? I think the phrase "should be" bothers me here. I just had an idea and I'm gonna try to implement it. Most likely I will be the only person to do so, but if someone else thinks it's a good idea, they can implement it too if they wish, and that would be cool. I'm sure many people who are interested in KyuWeb's goals will read my proposal and my arguments in this thread and still decide that Gopher, Gemini, or the modern web is still the better route to take, and that's fine.

Starlevel001 5y ago

> For one thing, I think common mark is really the worst form of markdown and especially considering the whole angle of hacker culture and DIY these kind of projects clearly aim at, I am always baffled that something more feature rich and easy to interoperate with like pandoc flavored markdown is not chosen. Or something even better than MD, like reStructuredText.

brabel 5y ago
OMG no. RST has such a random syntax it's impossible to remember anything. I really hate it (have to use it at work, its processor is slow as hell, just a horrible experience).
- tetris11 5y ago
  Org-markdown?
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    How about we just stick with HTML?
    - Cyberdog 5y ago
      If I ever decide against Markdown, some sort of strictly-defined subset of HTML would probably be my second choice. As someone who's been building web sites since 1996, though, I find HTML unpleasant to use for writing prose, and less readable when unrendered than Markdown.
- snek_case 5y ago
  Agreed, the RST syntax is truly awful. At least Markdown is easy to understand and work with.

Induane 5y ago

Taking what the HTMX project has done and making it standard in browsers (without a library) would go light-years towards bringing back the hypertext focus of the web.

traverseda 5y ago
I think everyone has there own set of killer features for something like this, here's mine. * HTMX build in, gives 99% of modern page interactivity with no javascript * No javascript. * Yes images and videos, no custom video controls. * Simplified CSS, all layout done via flexbox? The goal is to be able to not use HTML as part of your layout, but instead have HTML model your data as closely as possible. Looking at how simplified the HTML is for modern bootstrap compared to previous generations I think this is possible. * Simplified HTML. There are a lot of older tags that probably shouldn't get used. Everyone has their own set of killer features though, so it's a hard problem to coordinate on. I think something very much like that could be really powerful as a native GUI toolkit if you included an HTML5-canvas equivalent, maybe something similar to wayland's protocol, for native apps only of course.
knighthack 5y ago
HTMX is such a killer library, especially with Django. I use it for almost everything now, and with a touch of Alpine JS.

hombre_fatal 5y ago

> I always fell a way back to a more text focused web should also have even more a focus on hypertext than the original web did. This is something that struck me with Gemini. What happens is that since there are no inline links, you are basically penalized for adding links because you have to disrupt your prose with a stack of links, each on their own line, before resuming your content. It focused so much on the text-only part of the early web that it forgot about the part where people linked to each other heavily. It's like it imagines the ideal web as just a bunch of online books rather than interconnected documents.

zozbot234 5y ago
> What happens is that since there are no inline links, you are basically penalized for adding links because you have to disrupt your prose with a stack of links, each on their own line, before resuming your content. Just use footnotes.[0][1] [0] Like this [1] Or this[1a] [1a] Or even this.
- IgorPartola 5y ago
  So a PDF.
- afavour 5y ago
  Which is objectively worse than an inline link.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    I find it far less disruptive for actually reading a text, in which you want to follow references after you've read the text. If you do that while you read the text, you're no longer actually reading the text.

Cyberdog 5y ago

> I think common mark is really the worst form of markdown How so? > And tables are optional? That does not sound great for many Text documents to be honest. I would rather argue, forcing browsers to not only implement tables but sortable and filterable tables would give such a standard an immediate leg up over the existing web and browsers and is absolutely something people working with text documents would gain benefit from. There are two issues with tables: One, they are not in the CommonMark spec and as such many parsers will not support them out-of-the-box, and two, the syntax as implemented in GitHub-flavored Markdown (which is what is commonly understood as a "Markdown table") is incredibly complex compared to any other standard or not-standard-but-common Markdown feature. Thus, I would not expect very resource-limited systems to be able to support them. That said, I'd expect that any KyuWeb browsers that reach widespread use on modern every-day systems would support tables, so unless you're interested in browsing KyuWeb on old IBM PC systems or the like, the issue is largely moot.

IgorPartola 5y ago
I think you answered your own questions as to why common mark is bad :)
- Cyberdog 5y ago
  Did I? How so? Please be specific. Was it that it doesn't support tables?
- davidjytang 5y ago
  Only because the spec lacks table?