8 ms·

A Reflection on the Small Web

55 points by sodimel 4y ago

smcn 4y ago
Just want to say that I love the way this page looks and think that I'm going to ~steal~ take inspiration from it.
- sodimel 4y ago
  Thanks! I found that you need to add some kind of magic chars [0] at the beginning of the txt file in order to display utf-8 chars (prevent this Ã©Ã Â :P), here's how to do it: echo -e "\xef\xbb\xbf\n" > myfilename.txt [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark#UTF-8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark#UTF-8
  - smcn 4y ago
    Ah, good to know! Thanks!
  - tiborsaas 4y ago
    Oh, the good old PHP days, when the BOM was considered a source of bugs :)
  - SahAssar 4y ago
    I'm guessing you wouldn't need that if you set this header: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
    - sodimel 4y ago
      That's another level of work :P I created the whole https://misc.l3m.in/txt/ https://misc.l3m.in/txt/ trying to prove a point with a friend (the point was something like "you can start a blog right away if you have a domain name and a ssh access to a server, let me show you") :D
      - SahAssar 4y ago
        You're using apache which I'm guessing you installed. If so I think adding `AddDefaultCharset utf-8` to the config should be enough, and probably easier than adding a BOM to each of your files.
ploum 4y ago
I would like to point out at Gemini, which is an incredible community regarding this. I’ve developed a terminal browser for the web/RSS/gemini/gopher and I’m everyday astonished how 95% of what I need is best served as simple text in my terminal. It makes me wonder "why do we to invest so much time learning/tweaking CSS/JS when all we want to do is exchanging text and a few pictures ?" https://notabug.org/ploum/offpunk https://notabug.org/ploum/offpunk PS: to be inclusive of gemini/gopher, I prefer the word "smolnet" over "small web". But we understand each other, that’s really a detail.
- sodimel 4y ago
  I wanted to mention offpunk but I forgot! (edit: done) (I read your posts on your gemlog as well as the french ones on your blog, thank you very much for writing all of these posts)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  Gemini and Gopher seem to be quite different from the intention of the small web. One is a retro-computing thing, the other is a mission to focus on people rather than organizations
  - tgvaughan 4y ago
    In practice they're not so different . There are plenty of people regularly publishing stuff over gopher that has nothing to do with retro-computing. Gemini also grew out of a gopher community.
- sylware 4y ago
  Mostly because corpos and web dev tantrums: planned obsolescence and corpo/web dev locking via non-pertinent technical complexity and size of the web engines. This is a scam or toxic dellusions. Those "open source" web engines have grotesque and absurd complexity and size, are written with a computer language (c++) which has a syntax complexity morbidely accute that it requires compilers (even naive ones) not better than the web engines themselves. Hard truth: bazillions of services provided over the net can be provided as noscript/basic (x)html, aka basic html forms. Hard truth: asking nicely usually does not fix that (I tried). Hard truth: the real work in not the web "code", it is protecting it against hackers, like DDOS attacks. Hard truth: Don't fool youself, hackers will be "paid" to push hard those sites on big tech network infrastructure (or are idiots). "Ppl coding computer viruses are probably those who sell anti-virus software".
erwinh 4y ago
On a higher level, the trend a couple of years ago to have big video banners & highly complex interactive websites with lots of moving content does seem to have turned a bit. You still see it a bit from these more designerly 'award-winning' websites that start up with a loading bar... But now tools such as Google Lighthouse and Next.js logging first load file sizes makes it quite tangible to focus the team on and advocate for faster first meaningful content paints.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  > faster first meaningful content paints. That seems like trying to address one of the symptoms, not the underlying problem. "First meaningful paint" means nothing to me, depending on what the developer means by "meaningful". Why can't I just have the whole page load and display quickly? A lot of this nonsense is because of mobiles. Mobile browsers don't handle some UI elements (checkboxes, radios, drop-downs) very well, and all the browsers have "interesting" incompatibilities; so developers use these compatibility shims, which usually result in a badly-degraded desktop experience, and slowness for everyone. So I'm blaming the mobile browsers. They don't deal with standard markup properly.
  - erwinh 4y ago
    Depending on the goals of the page I would say its not up to the developer either. Developer/designer/pm whoever should ask the user: is this part of the page/content meaningful to you to load first? Unless you have something specific you want to communicate and then its up to you to decide whatever you find meaningful to show first.
frou_dh 4y ago
margarina72 4y ago
Just to add to conversation, IMO the smol web is mostly in need of great content, and discoverability. When I say great content, I mean something that can federate a large audience and serve as a reference and inspiration for others. Today most of content creator are producing for the rich web, so most of the interaction happen there, and as a result most of the new content is formatted for the rich web. From the top of my head, Phrack Magazine [1] is the only examples I can think of text based good content. It is mostly aimed at a very specific audience, but I am sure they are other examples out there. Which basically lead to the other question of discoverability... 1: http://phrack.org/ http://phrack.org/
- mod 4y ago
  This should meet your standard, I think: https://woodgears.ca/ https://woodgears.ca/
  - 0x445442 4y ago
    But then he blows it by linking to Instagram.
- ploum 4y ago
  The more I’m on the smolnet, the more I believe that there’s no content on the smolnet. Only conversations. You will not find that trendy topic everybody is talking about. You will not find buzz and virality. You will not find a bunch of content creators with thousands of consumers happy to comment/reshare. And that’s the whole point. You write in the smolnet thinking you write in the void. Then, sometimes, you realize you are part of a conversation. Because you see posts replying to you. Because you receive emails. The web is now mostly a huge stadium where we watch millionnaires playing football. The smolnet is the grassy field were you can play with others, having fun and improving your skills. The small field is not there to replace the huge stadium. You can even enjoy both.
dmitriid 4y ago
A lot of these (Gemini included) throw the baby out with the bath water. Yes, we want pages small. But we also want images and video in those pages, and those can and will be quite large.
- sodimel 4y ago
  (you can point to images in gemini pages, you just can't display them, and it changes my way to consume this content)
  - onemoresoop 4y ago
    Yes for distraction free content!!!
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      Someone mentioned this site in the comments: https://woodgears.ca/ https://woodgears.ca/ For example, this kind of visual tutorial page is impossible in Gemini: https://woodgears.ca/pantorouter/linear.html https://woodgears.ca/pantorouter/linear.html In it's insistence on "human consumption of predominantly written material" Gopher has removed the possibility of such content, too. Edit: corrected a link
- betwixthewires 4y ago
  Speak for yourself. I'd just like to click a video link and have it open in VLC.
BrainVirus 4y ago
I'm not sure I like it. This Small Web stuff (and other similar movements) is close enough to plausibility to capture people's time and attention, but far enough from reality to inevitably fail without making a dent in the awful state of the Web today. Here is something you should think about. If Small Web actually worked, we would be discussing this on Small Web right now. Do think about what this statement actually means before dismissing it as yet-another-negative-HN-comment. This means, for starters, that I would gladly use another platform to discuss your ideas, but none of the websites from various "alternative web" movements have any plausible solutions for people collaborating with one another. Which indicates a kind of lack of high-level, systemic thinking that is absolutely essential if you want to change anything at scale.
- 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  > Do think about what this statement actually means before dismissing it as yet-another-negative-HN-comment. Well you've pooh-poohed the idea without offering a constructive alternative. To me that's a typical negative HN comment. Why not suggest some ways to make it closer to reality?
  - hosteur 4y ago
    One alternative would be the web as today but without JavaScript. I think 90% of what sucks about current web goes away if js goes away. I don’t like executing arbitrary code from the web anyway. Even if the browser sandboxes it. Most of what websites do with JavaScript is not in my interest anyway.
    - sodimel 4y ago
      I did a calculation a while back [0] that showed that there's 30x more js than html on the web today. [0]: https://misc.l3m.in/txt/js_ratio.txt https://misc.l3m.in/txt/js_ratio.txt
    - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
      I find the layout that browsers use really annoying, and the way HTML and CSS are used to modify the layout very unintuitive. To get something to show up on the screen in the way you want, you have to keep changing lines of code and experimenting until it finally shows up the way you want. This is really annoying and unnecessary. Tools like PowerPoint and MS Publisher have allowed (for decades) the ability to just drag and drop anything you want onto a screen, save it, then send it to someone, and it will display for them exactly how it displayed for me. Text, pictures, sound, video. And it supports clickable hyperlinks. Which was the entire point of the web! But for some reason, web browsers are 10,000 times more complicated than these other ancient tools. If we really want to make the web less braindead, less bloaty, easier to use, we should throw away the annoying crap we have now, and start from scratch with something that is just easy for the average person. We don't have to regress to text terminals and Gopher, or just use browsers without JS. We can make something new that is both easy and useful.
t_mann 4y ago
Are anchor tags frowned upon in the small web movement? It feels like making it harder to follow hyperlinks goes against the "spirit" of what the web was built for.
- sodimel 4y ago
  (this txt file is not an html element, it's lighter than a traditional webpage because of my poor connection and the fact that I'm self-hosting my website)
  - t_mann 4y ago
    ok, but wouldn't the tags still be resolved by browsers, even if they're not wrapped inside <html>? or is the point that it's not meant to be viewed through a browser? the overhead of the tags in terms of bytes seems fairly negligible, no?
    - sodimel 4y ago
      I think tags would not be recognized by browsers. I just select the link (triple click) and right click > open link in new tab.
      - t_mann 4y ago
        Yeah you're right, I just tested it on my site. Before I just tried it in Codepen, but I forgot that it autowraps everything inside <html> and <body>, haha
    - perilunar 4y ago
      HTML tags will be recognised by browsers even if the file is not wrapped with an <html> tag, but only if the file is served as html. As I mentioned in a comment above, wrap the plain text in <pre></pre> tags, serve as html, then you can use links without adding any other html at all.
      - 4y ago
perilunar 4y ago
I'm all in favour of small websites, but publishing plain text files to the web seems a little bit too crude for me. If you take text file, wrap it with just a <pre></pre> tags, and publish it as .html you can then use any inline html tags such as bold, italics, links, etc. And even block level stuff like headings and lists. But really, just mark up your text as plain, semantic HTML. It add very little to the file size.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

55 points by sodimel 4y ago

smcn 4y ago

Just want to say that I love the way this page looks and think that I'm going to ~steal~ take inspiration from it.

sodimel 4y ago
Thanks! I found that you need to add some kind of magic chars [0] at the beginning of the txt file in order to display utf-8 chars (prevent this Ã©Ã Â :P), here's how to do it: echo -e "\xef\xbb\xbf\n" > myfilename.txt [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark#UTF-8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark#UTF-8
- smcn 4y ago
  Ah, good to know! Thanks!
- tiborsaas 4y ago
  Oh, the good old PHP days, when the BOM was considered a source of bugs :)
- SahAssar 4y ago
  I'm guessing you wouldn't need that if you set this header: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
  - sodimel 4y ago
    That's another level of work :P I created the whole https://misc.l3m.in/txt/ https://misc.l3m.in/txt/ trying to prove a point with a friend (the point was something like "you can start a blog right away if you have a domain name and a ssh access to a server, let me show you") :D
    - SahAssar 4y ago
      You're using apache which I'm guessing you installed. If so I think adding `AddDefaultCharset utf-8` to the config should be enough, and probably easier than adding a BOM to each of your files.

ploum 4y ago

I would like to point out at Gemini, which is an incredible community regarding this. I’ve developed a terminal browser for the web/RSS/gemini/gopher and I’m everyday astonished how 95% of what I need is best served as simple text in my terminal. It makes me wonder "why do we to invest so much time learning/tweaking CSS/JS when all we want to do is exchanging text and a few pictures ?" https://notabug.org/ploum/offpunk https://notabug.org/ploum/offpunk PS: to be inclusive of gemini/gopher, I prefer the word "smolnet" over "small web". But we understand each other, that’s really a detail.

sodimel 4y ago
I wanted to mention offpunk but I forgot! (edit: done) (I read your posts on your gemlog as well as the french ones on your blog, thank you very much for writing all of these posts)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
Gemini and Gopher seem to be quite different from the intention of the small web. One is a retro-computing thing, the other is a mission to focus on people rather than organizations
- tgvaughan 4y ago
  In practice they're not so different . There are plenty of people regularly publishing stuff over gopher that has nothing to do with retro-computing. Gemini also grew out of a gopher community.
sylware 4y ago
Mostly because corpos and web dev tantrums: planned obsolescence and corpo/web dev locking via non-pertinent technical complexity and size of the web engines. This is a scam or toxic dellusions. Those "open source" web engines have grotesque and absurd complexity and size, are written with a computer language (c++) which has a syntax complexity morbidely accute that it requires compilers (even naive ones) not better than the web engines themselves. Hard truth: bazillions of services provided over the net can be provided as noscript/basic (x)html, aka basic html forms. Hard truth: asking nicely usually does not fix that (I tried). Hard truth: the real work in not the web "code", it is protecting it against hackers, like DDOS attacks. Hard truth: Don't fool youself, hackers will be "paid" to push hard those sites on big tech network infrastructure (or are idiots). "Ppl coding computer viruses are probably those who sell anti-virus software".

erwinh 4y ago

On a higher level, the trend a couple of years ago to have big video banners & highly complex interactive websites with lots of moving content does seem to have turned a bit. You still see it a bit from these more designerly 'award-winning' websites that start up with a loading bar... But now tools such as Google Lighthouse and Next.js logging first load file sizes makes it quite tangible to focus the team on and advocate for faster first meaningful content paints.

denton-scratch 4y ago
> faster first meaningful content paints. That seems like trying to address one of the symptoms, not the underlying problem. "First meaningful paint" means nothing to me, depending on what the developer means by "meaningful". Why can't I just have the whole page load and display quickly? A lot of this nonsense is because of mobiles. Mobile browsers don't handle some UI elements (checkboxes, radios, drop-downs) very well, and all the browsers have "interesting" incompatibilities; so developers use these compatibility shims, which usually result in a badly-degraded desktop experience, and slowness for everyone. So I'm blaming the mobile browsers. They don't deal with standard markup properly.
- erwinh 4y ago
  Depending on the goals of the page I would say its not up to the developer either. Developer/designer/pm whoever should ask the user: is this part of the page/content meaningful to you to load first? Unless you have something specific you want to communicate and then its up to you to decide whatever you find meaningful to show first.

frou_dh 4y ago

margarina72 4y ago

Just to add to conversation, IMO the smol web is mostly in need of great content, and discoverability. When I say great content, I mean something that can federate a large audience and serve as a reference and inspiration for others. Today most of content creator are producing for the rich web, so most of the interaction happen there, and as a result most of the new content is formatted for the rich web. From the top of my head, Phrack Magazine [1] is the only examples I can think of text based good content. It is mostly aimed at a very specific audience, but I am sure they are other examples out there. Which basically lead to the other question of discoverability... 1: http://phrack.org/ http://phrack.org/

mod 4y ago
This should meet your standard, I think: https://woodgears.ca/ https://woodgears.ca/
- 0x445442 4y ago
  But then he blows it by linking to Instagram.
ploum 4y ago
The more I’m on the smolnet, the more I believe that there’s no content on the smolnet. Only conversations. You will not find that trendy topic everybody is talking about. You will not find buzz and virality. You will not find a bunch of content creators with thousands of consumers happy to comment/reshare. And that’s the whole point. You write in the smolnet thinking you write in the void. Then, sometimes, you realize you are part of a conversation. Because you see posts replying to you. Because you receive emails. The web is now mostly a huge stadium where we watch millionnaires playing football. The smolnet is the grassy field were you can play with others, having fun and improving your skills. The small field is not there to replace the huge stadium. You can even enjoy both.

dmitriid 4y ago

A lot of these (Gemini included) throw the baby out with the bath water. Yes, we want pages small. But we also want images and video in those pages, and those can and will be quite large.

sodimel 4y ago
(you can point to images in gemini pages, you just can't display them, and it changes my way to consume this content)
- onemoresoop 4y ago
  Yes for distraction free content!!!
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    Someone mentioned this site in the comments: https://woodgears.ca/ https://woodgears.ca/ For example, this kind of visual tutorial page is impossible in Gemini: https://woodgears.ca/pantorouter/linear.html https://woodgears.ca/pantorouter/linear.html In it's insistence on "human consumption of predominantly written material" Gopher has removed the possibility of such content, too. Edit: corrected a link
betwixthewires 4y ago
Speak for yourself. I'd just like to click a video link and have it open in VLC.

BrainVirus 4y ago

I'm not sure I like it. This Small Web stuff (and other similar movements) is close enough to plausibility to capture people's time and attention, but far enough from reality to inevitably fail without making a dent in the awful state of the Web today. Here is something you should think about. If Small Web actually worked, we would be discussing this on Small Web right now. Do think about what this statement actually means before dismissing it as yet-another-negative-HN-comment. This means, for starters, that I would gladly use another platform to discuss your ideas, but none of the websites from various "alternative web" movements have any plausible solutions for people collaborating with one another. Which indicates a kind of lack of high-level, systemic thinking that is absolutely essential if you want to change anything at scale.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago
> Do think about what this statement actually means before dismissing it as yet-another-negative-HN-comment. Well you've pooh-poohed the idea without offering a constructive alternative. To me that's a typical negative HN comment. Why not suggest some ways to make it closer to reality?
- hosteur 4y ago
  One alternative would be the web as today but without JavaScript. I think 90% of what sucks about current web goes away if js goes away. I don’t like executing arbitrary code from the web anyway. Even if the browser sandboxes it. Most of what websites do with JavaScript is not in my interest anyway.
  - sodimel 4y ago
    I did a calculation a while back [0] that showed that there's 30x more js than html on the web today. [0]: https://misc.l3m.in/txt/js_ratio.txt https://misc.l3m.in/txt/js_ratio.txt
  - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
    I find the layout that browsers use really annoying, and the way HTML and CSS are used to modify the layout very unintuitive. To get something to show up on the screen in the way you want, you have to keep changing lines of code and experimenting until it finally shows up the way you want. This is really annoying and unnecessary. Tools like PowerPoint and MS Publisher have allowed (for decades) the ability to just drag and drop anything you want onto a screen, save it, then send it to someone, and it will display for them exactly how it displayed for me. Text, pictures, sound, video. And it supports clickable hyperlinks. Which was the entire point of the web! But for some reason, web browsers are 10,000 times more complicated than these other ancient tools. If we really want to make the web less braindead, less bloaty, easier to use, we should throw away the annoying crap we have now, and start from scratch with something that is just easy for the average person. We don't have to regress to text terminals and Gopher, or just use browsers without JS. We can make something new that is both easy and useful.

t_mann 4y ago

Are anchor tags frowned upon in the small web movement? It feels like making it harder to follow hyperlinks goes against the "spirit" of what the web was built for.

sodimel 4y ago
(this txt file is not an html element, it's lighter than a traditional webpage because of my poor connection and the fact that I'm self-hosting my website)
- t_mann 4y ago
  ok, but wouldn't the tags still be resolved by browsers, even if they're not wrapped inside <html>? or is the point that it's not meant to be viewed through a browser? the overhead of the tags in terms of bytes seems fairly negligible, no?
  - sodimel 4y ago
    I think tags would not be recognized by browsers. I just select the link (triple click) and right click > open link in new tab.
    - t_mann 4y ago
      Yeah you're right, I just tested it on my site. Before I just tried it in Codepen, but I forgot that it autowraps everything inside <html> and <body>, haha
  - perilunar 4y ago
    HTML tags will be recognised by browsers even if the file is not wrapped with an <html> tag, but only if the file is served as html. As I mentioned in a comment above, wrap the plain text in <pre></pre> tags, serve as html, then you can use links without adding any other html at all.
    - 4y ago

perilunar 4y ago

I'm all in favour of small websites, but publishing plain text files to the web seems a little bit too crude for me. If you take text file, wrap it with just a <pre></pre> tags, and publish it as .html you can then use any inline html tags such as bold, italics, links, etc. And even block level stuff like headings and lists. But really, just mark up your text as plain, semantic HTML. It add very little to the file size.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]