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I'm a fan of Lynx. React and angular have destroyed the semantic web.

by kgbcia 4y ago

pipo234 4y ago
Love Lynx and not particularly fond about JS or responsive frameworks. But I do not understand what React or Angular could have contributed that would be incompatible counter to or otherwise could have hampered the semantic web — so far as that would have ever been a viable thing is the first place. Can you elaborate on how react and angular have destroyed the semantic web?
- mprime1 4y ago
  Not GP but heres what I think they meant. In the old days you could look at at raw non-rendered HTML and it would be so simple that you can render it in your head. With the advent of more sophisticated web frameworks like the one mentioned, that’s no longer the case. The site consists of MBs of scripts and templates that take a gigawatt to render.
  - pipo234 4y ago
    +1 on the bloat, though i would primarily blame sloppy code and cheap fast pipes. On complicated scripts taking a gigawatt to render, I would like to point out that in the good old days that was all happening too — just not in your browser. Inefficient PHP and CGI scripts, massive Java frameworks. Today, still the majority of complexity and heavy lifting is kept away from our browsers. It's sobering to think that most of the gigawatts we burn on our phones, do not show up on our power bills...
    - johnfernow 4y ago
      I think that for most businesses, their sites could be statically generated, with iframes and embed tags for interactive parts like forms, and the web would become much faster, more pleasant to use, and have a notably lower carbon footprint. Making images smaller by default would help too. For interactive sites, if videos were limited to 480p on mobile and 720p on desktop unless manually changed, I imagine the carbon impact of data centers would drop considerably. For content viewed on TVs (where you usually sit quite a bit farther back than a monitor), such as Netflix or Hulu, I think they could set it to 480p by default and a lot of people would never bother to change it. Unfortunately actually calculating the carbon footprint of a bloated web (compared to a lite version) would be very difficult. As you mention, a lot of that bloat is on the backend. New Reddit may transfer 6x more resources over the network than Old Reddit, but both of them have to process on the back-end what links should even be shown for a given user, so I doubt switching to Old Reddit would result in 6x fewer emissions. But even if it only resulted in 2x fewer emissions, that'd still be a considerable improvement. Part of the investigation would require seeing how much energy is used by the data centers processing what to send, versus how much energy is used by ISPs transferring that data across networks to the end-users. In any case, if sites were more like Hacker News, Craigslist, and Wikipedia, versus New Reddit, Amazon, and most news sites, I feel confident that the carbon footprint of the Internet would go down notably. HN and Craigslist's designs are going to be hard sell for most businesses, but something like Wikipedia proves you can have an attractive design with low page sizes. And in the case for newspapers, it'd be nice if their web versions were more similar to their paper versions. That is tough with a free + ads model, but honestly I'm more likely to see an ad if the whole site is just text and there's a text ad in the middle of it (hopefully properly identified as such, though.)
pbhjpbhj 4y ago
I quickly moved on to Links when I was using Lynx for a while (some years ago) as it optionally did images and could work with some JavaScript. Depends on ones use case.
every 4y ago
I have been using lynx for almost 3 decades. It is still my primary browser. All of my bookmarks are stored in lynx. When necessary, I can spawn my defined x-www-browser from inside lynx, as when typing this comment. The two together are quite functional...
shadowgovt 4y ago
React and angular are definitely the wrong tools for the job if one is trying to make a semantically-parseable page. They're tools for human interaction, not machine interaction. It turns out humans care about things that HTML and CSS alone weren't sufficient to account for (like delaying streaming of data until it's actually needed, saving on bandwidth, which humans have to pay for).
phpnode 4y ago
There has never been a semantic web
- mdaniel 4y ago
  "Never" is a tiny bit harsh, IMHO; arguably, there have been several of them they just (evidently?) don't offer content producers as much value as it offers to consumers (which includes search engines), and thus the incentives play out in exactly that way * JSON-LD markup exists in plenty of modern sites * schema.org markup exists in some * microformats.org briefly raised its head The BBC website is the biggest example I know of which has a lot of semantic markup/annotations. IIRC they used to actually have RDF attributes in a lot of the BBC Radio listings

I'm a fan of Lynx. React and angular have destroyed the semantic web.

by kgbcia 4y ago

I'm a fan of Lynx. React and angular have destroyed the semantic web.

Love Lynx and not particularly fond about JS or responsive frameworks. But I do not understand what React or Angular could have contributed that would be incompatible counter to or otherwise could have hampered the semantic web — so far as that would have ever been a viable thing is the first place. Can you elaborate on how react and angular have destroyed the semantic web?

mprime1 4y ago
Not GP but heres what I think they meant. In the old days you could look at at raw non-rendered HTML and it would be so simple that you can render it in your head. With the advent of more sophisticated web frameworks like the one mentioned, that’s no longer the case. The site consists of MBs of scripts and templates that take a gigawatt to render.
- pipo234 4y ago
  +1 on the bloat, though i would primarily blame sloppy code and cheap fast pipes. On complicated scripts taking a gigawatt to render, I would like to point out that in the good old days that was all happening too — just not in your browser. Inefficient PHP and CGI scripts, massive Java frameworks. Today, still the majority of complexity and heavy lifting is kept away from our browsers. It's sobering to think that most of the gigawatts we burn on our phones, do not show up on our power bills...
  - johnfernow 4y ago
    I think that for most businesses, their sites could be statically generated, with iframes and embed tags for interactive parts like forms, and the web would become much faster, more pleasant to use, and have a notably lower carbon footprint. Making images smaller by default would help too. For interactive sites, if videos were limited to 480p on mobile and 720p on desktop unless manually changed, I imagine the carbon impact of data centers would drop considerably. For content viewed on TVs (where you usually sit quite a bit farther back than a monitor), such as Netflix or Hulu, I think they could set it to 480p by default and a lot of people would never bother to change it. Unfortunately actually calculating the carbon footprint of a bloated web (compared to a lite version) would be very difficult. As you mention, a lot of that bloat is on the backend. New Reddit may transfer 6x more resources over the network than Old Reddit, but both of them have to process on the back-end what links should even be shown for a given user, so I doubt switching to Old Reddit would result in 6x fewer emissions. But even if it only resulted in 2x fewer emissions, that'd still be a considerable improvement. Part of the investigation would require seeing how much energy is used by the data centers processing what to send, versus how much energy is used by ISPs transferring that data across networks to the end-users. In any case, if sites were more like Hacker News, Craigslist, and Wikipedia, versus New Reddit, Amazon, and most news sites, I feel confident that the carbon footprint of the Internet would go down notably. HN and Craigslist's designs are going to be hard sell for most businesses, but something like Wikipedia proves you can have an attractive design with low page sizes. And in the case for newspapers, it'd be nice if their web versions were more similar to their paper versions. That is tough with a free + ads model, but honestly I'm more likely to see an ad if the whole site is just text and there's a text ad in the middle of it (hopefully properly identified as such, though.)

pbhjpbhj 4y ago

I quickly moved on to Links when I was using Lynx for a while (some years ago) as it optionally did images and could work with some JavaScript. Depends on ones use case.

every 4y ago

I have been using lynx for almost 3 decades. It is still my primary browser. All of my bookmarks are stored in lynx. When necessary, I can spawn my defined x-www-browser from inside lynx, as when typing this comment. The two together are quite functional...

shadowgovt 4y ago

React and angular are definitely the wrong tools for the job if one is trying to make a semantically-parseable page. They're tools for human interaction, not machine interaction. It turns out humans care about things that HTML and CSS alone weren't sufficient to account for (like delaying streaming of data until it's actually needed, saving on bandwidth, which humans have to pay for).

phpnode 4y ago

There has never been a semantic web

mdaniel 4y ago
"Never" is a tiny bit harsh, IMHO; arguably, there have been several of them they just (evidently?) don't offer content producers as much value as it offers to consumers (which includes search engines), and thus the incentives play out in exactly that way * JSON-LD markup exists in plenty of modern sites * schema.org markup exists in some * microformats.org briefly raised its head The BBC website is the biggest example I know of which has a lot of semantic markup/annotations. IIRC they used to actually have RDF attributes in a lot of the BBC Radio listings