20 ms·

The "Cheap" Web

308 points by surprisetalk 3y ago

throwaway81523 3y ago
Is that the Comic Sans I've heard so much about?
- Brajeshwar 3y ago
  The other day, I was talking to my daughter about where she might like to study in future. We happen to went to a big University for some showcase event and I asked her if she liked that one. She replied, “No! Their logo is in Comic Sans.”
- globalise83 3y ago
  "Playpen Sans"
- 6th 3y ago
  It is. It's all real and it's spectacular...ly ugly.
cardinalbug 3y ago
[flagged]
- Brajeshwar 3y ago
  I usually tend to use Reader mode in Safari or ReaderMode[1] in Google Chrome. In-fact, I have set Reader Mode as default for a few common website such as that of PG's. 1. https://readermode.io/ https://readermode.io/
cxr 3y ago
The thing that makes me disagree with proponents of the "smol"/"cheap"/etc Web is their totally misguided insistence on personal webpages as a sui generis medium for self-expression wrt layout and styling. > Until we adopt simple and stable building materials, all websites will continue to look the same. Yeah, big deal. Who cares if websites look the same? Wait, let me put that another way: we should care whether websites look the same in the sense that more of them should look similar to one another than they do today—namely, they should look how you and I (the readers) wish for them to look for our own comfort and convenience—which means fewer dark starry sky backgrounds, fewer text drop shadows and typefaces reminiscent of comic book speech bubbles, and fewer distracting marquees. Way less kitsch, not more. HN, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, SMS, etc. all have a limited range of expression through form. Somehow we get by. Completely dissimilar books look a lot more "the same" than websites do, and that's not a bad thing. You never see book authors complaining about control over the printed page the way that you see self-styled web designers insisting on their manifest destiny over the user's viewport for the purposes of self-expression. Webdevs need to get over themselves, and the wider world needs to stop letting them get by with (or encouraging) this kind of narcissism.
- mcluck 3y ago
  Authors like Mark Z. Danielewski do more with the layout in their books than most and I love them for it. I like seeing people try out different ideas and do things that might be considered less-than-ideal to view
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  You can have all web sites look the same by setting reader view as default in your browser. It is a great improvement for browsing the web, both on desktop and phone. If somebody invented a "forum view" to make all forums look the same on our browsers, then I think the circle would be complete. It shouldn't be too difficult either, since most run on similar software.
  - anon25783 3y ago
    You should learn about the Gemini protocol! It's an alternative to HTTPS that uses a document markup language similar to Markdown instead of HTML, and uses a deliberately simplified, feature-frozen protocol with the explicit goal that anyone should be able to write their own Gemini browser "in a weekend". No scripting or styling support, just documents with links and images in them. Here are some informative webpages on the topic, neither of them mine: https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq.gmi https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq.gmi https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange
    - carlosjobim 3y ago
      I think the Gemini stuff is really neat, and I've already experimented with Lagrange and Kristall browsers. However, the information I'm interested in isn't published on those networks, and I think that's true for most of us. Reader view is a seamless way for me to have control of how the web is presented to me. An RSS client + browser with reader mode is the perfect combo for most online stuff that is information (and not function, like an e-shop). As I understand it, forum functions are not a feature of the Gemini protocol?
      - 3y ago
infotainment 3y ago
Love it — I think something of value was lost when we collectively decided in 2005 that everyone’s page should look exactly the same (i.e. TheFacebook™ profiles) Sadly that, combined with the changes Google made to deprioritize results from personal sites like these, all but destroyed these neat bespoke pages.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  I mean, that's because Facebook Pages are cheap. Businesses don't want to spend money on anything they don't have to, and people aren't much different. The argument for learning to write even basic HTML only to upload it even to something like Amazon S3 (free) and direct a web address to it (not free) or spend money on hosting to not have to learn how to deposit files into an S3 bucket is a LOT of time to spend to accomplish this task. Instead, you can outsource all of that time, effort, and labor to Facebook who already built a website. And yeah, it sucks ass and it's full of undesirable people, but it's free and it accomplishes the same goal. Google, meanwhile, sees that everyone is setting up Facebook profiles instead of websites because it's easier, and now businesses websites are sometimes quite out of date compared to their Facebook pages so they begin prioritizing results from network sites over regular pages. And now people can follow their favorite businesses on Facebook and be at least somewhat assured they'll always know if, for example, they have to close up one day unexpectedly and won't be doing business again until tomorrow. This is not meant to be an argument against the cheap web, mind: I'm just saying that people trend towards what is the lowest-cost option (by money, time, effort, or any combination) and use it because it works and gets the job done. I still keep a website, because I value my independence and have no interest in having my thoughts dumbed down to suit the preferences of corporate America. But the vast majority of people do not care about that (until they get smacked with a ban-hammer anyway) and will just stick to the easy option. Also, I would state: there is no reason we couldn't have a social media site that functions as a public utility instead of a for-profit corporation. We could just... have a Facebook that doesn't need to piss everyone off to make money. Social media without profit motive could be a massive boon to our society.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    The other conclusion I've come to is that web designers way overcomplicate stuff. So I don't want to do a Facebook page. What are my relatively low-cost options? Well, I can have a really basic HTML site but that's a little late-90s. OK, a Wordpress site then. Now I'm dealing with introductory rates that shoot up after a year unless I just use a standard VPS and now I'm having to do a lot of stuff myself. And, as far as I can tell, most of the literally thousands of templates/themes out there don't make it straightforward to just have a nice homepage with a simple blog post that doesn't require a high-resolution photograph to go with it. I'm probably settling on just sticking with Blogger using a new theme. I'm not really happy with that solution--but I'm not a web designer. I'm willing to spend some money but I haven't really found an answer I love.
5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
the whole cheap/small web thing has me thinking of those people who buy used clothes but think nothing of paying $15 for a coffee at hipsterCafe. something virtue signally about it. maybe it's the "solarpunk philosophy" and the "synthesize serendipity"-ies or quoting steve jobs, one of the biggest a*holes in the history of tech (imo). although i agree strongly with everything here https://potato.cheap/#cheap https://potato.cheap/#cheap
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  > people who shop at goodwill but think nothing of paying $15 for a coffee at hipsterCafe I don't go in for fancy coffee with any regularity, but I do care a lot more about what goes in my body than what covers it, so I don't really see a contradiction here. Honestly, the older I get, things that may help my health (and I think there's a lot of "woo" there, but I think we can all agree that a decent restaurant is on average healthier than a McDonald's) are where I'm willing to spend money.
- culi 3y ago
  > buy used clothes but think nothing of paying $15 for a coffee at hipsterCafe The funny thing is Starbucks is by far the most expensive and crap quality coffee you can get most anywhere. "hipsterIndependentCafe" is consistently cheaper and better if you're a coffee snob. Also people like me prefer to buy used as much as possible not to save money but to reduce waste. The romantics amongst us also prefer to have our goods well-storied
  - JAlexoid 3y ago
    Offtopic - but that is wildly untrue.(for the US, at least) Starbucks makes consistently good espresso. The amount of times I had - "oh, this hipster cafe is number one in the area" to just go dump the coffee and dip into Starbucks - is very high. But going back to the topic - the consistency of Starbucks and the inconsistency of coffee shops (even in places like NYC) is reminiscent of why we gravitated to repeatable designs that we see today. The visually appealing websites, that are not hard to read is "Starbucks". Be it visually "extravagant"(TheVerge) or simple(Yahoo Finance) they are fairly standard... these follow time proven visual standards set out by printed magazine, books and newspapers. This potato.cheap website is a pain to read. Hard to focus on the message and the text is way too clumped. So are many of the sites it lists as examples. HN is barebones Starbucks, not a pointlessly overbearing hipster cafe.
its-summertime 3y ago
"Most websites should be compatible with screenreaders", and yet, the first line of text in the website is "♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡"; With the spoken form of: "Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart"
- graypegg 3y ago
  My browser (Chrome 120) does correctly intuit that the header is not a landmark, so it at least won't be included in the landmark rotor. (In VO) Still though, it would be ideal to remove that from a11y tree since it's totally useless in there.
- layer8 3y ago
  Seems accurate? ;)
- surprisetalk 3y ago
  Ha! Thanks for catching that! I think that demonstrates how difficult it is to make even a simple website accessible. I assumed that since my browser's "reader mode" was all good, then screen readers would know how to parse it too. I do like the heart aesthetic, so how exactly would I make it more accessible?
  - graypegg 3y ago
    role="presentation" will remove it from the a11y tree! Easy fix. Most browsers will notice the characters in the element are not human readable and make some tweaks to make "heartheartheartheartheartheartheartheart" less likely though, even in the current version!
    - surprisetalk 3y ago
      Thank you! I added it.
d-lisp 3y ago
In a sense OP wants E-ink screens and org/vimwiki/markdown. Styling is where the problem it claims to criticize begins; if you want a truly accessible hypertext book, then you don't need styling, the user should be in charge of this, and the default theme would be whatever easily readable font, black on white, headings 36pt bold, paragraphs 14pt regular, every elements as blocks. Epub, in usage, is actually a cool format and I almost prefer this type of "browsing" experience than what websites proposes. Or maybe OP wants higher level CSS and HTML, and this is a problem because this leads to the invention of a new language with yet another complex ontology that claims to be "simpler than its lower level counterpart" but is not. Of course you could create some markdown with basic styling options, but I am pretty sure learning basic html and css is not that more complex than learning that specific markdown and how to operate it to finally get a website served on a specific server. Web and styling became complex exactly when occurred the encounter between what was styling on the web in the 2000s, the emergence of the nowadays variety of devices that are able to browse it and the actual way people interacted with smartphones. Today our browsers are almost OSes and it's almost like the complexity of what you can share with them is superior than the complexity of you could create on a 1990 pc natively. I mean, you can run godot engine on your browser : you can develop prototypes of projects with your friends just for fun, create your own private platform for communicating with people you like. I notice a lot of hate toward JS, but honestly when I first stumbled upon it I felt like a dream came true; it gives you the power to create experiences and share them almost effortlessly, and the fact that bigTechs decided to make boring websites on crazy over-engineered frameworks doesn't change anything to this.
- soerxpso 3y ago
  > I notice a lot of hate toward JS, but honestly when I first stumbled upon it I felt like a dream came true; it gives you the power to create experiences and share them almost effortlessly The complaints about JS are almost never about the concept of a programming language that runs in your browser, and the upside you describe seems to apply to any language that runs in your browser.
  - d-lisp 3y ago
    That's false, OP talks about that, many people wish the web to be static only and many people wants to be able to read pages "without js" and complain about the fact that they cannot read a page without js.
Semaphor 3y ago
> If you are spending less than $1 per hour on your entertainment (podcasts, videos, articles, games, books, etc.), consider finding ways to support creators and the infrastructure that supports them. So I should send them extra money because I keep using it? I bought the discography of a band (0.2665 € / hour according to last.fm so far, obviously falling), should I now set up a monthly donation just because I keep listening? It seems like advocating to only use subscriptions and never owning anything. This is such a weird take.
- surprisetalk 3y ago
  If you get a lot of value from their music, you may want to support them via merch and concerts! I've found that "$1 per hour" is simply a good starting point for figuring out which things in my life are worth supporting. Obviously, it may be different for other people :)
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    Going to concerts is sadly not a "want to go" thing, but "is there anything that’s close by", and I say that as someone living in a metal country like Germany.
- majewsky 3y ago
  There are other ways besides subscriptions and ownership: Patronage is a big and popular one, through platforms like Steady or Patreon, or even just direct bank transfers. Another big one is commissions, though that's usually more of a thing with artists than with musicians or videomakers.
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    Yes, there are different ways to subscribe. And again, I find it extremely weird to be supposed to keep paying indefinitely because you keep using something you bought.
    - toss1 3y ago
TeaDude 3y ago
I agree that we need a new - less crufty - standard to replace HTML/CSS/JS but there's another point which I feel has been sorely missed in previous efforts. I want a FUN standard. I want to make cool looking sites that are relatively scalable based on user hardware. Alternatives like Gopher and Gemini never really scratched that itch due to how sterile they are.
- squidbeak 3y ago
  The problem will always be that 'fun' rapidly develops complexity to support 'cool looking'.
- jerf 3y ago
  The problem you have is that by defining a "FUN" standard, you've probably created a basin of attraction [1] for what is basically the web today. It doesn't take much before you've basically let the ocean in. There are clearly many points between Gopher/Gemini and the modern web... but I'm not sure any of them are stable. Between the difficulty of keeping out features in a principled manner in what will inevitably become a group effort and how easy it is to accidentally spec something that turns out to be a lot more complicated than you thought it was, you're pretty much working in a space where the Horrors of the Web are lurking just outside your door, and you'd be surprised which missteps will let them in. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor
  - radiator 3y ago
    This is very deep. I like this mathematical explanation of why we get either Gemini, which nobody uses, or the modern web.
    - jerf 3y ago
      When people say math doesn't matter and is useless, I see it as rather akin to standing in Adam Savage's workshop and wondering why he has collected so much useless stuff and proudly declaring their inability to understand or utilize the contents. As a bonus, here's another IMHO highly underrated gem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coevolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coevolution Not only are there characteristic patterns intrinsic to evolution (in all its forms, far beyond just biology), there are characteristic patterns to interacting evolving systems. And that's, like, basically everything in the world. Super useful tool.
graypegg 3y ago
I'm a bit conflicted, there's some really good points mixed in with some odd-ball hurdles that I don't think anyone benefits from jumping over. > Cheap to maintain: Most webpages should work indefinitely without falling over. YES, holy crap this is what I find most annoying about some of the things I've made recently. Moving between computers, bringing over old projects, and of course dependancies break down and rot. Why can't I start this Gatsby 3 app? Who knows, the install fails. Aggravating. > Cheap to leave: Opting-out of the web should be painless. The age of total anonymity on the web is gone I think. Even if you try to be totally anonymous, it's pretty advantageous to have successful online media tied to your name. That makes it pretty hard to opt-out. It's a good ideal to have though! > Cheap to access: Most websites should be compatible with screenreaders, etc. Machine readable information is a shallow measure of accessibility. Just because everything is labeled doesn't mean your website is usable. It's a whole interface you need to consider. I would reword as "Most websites should be usable with only a screenreader" or "assistive technology". > Cheap to participate: Interacting with the web should be possible on a Wii. ... what? An old, outdated, version of Opera? > Cheap to explore: Exploring the web should be pleasant on 1W of power. Why are we measuring power draw? Yeah your website can be intense enough to draw more power, but this just seems like an odd metric. > Cheap to contribute: Making/hosting websites should be easier than scrapbooking. Yeah, squarespace, wix, wordpress, etc... facebook?
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  > Cheap to explore: Exploring the web should be pleasant on 1W of power. Why are we measuring power draw? Yeah your website can be intense enough to draw more power, but this just seems like an odd metric. Regardless how you'd measure it, a pretty useful metric imho. A nice catch-all encompassing: Complexity of a website + efficiency of common software implementations + efficiency of common hardware platforms. Any content that requires a 'beefy' setup on client side to view (or consumes a lot of power doing so), automatically cuts a large chunk of potential audience.
  - graypegg 3y ago
    That is a fair point, maybe I'm thinking to concretely about it. Was imagining getting a kill-a-watt power meter, and making sure my OS + browser + a website is drawing less than 1W from the wall. What you're saying as a more all-encompassing "efficiency in general" metric makes sense.
naglis 3y ago
The link to Marginalia in the "Explore" sidebar should be "marginalia.nu", unless this is some alternative Marginalia.
- surprisetalk 3y ago
  Thanks! Fixed
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    The font (because of the drop shadows I guess) looks jarring in dark mode.
avgcorrection 3y ago
This is the standard tirade^W manifesto about how web users forced corporations to ruin the Web. Oh no. Why did you patron Walmart when you could have gone to your local mom&pops. That but for the Web. Petite bourgeoisie sentiment.
- Nasrudith 3y ago
  What the hell does "petite bourgeoisie sentiment" even mean?
  - avgcorrection 3y ago
    A sentiment coming from the petite bourgeoisie or those of that viewpoint.
JAlexoid 3y ago
Reading through I got this: - Cheap = a pain to read Good and modern visual design exists explicitly to deliver information to a person in the most accessible way. If you show a Japanese website to someone who grew up in Ireland, they will be overwhelmed. Not catering to different cultures, like the website suggests - only makes it worse. - Cheap = a lot of spam Having low cost of equipment and almost unlimited anonymity, makes fighting against spamming or "enshittification" exponentially hard. Just ask anyone who bothered to run their own mail server or open forum board. It's just not feasible for us to be able to have a nice experience without a level of trust.
- YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
  "Good" modern visual design barely exists at all according to that definition. Most modern web design exists to jam marketing in your eyeballs while drip-feeding information at the minimum rate to keep you from closing the tab, which is basically the opposite of "delivering information in the most accessible way". Also: The YouTube homepage uses twice the memory of the NicoNico homepage to show fewer thumbnails, and has basically been unchanged for years, while YouTube can barely resist keeping their layouts the same for a single month. Japanese web design has quite a few issues with being stuck in the 2000s but I'll take consistently bad over rolling the A/B testing dice every week to see what page I get.
  - JAlexoid 3y ago
    I haven't provided any definitions on what is a good design at all, so you'll have to tell me what it is. Your issue with the content, doesn't negate the designs. Japanese websites are also filled with a lot of junk content. As for the Japanese websites, they aren't bad. They are bad for you, maybe... they're very much good for people accustomed to Japanese culture.
flpm 3y ago
Very interesting, thanks for posting! I am not sure if the way to go is a cheap web, small web, slow web, indie web, or maybe some combination of these attributes, but something about the current web feels off, mass produced and superficial. The old sites created by people who did cool stuff just for the sake of doing it are so hard to find now. I miss them.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  They're hard to find because they're not really linked anywhere. We used to have Web directories arranged by subject headings that tried to be mostly comprehensive and put some serious curation effort into that goal, such as DMOZ.org - but there's no modern equivalent to that. People like to complain about how the whole SEO issue has made search results useless as of late, but that if anything is downstream of the overall lack of manual curation.
  - flpm 3y ago
    That's so true, it's almost like a return to the beginning (Yahoo Web Directory). We need to find a way to curate content that scales but in a way that eliminates the incentive for bad actors to try SEO-like approaches to game the process. That feels impossible without a feasible alternative to the ad-based revenue model.
    - HotGarbage 3y ago
      I always thought search engines could go back to using titles, description, and meta tags, but limit the number of characters/meta tags accepted.
    - Tomte 3y ago
      Pinboard and similar bookmarking sites could play that role.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        Blogrolls, folksonomies (tags), etc. just pretty much faded away once the web really went mainstream. How many people ever really used lists on Twitter?
danielvaughn 3y ago
That comment about a "simple markup language" is interesting - anyone know what OP is referring to? They mentioned they're attempting to build one.
- surprisetalk 3y ago
  OP here! I've got a few different competing ideas at various stages of development. One idea builds on the programming language I'm building. I am growing more doubtful that it's going to provide the beginner-friendly experience I yearn for. It might be as easy as Elm one day, but that's not good enough for grandma. [1] https://scrapscript.org https://scrapscript.org Another idea is like "markdown, but with a grid model". That one also does not feel very good right now. I've also been toying around with something called "BYOD" (bring your own data), where you stitch things together in a simple layout format. This ends up feeling like powerpoint via plaintext, and surprisingly pleasant.
  - danielvaughn 3y ago
    Love that - I also have a few competing ideas around something that sounds very similar. My goal is to create a textual interface that eschews traditional programming conventions in favor of a grammar and syntax that feels familiar to UI designers. I'm calling the overall effort "matry" - right now it's a language but that could change in the future: https://matry.design/ https://matry.design/
- fullstackchris 3y ago
  I don't really get this point... HTML is not _that_ complicated. I mean is: <h1>this</h1> <h2>this</h2> <h3>this</h3> really "more complex" than something like: # this ## this ### this You still need to know that '#' means header / title, and that more of them leads to a lower header level... and this is just for the most basic concept of web pages: headers. Okay, even if it's not markdown, no matter what system you cook up, the syntactic complexity to support the huge number of elements that exist in HTML has to live _somewhere_ right? (Yes, you can argue maybe not ALL of the 100+ HTML tags aren't needed, but probably most of them are!) While there is something to be said for mega purists who don't even like JavaScript, we're supposed to not even like HTML anymore either? I think at some point you have to accept that building things for the web involves some minimum level of complexity...
toastal 3y ago
This is why we should be using decentralized XMPP servers to chat since they actually run on potato hardware unlike other chat options.
- jacooper 3y ago
  Matrix Homeservers like Synapse can run on anything now, and there is conduit which should be lighter too.
  - olah_1 3y ago
    Last I checked, the way the protocol works still causes a huge amount of load for minimal usage. Because of the way events need to propagate and the types of events that propagate
    - jacooper 3y ago
      I haven't seen this in my servers. I host three matrix servers and so far synapse isn't out of the ordinary.
  - gunapologist99 3y ago
    Matrix is not lightweight or simple.
    - ptman 3y ago
      Matrix shifts much of the burden to the server so that clients can be simpler (except for e2ee, which has to be done clientside).
      - toastal 3y ago
        Which if true is still a burden that prevents simple self-hosting. You can (& I did briefly) install an XMPP server on a 10-year-old smart phone with postmarketOS on your network & have a reasonable experience.
- 3y ago
axblount 3y ago
Has there been a serious attempt to define an html/css subset that achieves these kinds of goals? Something that a mere mortal could implement and would cover the vast majority of web designs? I understand the urge to throw out the old and replace it with a new system, but that would be a huge blow to accessiblilty and adoption.
- eitland 3y ago
  I have been asking for a while if it could be a good idea to make something like asm.js but for webpages: Something to put in a meta tag or something early in the page that lets the browser know this webpage will only use a known-to-be-fast-and-predictable subset of html and css and only use js from a standardized library that provides things like autocomplete and other actually high value interactions.
  - WorldMaker 3y ago
    You don't need JS for basic autocomplete in 2023, you can use "datalist" in HTML: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/datalist https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/da... A lot of basic high value interactions are more directly encoded in HTML today than a lot of developers expect to need JS for. Some other tags to pay attention to: summary/details, progress, meter, input type="color|date|time|datetime|range". It's an interesting relearning project, sometimes, how much the high level interactivity bits of HTML have changed since, for instance, the jQuery era.
    - eitland 3y ago
      > You don't need JS for basic autocomplete in 2023, you can use "datalist" in HTML: This does not seem to load data dynamically, it seems to be a way to show data from a predefined list?
      - WorldMaker 3y ago
        Most "basic" autocomplete isn't all that dynamic and you can prepopulate on the server side reasonably well. Sure, you still need JS to fetch a dynamic changing list, but you can also just update datalist options elements with JS rather than implement a full separate UX for autocomplete today. You are limited in the ability to CSS style datalist options so a lot of developers are still going to feel pressure in 2023 from "pixel perfect" UX designers to continue to reimplement that wheel, but the version of the JS that just updates a datalist after a fetch is likely much simpler than building a full "autocomplete control".
oooyay 3y ago
> Cheap to maintain: Most webpages should work indefinitely without falling over. Simple HTML will do this, so long as a browser that supports that version of HTML and CSS is still around. A static Go binary serving dynamic HTML will do this. I struggle to imagine Python, Ruby, etc being able to accomplish this though. That's to say, I'm not sure that's a good rule or could use some reworking to make it more achievable.
- collaborative 3y ago
  Once upon a time side bars and tool bars were made up of iframes that could talk to each other. Those sites wouldn't work today for "security reasons"
  - YoshiRulz 3y ago
    If they have the same origin, then they should still work. But there's always postMessage[1]. [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/postMessage https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/post...
dcreater 3y ago
Absolutely lovely read!! Honestly feels incredible to see other people feel the things I do when most people don't, don't care and don't want to care. Might be a nitpick, but the point is ruined by the god awful aesthetics of the page
- benrutter 3y ago
  Weirdly I loved the aesthetics of the page. I know they are probably pretty terrible from a conventional design standpoint, but they're so full of personality it was a joy to look at!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
tshirthoodie 3y ago
>As software rots, multinationals may become the only players capable of making websites. They are already the decision makers of who open source software is for. The thing people fail most at realizing is that you can't have a lot of rich people with a lot of power without having a lot of poor people with no power. The interests of the former will always effectively undermine the latter. Similarly, you can't have software that serves multinationals and regular people at the same time because the interests of the former will always effectively undermine the latter.
zackmorris 3y ago
This is great! I can't really endorse most of the web "innovations" that have happened since the Dot Bomb. There was a time before FAANG when people with low technical knowhow could build something on the web and start earning enough residual income to pay their rent. Like the eBay store on The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Or the Mutiny BBS before that in Halt and Catch Fire. I did it with my business partner via shareware in the early 2000s. Even though the writing was on the wall even then that this was all going corporate. I think that things started going wrong when the anti-intellectual/anti-education movement gained prominence after 9/11 in the push towards privatization and outsourcing. Before that, we could rely on publicly-funded academia to deliver techniques designed from first principles to decrease our workload. But since then, we seem to get leftovers like endless Javascript build pipelines handed down to us from the private sector. It's almost like best practices today are designed to mire a startup in endless red tape. While multinational corporations just throw money at it to create a billion dollar pair of scissors that we can't afford. The way to undo all of that is to do the opposite. Realize that our freedom and prosperity start with our tools and techniques. Find the underemployed exhausted people and give them any resources at all to design better stuff and then leave them alone. Start funding bottom-up and middle-out policies instead of waiting around for trickle-down economics to toss us more scraps. Don't let any one person become a cult of personality preaching how things should be. And stop worshipping capital and focus on getting actual resources (the most important being time) to the middle class through automation and recycling to avoid war. This stuff is so obvious and evident in history that the main challenge is to unlearn one's own programming to be able to perceive alternatives. Edit: we're talking about HTML not macroeconomic policy. But after spending my entire career having to do things the "easy" way because there's never any time or budget to do things the simple way, I view the complexities of the modern web and the barriers standing in the way of our self-actualization as one and the same. Edit 2: think scholarships, grants and UBI - not loans, investments and contests.
- jacobr 3y ago
  There's a shift though, just the last couple of years. Today all browsers support native modals with the dialog element, accordions with details/summary, everything but Firefox supports popovers (dropdowns, tooltips, menus, etc) in plain HTML. I'd honestly love to be a beginner again learning modern HTML and CSS today, it's not bad at all.
enos_feedler 3y ago
What is a slippy mindset? what does slippy mean in this context? is it an acronym or something? I couldn't find anything about it.
- sandywotsits 3y ago
  There's a link from the page to here[0] and then out to here[1], which says... The tadi web is built with a slippy mindset. We try to be as ‘slippy’ as possible. Being slippy means you’re not stuck. When you’re slippy, it’s easy to change plan, or rebuild something from scratch. It means you’re not locked in to using a certain tool. If something breaks, you can choose to fix it, or let it die. It’s ok, because it won’t take long to rebuild it from scratch. Every time you grow back, you’ll be a bit different. You might be stronger. Or you might be better equipped for your changing needs. [0]: https://www.todepond.com/wikiblogarden/tadi-web/ https://www.todepond.com/wikiblogarden/tadi-web/ [1]: https://www.tadiweb.com/ https://www.tadiweb.com/
benrutter 3y ago
I love this. I've seen a lot of similar "use HTML as HTML" type things recently (probably a lot coming from the HATEOAS crowd). I'm not a web developer, and I really don't understand how we've ended up in this state where: - web starts as a means to share documents, HTML is built around that - eventually people want to build general applications (a la google docs) so they build tools that let you build non-document things by pretending they're documents - everyone thinks those tools are great and starts using them - 90% of the web is still documents, but now its all built in frameworks where you build a non-document by pretending its a document, even though in actuality, we're normally just building a document in the first place. The whole thing is a batshit crazy mess and I don't understand how as a global engineering culture we view it as anything other than completely insane.
- nosefurhairdo 3y ago
  HATEOAS = Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State (in case this saves a search). The JavaScript tools for building web applications are nice when used correctly. I can't imagine the product I work on would be easier to build with HTMX, but perhaps I'm ignorant. I wonder though, are there more enjoyable, non-web UI engines out there? Given that web app UI was glued together on top of a document sharing platform, it makes me think native UI dev should be more coherent.
- tracerbulletx 3y ago
  The platform isn't that much of a mess imo. I think if you look at individual web application code bases they're kind of a mess because the penalty for doing it wrong isn't that high compared to real physical engineering just throwing the business thing in without planning actually does have a higher ROI. If anything the 30 year old legacy code bases are still much worse than the typical React application and services tangle you get today.
worldofmatthew 3y ago
I'm guessing Cheap does not count for the blog post with no included image weighting over 1MB....... 315KB for HTML and looks like your "favicon.ico" is literally a copy of the webpage...
- its-summertime 3y ago
  The images are embedded into the CSS.
  - worldofmatthew 3y ago
    I mean the blog post itself has no images.
butz 3y ago
What a breath of fresh air is browsing simple websites, where content in mainly text and images are sparingly used. All "modern" websites are so tiring. Now if website pops up anything on screen on first visit, be it newsletter signup, login request or just huge image covering whole viewport, I just switch to reader view.
- chankstein38 3y ago
  If I can't close it immediately and resume I right-click->Block Element. If doing that leaves the page unusable, I usually just click off. I'm with you, the web today is exhausting and feels hostile to the user in most cases.
DevAbdul 3y ago
cs professors are happy with this. this is what their "personal site" envisions
sam0x17 3y ago
I do wish we could go back to how things were in the early 00s where view source on any page was extremely telling and would show you cleanly formatted code. Another huge reason for the status quo is a lot of companies actively try to obfuscate their frontend code for a variety of reasons, and a lot unwittingly do it as part of minification to squeeze out a little bit of extra efficiency both in terms of payload size and parsing time for clients (every token counts!). That said, I would love a world where the de-jure frontend syntax was less ambiguous to the point where minification is essentially a lossless operation other than the actual names of things. At the browser level we have to make the decision: do we want clients to be able to figure exactly what is running in their browser? If the answer is no, the current situation is great, if the answer is yes, the current situation is pretty bleak, and will actually get bleaker with the advent of WASM-based payloads where we now need to disassemble on top of everything else.
- FerretFred 3y ago
  > view source on any page was extremely telling Yeah! This was basically how I taught myself to write effective HTML. Great fun!
- joemi 3y ago
  > to the point where minification is essentially a lossless operation other than the actual names of things. Is that not the case now? I don't do a lot with javascript myself, but I always assumed the minification process wasn't changing the code itself.
  - 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
    It will shorten variable names, replace true with !0 and many other things. Newer technology might even unroll loops to improve performance but that's a bit different.
ryukoposting 3y ago
Has anyone proposed CommonMark over HTTP? Like, just shove markdown in a GET response with Content-Type: text/markdown And let the client decide how to render it. It'd be like Gopher, but modern.
- LoganDark 3y ago
  Does Gemini[0] look interesting to you? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
  - arp242 3y ago
    Gemini isn't over HTTP and it's not Markdown.
  - GuB-42 3y ago
    Gemini is like modern Gopher, but it is also very opinionated. The protocol does not support extensions and revision, it refuses HTTP, mandates TLS, etc... That's not the same as having browsers support the markdown content type.
    - flir 3y ago
      You might disagree about where to draw the line but you can see why they drew a line in the sand. text/markdown would very quickly grow to be everything HTML is. There's probably a pithy "every internet protocol expands until it can serve ads" lesson in there somewhere.
      - 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
        Markdown generally does include everything HTML is (because you're allowed to write HTML in markdown)
      - anon25783 3y ago
        I like your pithy remark! I'm calling that "Flir's Law" from now on, after your username.
max-throat 3y ago
I've had this idea for something in between Gemini and the modern web that's essentially supposed to capture how the web was in the late 90s/early 00s. Basically just HTML/CSS with GET and POST, no scripting at all. I don't have the expertise to write this, unfortunately.
- krapp 3y ago
  That's literally just "writing basic HTML and not using Javascript." You can still totally just do that, no one is stopping you. But even if you went the whole Gemini route and published a custom protocol to be explicitly incompatable with HTTP and a spec supporting only early HTML, you still wouldn't be able to capture the early web, because it isn't the 1990s anymore.
karmakaze 3y ago
> Unfortunately, the HTML source for Apple.com is not so "beautiful on the inside", but Apple engineers shouldn't be faulted for ugly HTML. Their only option was to wrap a sleek skin around shoddy materials. Can ChatGPT et al make good beautiful HTML/CSS pages? Or take an existing one and actually beautify it?
willhackett 3y ago
Did anybody else's eyes get freaked out by the blog?
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
The article pulls together a lot of lovely material and links and ideas, but it starts with such a toxic & conservative outlook. Sure, apple.com's source might not be as beautiful as their products but potato.cheap immediately turns around and says it's not apples fault, and trashes the web and says it needs sto be replaces by something else. It just seems to be like the industrial world isn't going to improve without being lead there, but that there's so much leeway for the better awesome web to evince itself. The manifest possibilities are what so many people see as a bad and awful thing, but I think taste & discernment & internal structure are incredibly complicated & any kind of broad scale human hyper-engine of note is going to take more than a decade of effort for us to really suss out where to go & what looks & feels right. There isn't going to be the perfect system created out of nothing that makes everything great; it's power flexibility and possibility that we refine &harness onward to get to exceptional, and the web has ongoingly been an amazing host to that dialog in ways nothing else has been or from what I can see could be. I'm so tired of those who most strongly clearly advocate for better online systems being so retrograde. I miss the hope & buoyancy of those excited for stuff! Web Components and webrtc and QUIC and moq, our new awesome css flexbox and grid and layers, css variables. I'm still as thirsty and in love & still a believer that we can keep honing new & great. To shock industry into not sucking we just need to lead towards better, towards protocols & interoperation & elegance personally. The virtue will come out, and will be aped, as we develop, if we dare be better.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
perilunar 3y ago
I get the spirit of the article, but disagree with some of the specifics. > HTML remains hostile to beginners. What? HTML is dirt simple. There are some fiddly bits, but if you are creating simple documents (like this one) you don't need them — just use the subset of HTML that you are comfortable with. > HTML is generally unkind to people of limited hearing, vision, etc. Only if you mess it up. Clean and simple markup is usually pretty accessible. But really, this page is 1.4 MB of code for less than 20 KB of text (300 ms to load!). You want the 'cheap' and simple web, then set an example.
- bimguy 3y ago
  I agree with your disagreements. I am really bad with any coding, I have tried to learn Python and CSS several times now and can't remember a single thing. At the age of 12 I was easily able to learn HTML to build functional websites. Despite not having written a website in HTML for over 15 years I am still confident that I would be able to build a website using HTML code only right now. How is that hostile to beginners when it was the only language that I could ever grasp? Are there coding language out there easier than HTML?
eternityforest 3y ago
The web is already fast and performant on all devices from the last five years, and does not seem to be getting slower. Moore's law and optimizations caught up, performance is good enough for me, I won't complain as long as nobody messes it up. I do absolutely agree we need more accessibility and more sites that aren't endless scrolling trash. I don't think we need old fashioned simple HTML to do it, although that's certainly one of the tools that can be used. I think we mostly need more things like neocities that make it actually easy and maintenance free to set up a site. To me the important part of the old web was the content and the people, not the tech.

The "Cheap" Web

308 points by surprisetalk 3y ago

throwaway81523 3y ago

Is that the Comic Sans I've heard so much about?

Brajeshwar 3y ago
The other day, I was talking to my daughter about where she might like to study in future. We happen to went to a big University for some showcase event and I asked her if she liked that one. She replied, “No! Their logo is in Comic Sans.”
globalise83 3y ago
"Playpen Sans"
6th 3y ago
It is. It's all real and it's spectacular...ly ugly.

cardinalbug 3y ago

[flagged]

Brajeshwar 3y ago
I usually tend to use Reader mode in Safari or ReaderMode[1] in Google Chrome. In-fact, I have set Reader Mode as default for a few common website such as that of PG's. 1. https://readermode.io/ https://readermode.io/

cxr 3y ago

The thing that makes me disagree with proponents of the "smol"/"cheap"/etc Web is their totally misguided insistence on personal webpages as a sui generis medium for self-expression wrt layout and styling. > Until we adopt simple and stable building materials, all websites will continue to look the same. Yeah, big deal. Who cares if websites look the same? Wait, let me put that another way: we should care whether websites look the same in the sense that more of them should look similar to one another than they do today—namely, they should look how you and I (the readers) wish for them to look for our own comfort and convenience—which means fewer dark starry sky backgrounds, fewer text drop shadows and typefaces reminiscent of comic book speech bubbles, and fewer distracting marquees. Way less kitsch, not more. HN, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, SMS, etc. all have a limited range of expression through form. Somehow we get by. Completely dissimilar books look a lot more "the same" than websites do, and that's not a bad thing. You never see book authors complaining about control over the printed page the way that you see self-styled web designers insisting on their manifest destiny over the user's viewport for the purposes of self-expression. Webdevs need to get over themselves, and the wider world needs to stop letting them get by with (or encouraging) this kind of narcissism.

mcluck 3y ago
Authors like Mark Z. Danielewski do more with the layout in their books than most and I love them for it. I like seeing people try out different ideas and do things that might be considered less-than-ideal to view
carlosjobim 3y ago
You can have all web sites look the same by setting reader view as default in your browser. It is a great improvement for browsing the web, both on desktop and phone. If somebody invented a "forum view" to make all forums look the same on our browsers, then I think the circle would be complete. It shouldn't be too difficult either, since most run on similar software.
- anon25783 3y ago
  You should learn about the Gemini protocol! It's an alternative to HTTPS that uses a document markup language similar to Markdown instead of HTML, and uses a deliberately simplified, feature-frozen protocol with the explicit goal that anyone should be able to write their own Gemini browser "in a weekend". No scripting or styling support, just documents with links and images in them. Here are some informative webpages on the topic, neither of them mine: https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq.gmi https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq.gmi https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    I think the Gemini stuff is really neat, and I've already experimented with Lagrange and Kristall browsers. However, the information I'm interested in isn't published on those networks, and I think that's true for most of us. Reader view is a seamless way for me to have control of how the web is presented to me. An RSS client + browser with reader mode is the perfect combo for most online stuff that is information (and not function, like an e-shop). As I understand it, forum functions are not a feature of the Gemini protocol?
    - 3y ago

infotainment 3y ago

Love it — I think something of value was lost when we collectively decided in 2005 that everyone’s page should look exactly the same (i.e. TheFacebook™ profiles) Sadly that, combined with the changes Google made to deprioritize results from personal sites like these, all but destroyed these neat bespoke pages.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
I mean, that's because Facebook Pages are cheap. Businesses don't want to spend money on anything they don't have to, and people aren't much different. The argument for learning to write even basic HTML only to upload it even to something like Amazon S3 (free) and direct a web address to it (not free) or spend money on hosting to not have to learn how to deposit files into an S3 bucket is a LOT of time to spend to accomplish this task. Instead, you can outsource all of that time, effort, and labor to Facebook who already built a website. And yeah, it sucks ass and it's full of undesirable people, but it's free and it accomplishes the same goal. Google, meanwhile, sees that everyone is setting up Facebook profiles instead of websites because it's easier, and now businesses websites are sometimes quite out of date compared to their Facebook pages so they begin prioritizing results from network sites over regular pages. And now people can follow their favorite businesses on Facebook and be at least somewhat assured they'll always know if, for example, they have to close up one day unexpectedly and won't be doing business again until tomorrow. This is not meant to be an argument against the cheap web, mind: I'm just saying that people trend towards what is the lowest-cost option (by money, time, effort, or any combination) and use it because it works and gets the job done. I still keep a website, because I value my independence and have no interest in having my thoughts dumbed down to suit the preferences of corporate America. But the vast majority of people do not care about that (until they get smacked with a ban-hammer anyway) and will just stick to the easy option. Also, I would state: there is no reason we couldn't have a social media site that functions as a public utility instead of a for-profit corporation. We could just... have a Facebook that doesn't need to piss everyone off to make money. Social media without profit motive could be a massive boon to our society.
- ghaff 3y ago
  The other conclusion I've come to is that web designers way overcomplicate stuff. So I don't want to do a Facebook page. What are my relatively low-cost options? Well, I can have a really basic HTML site but that's a little late-90s. OK, a Wordpress site then. Now I'm dealing with introductory rates that shoot up after a year unless I just use a standard VPS and now I'm having to do a lot of stuff myself. And, as far as I can tell, most of the literally thousands of templates/themes out there don't make it straightforward to just have a nice homepage with a simple blog post that doesn't require a high-resolution photograph to go with it. I'm probably settling on just sticking with Blogger using a new theme. I'm not really happy with that solution--but I'm not a web designer. I'm willing to spend some money but I haven't really found an answer I love.

5350-uiop-1130 3y ago

the whole cheap/small web thing has me thinking of those people who buy used clothes but think nothing of paying $15 for a coffee at hipsterCafe. something virtue signally about it. maybe it's the "solarpunk philosophy" and the "synthesize serendipity"-ies or quoting steve jobs, one of the biggest a*holes in the history of tech (imo). although i agree strongly with everything here https://potato.cheap/#cheap https://potato.cheap/#cheap

hotpotamus 3y ago
> people who shop at goodwill but think nothing of paying $15 for a coffee at hipsterCafe I don't go in for fancy coffee with any regularity, but I do care a lot more about what goes in my body than what covers it, so I don't really see a contradiction here. Honestly, the older I get, things that may help my health (and I think there's a lot of "woo" there, but I think we can all agree that a decent restaurant is on average healthier than a McDonald's) are where I'm willing to spend money.
culi 3y ago
> buy used clothes but think nothing of paying $15 for a coffee at hipsterCafe The funny thing is Starbucks is by far the most expensive and crap quality coffee you can get most anywhere. "hipsterIndependentCafe" is consistently cheaper and better if you're a coffee snob. Also people like me prefer to buy used as much as possible not to save money but to reduce waste. The romantics amongst us also prefer to have our goods well-storied
- JAlexoid 3y ago
  Offtopic - but that is wildly untrue.(for the US, at least) Starbucks makes consistently good espresso. The amount of times I had - "oh, this hipster cafe is number one in the area" to just go dump the coffee and dip into Starbucks - is very high. But going back to the topic - the consistency of Starbucks and the inconsistency of coffee shops (even in places like NYC) is reminiscent of why we gravitated to repeatable designs that we see today. The visually appealing websites, that are not hard to read is "Starbucks". Be it visually "extravagant"(TheVerge) or simple(Yahoo Finance) they are fairly standard... these follow time proven visual standards set out by printed magazine, books and newspapers. This potato.cheap website is a pain to read. Hard to focus on the message and the text is way too clumped. So are many of the sites it lists as examples. HN is barebones Starbucks, not a pointlessly overbearing hipster cafe.

its-summertime 3y ago

"Most websites should be compatible with screenreaders", and yet, the first line of text in the website is "♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡"; With the spoken form of: "Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart"

graypegg 3y ago
My browser (Chrome 120) does correctly intuit that the header is not a landmark, so it at least won't be included in the landmark rotor. (In VO) Still though, it would be ideal to remove that from a11y tree since it's totally useless in there.
layer8 3y ago
Seems accurate? ;)
surprisetalk 3y ago
Ha! Thanks for catching that! I think that demonstrates how difficult it is to make even a simple website accessible. I assumed that since my browser's "reader mode" was all good, then screen readers would know how to parse it too. I do like the heart aesthetic, so how exactly would I make it more accessible?
- graypegg 3y ago
  role="presentation" will remove it from the a11y tree! Easy fix. Most browsers will notice the characters in the element are not human readable and make some tweaks to make "heartheartheartheartheartheartheartheart" less likely though, even in the current version!
  - surprisetalk 3y ago
    Thank you! I added it.

d-lisp 3y ago

In a sense OP wants E-ink screens and org/vimwiki/markdown. Styling is where the problem it claims to criticize begins; if you want a truly accessible hypertext book, then you don't need styling, the user should be in charge of this, and the default theme would be whatever easily readable font, black on white, headings 36pt bold, paragraphs 14pt regular, every elements as blocks. Epub, in usage, is actually a cool format and I almost prefer this type of "browsing" experience than what websites proposes. Or maybe OP wants higher level CSS and HTML, and this is a problem because this leads to the invention of a new language with yet another complex ontology that claims to be "simpler than its lower level counterpart" but is not. Of course you could create some markdown with basic styling options, but I am pretty sure learning basic html and css is not that more complex than learning that specific markdown and how to operate it to finally get a website served on a specific server. Web and styling became complex exactly when occurred the encounter between what was styling on the web in the 2000s, the emergence of the nowadays variety of devices that are able to browse it and the actual way people interacted with smartphones. Today our browsers are almost OSes and it's almost like the complexity of what you can share with them is superior than the complexity of you could create on a 1990 pc natively. I mean, you can run godot engine on your browser : you can develop prototypes of projects with your friends just for fun, create your own private platform for communicating with people you like. I notice a lot of hate toward JS, but honestly when I first stumbled upon it I felt like a dream came true; it gives you the power to create experiences and share them almost effortlessly, and the fact that bigTechs decided to make boring websites on crazy over-engineered frameworks doesn't change anything to this.

soerxpso 3y ago
> I notice a lot of hate toward JS, but honestly when I first stumbled upon it I felt like a dream came true; it gives you the power to create experiences and share them almost effortlessly The complaints about JS are almost never about the concept of a programming language that runs in your browser, and the upside you describe seems to apply to any language that runs in your browser.
- d-lisp 3y ago
  That's false, OP talks about that, many people wish the web to be static only and many people wants to be able to read pages "without js" and complain about the fact that they cannot read a page without js.

Semaphor 3y ago

> If you are spending less than $1 per hour on your entertainment (podcasts, videos, articles, games, books, etc.), consider finding ways to support creators and the infrastructure that supports them. So I should send them extra money because I keep using it? I bought the discography of a band (0.2665 € / hour according to last.fm so far, obviously falling), should I now set up a monthly donation just because I keep listening? It seems like advocating to only use subscriptions and never owning anything. This is such a weird take.

surprisetalk 3y ago
If you get a lot of value from their music, you may want to support them via merch and concerts! I've found that "$1 per hour" is simply a good starting point for figuring out which things in my life are worth supporting. Obviously, it may be different for other people :)
- Semaphor 3y ago
  Going to concerts is sadly not a "want to go" thing, but "is there anything that’s close by", and I say that as someone living in a metal country like Germany.
majewsky 3y ago
There are other ways besides subscriptions and ownership: Patronage is a big and popular one, through platforms like Steady or Patreon, or even just direct bank transfers. Another big one is commissions, though that's usually more of a thing with artists than with musicians or videomakers.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  Yes, there are different ways to subscribe. And again, I find it extremely weird to be supposed to keep paying indefinitely because you keep using something you bought.
  - toss1 3y ago

TeaDude 3y ago

I agree that we need a new - less crufty - standard to replace HTML/CSS/JS but there's another point which I feel has been sorely missed in previous efforts. I want a FUN standard. I want to make cool looking sites that are relatively scalable based on user hardware. Alternatives like Gopher and Gemini never really scratched that itch due to how sterile they are.

squidbeak 3y ago
The problem will always be that 'fun' rapidly develops complexity to support 'cool looking'.
jerf 3y ago
The problem you have is that by defining a "FUN" standard, you've probably created a basin of attraction [1] for what is basically the web today. It doesn't take much before you've basically let the ocean in. There are clearly many points between Gopher/Gemini and the modern web... but I'm not sure any of them are stable. Between the difficulty of keeping out features in a principled manner in what will inevitably become a group effort and how easy it is to accidentally spec something that turns out to be a lot more complicated than you thought it was, you're pretty much working in a space where the Horrors of the Web are lurking just outside your door, and you'd be surprised which missteps will let them in. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor
- radiator 3y ago
  This is very deep. I like this mathematical explanation of why we get either Gemini, which nobody uses, or the modern web.
  - jerf 3y ago
    When people say math doesn't matter and is useless, I see it as rather akin to standing in Adam Savage's workshop and wondering why he has collected so much useless stuff and proudly declaring their inability to understand or utilize the contents. As a bonus, here's another IMHO highly underrated gem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coevolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coevolution Not only are there characteristic patterns intrinsic to evolution (in all its forms, far beyond just biology), there are characteristic patterns to interacting evolving systems. And that's, like, basically everything in the world. Super useful tool.

graypegg 3y ago

I'm a bit conflicted, there's some really good points mixed in with some odd-ball hurdles that I don't think anyone benefits from jumping over. > Cheap to maintain: Most webpages should work indefinitely without falling over. YES, holy crap this is what I find most annoying about some of the things I've made recently. Moving between computers, bringing over old projects, and of course dependancies break down and rot. Why can't I start this Gatsby 3 app? Who knows, the install fails. Aggravating. > Cheap to leave: Opting-out of the web should be painless. The age of total anonymity on the web is gone I think. Even if you try to be totally anonymous, it's pretty advantageous to have successful online media tied to your name. That makes it pretty hard to opt-out. It's a good ideal to have though! > Cheap to access: Most websites should be compatible with screenreaders, etc. Machine readable information is a shallow measure of accessibility. Just because everything is labeled doesn't mean your website is usable. It's a whole interface you need to consider. I would reword as "Most websites should be usable with only a screenreader" or "assistive technology". > Cheap to participate: Interacting with the web should be possible on a Wii. ... what? An old, outdated, version of Opera? > Cheap to explore: Exploring the web should be pleasant on 1W of power. Why are we measuring power draw? Yeah your website can be intense enough to draw more power, but this just seems like an odd metric. > Cheap to contribute: Making/hosting websites should be easier than scrapbooking. Yeah, squarespace, wix, wordpress, etc... facebook?

RetroTechie 3y ago
> Cheap to explore: Exploring the web should be pleasant on 1W of power. Why are we measuring power draw? Yeah your website can be intense enough to draw more power, but this just seems like an odd metric. Regardless how you'd measure it, a pretty useful metric imho. A nice catch-all encompassing: Complexity of a website + efficiency of common software implementations + efficiency of common hardware platforms. Any content that requires a 'beefy' setup on client side to view (or consumes a lot of power doing so), automatically cuts a large chunk of potential audience.
- graypegg 3y ago
  That is a fair point, maybe I'm thinking to concretely about it. Was imagining getting a kill-a-watt power meter, and making sure my OS + browser + a website is drawing less than 1W from the wall. What you're saying as a more all-encompassing "efficiency in general" metric makes sense.

naglis 3y ago

The link to Marginalia in the "Explore" sidebar should be "marginalia.nu", unless this is some alternative Marginalia.

surprisetalk 3y ago
Thanks! Fixed
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  The font (because of the drop shadows I guess) looks jarring in dark mode.

avgcorrection 3y ago

This is the standard tirade^W manifesto about how web users forced corporations to ruin the Web. Oh no. Why did you patron Walmart when you could have gone to your local mom&pops. That but for the Web. Petite bourgeoisie sentiment.

Nasrudith 3y ago
What the hell does "petite bourgeoisie sentiment" even mean?
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  A sentiment coming from the petite bourgeoisie or those of that viewpoint.

JAlexoid 3y ago

Reading through I got this: - Cheap = a pain to read Good and modern visual design exists explicitly to deliver information to a person in the most accessible way. If you show a Japanese website to someone who grew up in Ireland, they will be overwhelmed. Not catering to different cultures, like the website suggests - only makes it worse. - Cheap = a lot of spam Having low cost of equipment and almost unlimited anonymity, makes fighting against spamming or "enshittification" exponentially hard. Just ask anyone who bothered to run their own mail server or open forum board. It's just not feasible for us to be able to have a nice experience without a level of trust.

YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
"Good" modern visual design barely exists at all according to that definition. Most modern web design exists to jam marketing in your eyeballs while drip-feeding information at the minimum rate to keep you from closing the tab, which is basically the opposite of "delivering information in the most accessible way". Also: The YouTube homepage uses twice the memory of the NicoNico homepage to show fewer thumbnails, and has basically been unchanged for years, while YouTube can barely resist keeping their layouts the same for a single month. Japanese web design has quite a few issues with being stuck in the 2000s but I'll take consistently bad over rolling the A/B testing dice every week to see what page I get.
- JAlexoid 3y ago
  I haven't provided any definitions on what is a good design at all, so you'll have to tell me what it is. Your issue with the content, doesn't negate the designs. Japanese websites are also filled with a lot of junk content. As for the Japanese websites, they aren't bad. They are bad for you, maybe... they're very much good for people accustomed to Japanese culture.

flpm 3y ago

Very interesting, thanks for posting! I am not sure if the way to go is a cheap web, small web, slow web, indie web, or maybe some combination of these attributes, but something about the current web feels off, mass produced and superficial. The old sites created by people who did cool stuff just for the sake of doing it are so hard to find now. I miss them.

zozbot234 3y ago
They're hard to find because they're not really linked anywhere. We used to have Web directories arranged by subject headings that tried to be mostly comprehensive and put some serious curation effort into that goal, such as DMOZ.org - but there's no modern equivalent to that. People like to complain about how the whole SEO issue has made search results useless as of late, but that if anything is downstream of the overall lack of manual curation.
- flpm 3y ago
  That's so true, it's almost like a return to the beginning (Yahoo Web Directory). We need to find a way to curate content that scales but in a way that eliminates the incentive for bad actors to try SEO-like approaches to game the process. That feels impossible without a feasible alternative to the ad-based revenue model.
  - HotGarbage 3y ago
    I always thought search engines could go back to using titles, description, and meta tags, but limit the number of characters/meta tags accepted.
  - Tomte 3y ago
    Pinboard and similar bookmarking sites could play that role.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Blogrolls, folksonomies (tags), etc. just pretty much faded away once the web really went mainstream. How many people ever really used lists on Twitter?

danielvaughn 3y ago

That comment about a "simple markup language" is interesting - anyone know what OP is referring to? They mentioned they're attempting to build one.

surprisetalk 3y ago
OP here! I've got a few different competing ideas at various stages of development. One idea builds on the programming language I'm building. I am growing more doubtful that it's going to provide the beginner-friendly experience I yearn for. It might be as easy as Elm one day, but that's not good enough for grandma. [1] https://scrapscript.org https://scrapscript.org Another idea is like "markdown, but with a grid model". That one also does not feel very good right now. I've also been toying around with something called "BYOD" (bring your own data), where you stitch things together in a simple layout format. This ends up feeling like powerpoint via plaintext, and surprisingly pleasant.
- danielvaughn 3y ago
  Love that - I also have a few competing ideas around something that sounds very similar. My goal is to create a textual interface that eschews traditional programming conventions in favor of a grammar and syntax that feels familiar to UI designers. I'm calling the overall effort "matry" - right now it's a language but that could change in the future: https://matry.design/ https://matry.design/
fullstackchris 3y ago
I don't really get this point... HTML is not _that_ complicated. I mean is: <h1>this</h1> <h2>this</h2> <h3>this</h3> really "more complex" than something like: # this ## this ### this You still need to know that '#' means header / title, and that more of them leads to a lower header level... and this is just for the most basic concept of web pages: headers. Okay, even if it's not markdown, no matter what system you cook up, the syntactic complexity to support the huge number of elements that exist in HTML has to live _somewhere_ right? (Yes, you can argue maybe not ALL of the 100+ HTML tags aren't needed, but probably most of them are!) While there is something to be said for mega purists who don't even like JavaScript, we're supposed to not even like HTML anymore either? I think at some point you have to accept that building things for the web involves some minimum level of complexity...

toastal 3y ago

This is why we should be using decentralized XMPP servers to chat since they actually run on potato hardware unlike other chat options.

jacooper 3y ago
Matrix Homeservers like Synapse can run on anything now, and there is conduit which should be lighter too.
- olah_1 3y ago
  Last I checked, the way the protocol works still causes a huge amount of load for minimal usage. Because of the way events need to propagate and the types of events that propagate
  - jacooper 3y ago
    I haven't seen this in my servers. I host three matrix servers and so far synapse isn't out of the ordinary.
- gunapologist99 3y ago
  Matrix is not lightweight or simple.
  - ptman 3y ago
    Matrix shifts much of the burden to the server so that clients can be simpler (except for e2ee, which has to be done clientside).
    - toastal 3y ago
      Which if true is still a burden that prevents simple self-hosting. You can (& I did briefly) install an XMPP server on a 10-year-old smart phone with postmarketOS on your network & have a reasonable experience.
3y ago

axblount 3y ago

Has there been a serious attempt to define an html/css subset that achieves these kinds of goals? Something that a mere mortal could implement and would cover the vast majority of web designs? I understand the urge to throw out the old and replace it with a new system, but that would be a huge blow to accessiblilty and adoption.

eitland 3y ago
I have been asking for a while if it could be a good idea to make something like asm.js but for webpages: Something to put in a meta tag or something early in the page that lets the browser know this webpage will only use a known-to-be-fast-and-predictable subset of html and css and only use js from a standardized library that provides things like autocomplete and other actually high value interactions.
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  You don't need JS for basic autocomplete in 2023, you can use "datalist" in HTML: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/datalist https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/da... A lot of basic high value interactions are more directly encoded in HTML today than a lot of developers expect to need JS for. Some other tags to pay attention to: summary/details, progress, meter, input type="color|date|time|datetime|range". It's an interesting relearning project, sometimes, how much the high level interactivity bits of HTML have changed since, for instance, the jQuery era.
  - eitland 3y ago
    > You don't need JS for basic autocomplete in 2023, you can use "datalist" in HTML: This does not seem to load data dynamically, it seems to be a way to show data from a predefined list?
    - WorldMaker 3y ago
      Most "basic" autocomplete isn't all that dynamic and you can prepopulate on the server side reasonably well. Sure, you still need JS to fetch a dynamic changing list, but you can also just update datalist options elements with JS rather than implement a full separate UX for autocomplete today. You are limited in the ability to CSS style datalist options so a lot of developers are still going to feel pressure in 2023 from "pixel perfect" UX designers to continue to reimplement that wheel, but the version of the JS that just updates a datalist after a fetch is likely much simpler than building a full "autocomplete control".

oooyay 3y ago

> Cheap to maintain: Most webpages should work indefinitely without falling over. Simple HTML will do this, so long as a browser that supports that version of HTML and CSS is still around. A static Go binary serving dynamic HTML will do this. I struggle to imagine Python, Ruby, etc being able to accomplish this though. That's to say, I'm not sure that's a good rule or could use some reworking to make it more achievable.

collaborative 3y ago
Once upon a time side bars and tool bars were made up of iframes that could talk to each other. Those sites wouldn't work today for "security reasons"
- YoshiRulz 3y ago
  If they have the same origin, then they should still work. But there's always postMessage[1]. [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/postMessage https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/post...

dcreater 3y ago

Absolutely lovely read!! Honestly feels incredible to see other people feel the things I do when most people don't, don't care and don't want to care. Might be a nitpick, but the point is ruined by the god awful aesthetics of the page

benrutter 3y ago
Weirdly I loved the aesthetics of the page. I know they are probably pretty terrible from a conventional design standpoint, but they're so full of personality it was a joy to look at!
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tshirthoodie 3y ago

>As software rots, multinationals may become the only players capable of making websites. They are already the decision makers of who open source software is for. The thing people fail most at realizing is that you can't have a lot of rich people with a lot of power without having a lot of poor people with no power. The interests of the former will always effectively undermine the latter. Similarly, you can't have software that serves multinationals and regular people at the same time because the interests of the former will always effectively undermine the latter.

zackmorris 3y ago

This is great! I can't really endorse most of the web "innovations" that have happened since the Dot Bomb. There was a time before FAANG when people with low technical knowhow could build something on the web and start earning enough residual income to pay their rent. Like the eBay store on The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Or the Mutiny BBS before that in Halt and Catch Fire. I did it with my business partner via shareware in the early 2000s. Even though the writing was on the wall even then that this was all going corporate. I think that things started going wrong when the anti-intellectual/anti-education movement gained prominence after 9/11 in the push towards privatization and outsourcing. Before that, we could rely on publicly-funded academia to deliver techniques designed from first principles to decrease our workload. But since then, we seem to get leftovers like endless Javascript build pipelines handed down to us from the private sector. It's almost like best practices today are designed to mire a startup in endless red tape. While multinational corporations just throw money at it to create a billion dollar pair of scissors that we can't afford. The way to undo all of that is to do the opposite. Realize that our freedom and prosperity start with our tools and techniques. Find the underemployed exhausted people and give them any resources at all to design better stuff and then leave them alone. Start funding bottom-up and middle-out policies instead of waiting around for trickle-down economics to toss us more scraps. Don't let any one person become a cult of personality preaching how things should be. And stop worshipping capital and focus on getting actual resources (the most important being time) to the middle class through automation and recycling to avoid war. This stuff is so obvious and evident in history that the main challenge is to unlearn one's own programming to be able to perceive alternatives. Edit: we're talking about HTML not macroeconomic policy. But after spending my entire career having to do things the "easy" way because there's never any time or budget to do things the simple way, I view the complexities of the modern web and the barriers standing in the way of our self-actualization as one and the same. Edit 2: think scholarships, grants and UBI - not loans, investments and contests.

jacobr 3y ago
There's a shift though, just the last couple of years. Today all browsers support native modals with the dialog element, accordions with details/summary, everything but Firefox supports popovers (dropdowns, tooltips, menus, etc) in plain HTML. I'd honestly love to be a beginner again learning modern HTML and CSS today, it's not bad at all.

enos_feedler 3y ago

What is a slippy mindset? what does slippy mean in this context? is it an acronym or something? I couldn't find anything about it.

sandywotsits 3y ago
There's a link from the page to here[0] and then out to here[1], which says... The tadi web is built with a slippy mindset. We try to be as ‘slippy’ as possible. Being slippy means you’re not stuck. When you’re slippy, it’s easy to change plan, or rebuild something from scratch. It means you’re not locked in to using a certain tool. If something breaks, you can choose to fix it, or let it die. It’s ok, because it won’t take long to rebuild it from scratch. Every time you grow back, you’ll be a bit different. You might be stronger. Or you might be better equipped for your changing needs. [0]: https://www.todepond.com/wikiblogarden/tadi-web/ https://www.todepond.com/wikiblogarden/tadi-web/ [1]: https://www.tadiweb.com/ https://www.tadiweb.com/

benrutter 3y ago

I love this. I've seen a lot of similar "use HTML as HTML" type things recently (probably a lot coming from the HATEOAS crowd). I'm not a web developer, and I really don't understand how we've ended up in this state where: - web starts as a means to share documents, HTML is built around that - eventually people want to build general applications (a la google docs) so they build tools that let you build non-document things by pretending they're documents - everyone thinks those tools are great and starts using them - 90% of the web is still documents, but now its all built in frameworks where you build a non-document by pretending its a document, even though in actuality, we're normally just building a document in the first place. The whole thing is a batshit crazy mess and I don't understand how as a global engineering culture we view it as anything other than completely insane.

nosefurhairdo 3y ago
HATEOAS = Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State (in case this saves a search). The JavaScript tools for building web applications are nice when used correctly. I can't imagine the product I work on would be easier to build with HTMX, but perhaps I'm ignorant. I wonder though, are there more enjoyable, non-web UI engines out there? Given that web app UI was glued together on top of a document sharing platform, it makes me think native UI dev should be more coherent.
tracerbulletx 3y ago
The platform isn't that much of a mess imo. I think if you look at individual web application code bases they're kind of a mess because the penalty for doing it wrong isn't that high compared to real physical engineering just throwing the business thing in without planning actually does have a higher ROI. If anything the 30 year old legacy code bases are still much worse than the typical React application and services tangle you get today.

worldofmatthew 3y ago

I'm guessing Cheap does not count for the blog post with no included image weighting over 1MB....... 315KB for HTML and looks like your "favicon.ico" is literally a copy of the webpage...

its-summertime 3y ago
The images are embedded into the CSS.
- worldofmatthew 3y ago
  I mean the blog post itself has no images.

butz 3y ago

What a breath of fresh air is browsing simple websites, where content in mainly text and images are sparingly used. All "modern" websites are so tiring. Now if website pops up anything on screen on first visit, be it newsletter signup, login request or just huge image covering whole viewport, I just switch to reader view.

chankstein38 3y ago
If I can't close it immediately and resume I right-click->Block Element. If doing that leaves the page unusable, I usually just click off. I'm with you, the web today is exhausting and feels hostile to the user in most cases.

DevAbdul 3y ago

cs professors are happy with this. this is what their "personal site" envisions

sam0x17 3y ago

I do wish we could go back to how things were in the early 00s where view source on any page was extremely telling and would show you cleanly formatted code. Another huge reason for the status quo is a lot of companies actively try to obfuscate their frontend code for a variety of reasons, and a lot unwittingly do it as part of minification to squeeze out a little bit of extra efficiency both in terms of payload size and parsing time for clients (every token counts!). That said, I would love a world where the de-jure frontend syntax was less ambiguous to the point where minification is essentially a lossless operation other than the actual names of things. At the browser level we have to make the decision: do we want clients to be able to figure exactly what is running in their browser? If the answer is no, the current situation is great, if the answer is yes, the current situation is pretty bleak, and will actually get bleaker with the advent of WASM-based payloads where we now need to disassemble on top of everything else.

FerretFred 3y ago
> view source on any page was extremely telling Yeah! This was basically how I taught myself to write effective HTML. Great fun!
joemi 3y ago
> to the point where minification is essentially a lossless operation other than the actual names of things. Is that not the case now? I don't do a lot with javascript myself, but I always assumed the minification process wasn't changing the code itself.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
  It will shorten variable names, replace true with !0 and many other things. Newer technology might even unroll loops to improve performance but that's a bit different.

ryukoposting 3y ago

Has anyone proposed CommonMark over HTTP? Like, just shove markdown in a GET response with Content-Type: text/markdown And let the client decide how to render it. It'd be like Gopher, but modern.

LoganDark 3y ago
Does Gemini[0] look interesting to you? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
- arp242 3y ago
  Gemini isn't over HTTP and it's not Markdown.
- GuB-42 3y ago
  Gemini is like modern Gopher, but it is also very opinionated. The protocol does not support extensions and revision, it refuses HTTP, mandates TLS, etc... That's not the same as having browsers support the markdown content type.
  - flir 3y ago
    You might disagree about where to draw the line but you can see why they drew a line in the sand. text/markdown would very quickly grow to be everything HTML is. There's probably a pithy "every internet protocol expands until it can serve ads" lesson in there somewhere.
    - 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
      Markdown generally does include everything HTML is (because you're allowed to write HTML in markdown)
    - anon25783 3y ago
      I like your pithy remark! I'm calling that "Flir's Law" from now on, after your username.

max-throat 3y ago

I've had this idea for something in between Gemini and the modern web that's essentially supposed to capture how the web was in the late 90s/early 00s. Basically just HTML/CSS with GET and POST, no scripting at all. I don't have the expertise to write this, unfortunately.

krapp 3y ago
That's literally just "writing basic HTML and not using Javascript." You can still totally just do that, no one is stopping you. But even if you went the whole Gemini route and published a custom protocol to be explicitly incompatable with HTTP and a spec supporting only early HTML, you still wouldn't be able to capture the early web, because it isn't the 1990s anymore.

karmakaze 3y ago

> Unfortunately, the HTML source for Apple.com is not so "beautiful on the inside", but Apple engineers shouldn't be faulted for ugly HTML. Their only option was to wrap a sleek skin around shoddy materials. Can ChatGPT et al make good beautiful HTML/CSS pages? Or take an existing one and actually beautify it?

willhackett 3y ago

Did anybody else's eyes get freaked out by the blog?

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

The article pulls together a lot of lovely material and links and ideas, but it starts with such a toxic & conservative outlook. Sure, apple.com's source might not be as beautiful as their products but potato.cheap immediately turns around and says it's not apples fault, and trashes the web and says it needs sto be replaces by something else. It just seems to be like the industrial world isn't going to improve without being lead there, but that there's so much leeway for the better awesome web to evince itself. The manifest possibilities are what so many people see as a bad and awful thing, but I think taste & discernment & internal structure are incredibly complicated & any kind of broad scale human hyper-engine of note is going to take more than a decade of effort for us to really suss out where to go & what looks & feels right. There isn't going to be the perfect system created out of nothing that makes everything great; it's power flexibility and possibility that we refine &harness onward to get to exceptional, and the web has ongoingly been an amazing host to that dialog in ways nothing else has been or from what I can see could be. I'm so tired of those who most strongly clearly advocate for better online systems being so retrograde. I miss the hope & buoyancy of those excited for stuff! Web Components and webrtc and QUIC and moq, our new awesome css flexbox and grid and layers, css variables. I'm still as thirsty and in love & still a believer that we can keep honing new & great. To shock industry into not sucking we just need to lead towards better, towards protocols & interoperation & elegance personally. The virtue will come out, and will be aped, as we develop, if we dare be better.

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perilunar 3y ago

I get the spirit of the article, but disagree with some of the specifics. > HTML remains hostile to beginners. What? HTML is dirt simple. There are some fiddly bits, but if you are creating simple documents (like this one) you don't need them — just use the subset of HTML that you are comfortable with. > HTML is generally unkind to people of limited hearing, vision, etc. Only if you mess it up. Clean and simple markup is usually pretty accessible. But really, this page is 1.4 MB of code for less than 20 KB of text (300 ms to load!). You want the 'cheap' and simple web, then set an example.

bimguy 3y ago
I agree with your disagreements. I am really bad with any coding, I have tried to learn Python and CSS several times now and can't remember a single thing. At the age of 12 I was easily able to learn HTML to build functional websites. Despite not having written a website in HTML for over 15 years I am still confident that I would be able to build a website using HTML code only right now. How is that hostile to beginners when it was the only language that I could ever grasp? Are there coding language out there easier than HTML?

eternityforest 3y ago

The web is already fast and performant on all devices from the last five years, and does not seem to be getting slower. Moore's law and optimizations caught up, performance is good enough for me, I won't complain as long as nobody messes it up. I do absolutely agree we need more accessibility and more sites that aren't endless scrolling trash. I don't think we need old fashioned simple HTML to do it, although that's certainly one of the tools that can be used. I think we mostly need more things like neocities that make it actually easy and maintenance free to set up a site. To me the important part of the old web was the content and the people, not the tech.