4 ms·

Is it really so bad? Unlike computer interfaces, the web was never text-first. It was graphical from the start. The first browser was in a GUI, not a terminal.

Is it really so bad? Unlike computer interfaces, the web was never text-first. It was graphical from the start. The first browser was in a GUI, not a terminal. Sites have been hobbled/broken on Lynx since the very beginning. It's neat and can be convenient to have a browser that works in your terminal for simple stuff, but the web was never designed for that. It's natural and to be expected that many sites will break. The burden is really on Lynx to do what it can to support sites as they are, rather than sites to try to build compatibility with Lynx. It's kind of like, there are programs to "view" a PDF in the terminal, or at least its text content. But PDF authors shouldn't be expected to optimize the order text is presented for those programs. That's not what PDF was ever meant for, even if you can get it work sometimes.

mongol 2y ago
No it wasn't. The img element was not added to the standard until HTML 2.0
- crazygringo 2y ago
  Images and other media were supported from the start, they just opened in separate windows instead of being inline. The first browser ran on NeXT, graphically. It did not grow out of the terminal. And the very first publicly formalized definition of HTML in 1993 did already include the img tag: https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt
  - c-linkage 2y ago
    OP never said that the web was terminal based. He said it was text-based. Text should render fine either in a terminal or on a graphical canvas.
    - johnkizer 2y ago
      That doesn't necessarily hold true with rich text, though...
      - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
        Heading formats can be well represented on an VT320. HTML didn't have color text at the start.
ForTheKidz 2y ago
> It's natural and to be expected that many sites will break. There is nothing "natural" about software development at all. It was an active choice to hobble the internet as a browser to sell ads via interactive apps.
prepend 2y ago
Wasn’t lynx before other graphical browsers? I remember first using the web through a vax terminal and lynx. You could download images but had to launch a viewer.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  Nexus predates Lynx.
scratcheee 2y ago
Given the web’s much wider remit than pdf, it has support for accessibility tools and much better non-visual handling than pdf, so the comparison isn’t entirely fair I think. If a website doesn’t handle lynx well, there’s a good chance it doesn’t handle accessibility well either.
LeratoAustini 2y ago
I think a significant difference is that in the early days, the content was predominantly text, with styling/images/multimedia to embellish the content. But today it feels like a large proportion of websites put the embellishments first, the text content is thin and you often have to hunt it out. Of course the web has evolved and has uses other than reading/absorbing information (some of them great) and multimedia content is valid, but it does seem to have become harder to find substance in amongst all the style. When I'm surfing the web it's still usually words that I'm looking for. I think that may be going out of fashion.
wolrah 2y ago
Back in the day my 28.8k modem came bundled with a book on HTML, which is how I learned to make my first personal web site. Even back then, the book recommended testing your web site in Lynx for two reasons: 1. Web sites are supposed to gracefully degrade when viewed in browsers without support for advanced features. 2. Accessibility matters, and while most of us don't have access to or know how to operate screen readers if we can comfortably view and navigate a web site in Lynx there's a pretty decent chance that it'll be usable with a screen reader. It's been ~30 years since then and those reasons still apply just as well. For the vast majority of web sites which do not have any need to be interactive webapps there's not really any good reason for it not to be perfectly usable in a text-only browser, and if it's both readable and navigable in a text browser it should also be with a screen reader.
philistine 2y ago
I think you guys are talking across one another. You both are correct to my point of view. OP is correct that allowing websites, by enacting standards that allowed such a thing, to script their rendering was a mistake. You are also correct that the web is visual from the start.
giantrobot 2y ago
The early web was not terminal based but that doesn't automatically mean it was "graphical". HTML was meant to be processed by any number of different user agents. A lot of early HTML tags were semantic in nature in order to convey the intent of the element. Conveying intent allows non-graphical browser, meaning everything from spiders to screen readers to AI agents, to use a page with the same capability. People abusing HTML for the purpose of styling is the whole reason for CSS existing. A well written HTML document should have a very clean structure. The CSS has the ability to do all the crazy graphical styling. The old CSS Zen Garden was an amazing demonstration of that, an incredibly well structured and mostly semantic HTML document could have any number of crazy styles only by varying the CSS. Bullshit HTML loaded with bullshit CSS frameworks generated by megabytes of bullshit JavaScript is a complete failure of web devs to master the medium. Unless a web page is absolutely reliant on a graphical interface (Google Maps, a game, etc) there's no reason that it shouldn't render passably in lynx. Even in those cases it should have noscript guardrails to provide at least an explanation as to why it can't work.
dlcarrier 2y ago
By the time it caught on, HTML did allow for very graphical web pages, and that's not even considering how popular Flash Player was when the internet had its initial growth spurt. Technically, very early versions of HTML, especially predating CSS, were closer to epub than modern HTML, but there were so few web pages it's not a meaningful argument against your supposition. I think what's more important is that a significant portion of web pages have no more complex layout than a newspaper or slideshow, so why not make them easy to parse? Not only would it make browsing in Lynx easier, but it would work well with screen readers, which are the only way some people can browse web pages.

mongol 2y ago

No it wasn't. The img element was not added to the standard until HTML 2.0

crazygringo 2y ago
Images and other media were supported from the start, they just opened in separate windows instead of being inline. The first browser ran on NeXT, graphically. It did not grow out of the terminal. And the very first publicly formalized definition of HTML in 1993 did already include the img tag: https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt
- c-linkage 2y ago
  OP never said that the web was terminal based. He said it was text-based. Text should render fine either in a terminal or on a graphical canvas.
  - johnkizer 2y ago
    That doesn't necessarily hold true with rich text, though...
    - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
      Heading formats can be well represented on an VT320. HTML didn't have color text at the start.

ForTheKidz 2y ago

> It's natural and to be expected that many sites will break. There is nothing "natural" about software development at all. It was an active choice to hobble the internet as a browser to sell ads via interactive apps.

prepend 2y ago

Wasn’t lynx before other graphical browsers? I remember first using the web through a vax terminal and lynx. You could download images but had to launch a viewer.

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
Nexus predates Lynx.

scratcheee 2y ago

Given the web’s much wider remit than pdf, it has support for accessibility tools and much better non-visual handling than pdf, so the comparison isn’t entirely fair I think. If a website doesn’t handle lynx well, there’s a good chance it doesn’t handle accessibility well either.

LeratoAustini 2y ago

I think a significant difference is that in the early days, the content was predominantly text, with styling/images/multimedia to embellish the content. But today it feels like a large proportion of websites put the embellishments first, the text content is thin and you often have to hunt it out. Of course the web has evolved and has uses other than reading/absorbing information (some of them great) and multimedia content is valid, but it does seem to have become harder to find substance in amongst all the style. When I'm surfing the web it's still usually words that I'm looking for. I think that may be going out of fashion.

wolrah 2y ago

Back in the day my 28.8k modem came bundled with a book on HTML, which is how I learned to make my first personal web site. Even back then, the book recommended testing your web site in Lynx for two reasons: 1. Web sites are supposed to gracefully degrade when viewed in browsers without support for advanced features. 2. Accessibility matters, and while most of us don't have access to or know how to operate screen readers if we can comfortably view and navigate a web site in Lynx there's a pretty decent chance that it'll be usable with a screen reader. It's been ~30 years since then and those reasons still apply just as well. For the vast majority of web sites which do not have any need to be interactive webapps there's not really any good reason for it not to be perfectly usable in a text-only browser, and if it's both readable and navigable in a text browser it should also be with a screen reader.

philistine 2y ago

I think you guys are talking across one another. You both are correct to my point of view. OP is correct that allowing websites, by enacting standards that allowed such a thing, to script their rendering was a mistake. You are also correct that the web is visual from the start.

giantrobot 2y ago

The early web was not terminal based but that doesn't automatically mean it was "graphical". HTML was meant to be processed by any number of different user agents. A lot of early HTML tags were semantic in nature in order to convey the intent of the element. Conveying intent allows non-graphical browser, meaning everything from spiders to screen readers to AI agents, to use a page with the same capability. People abusing HTML for the purpose of styling is the whole reason for CSS existing. A well written HTML document should have a very clean structure. The CSS has the ability to do all the crazy graphical styling. The old CSS Zen Garden was an amazing demonstration of that, an incredibly well structured and mostly semantic HTML document could have any number of crazy styles only by varying the CSS. Bullshit HTML loaded with bullshit CSS frameworks generated by megabytes of bullshit JavaScript is a complete failure of web devs to master the medium. Unless a web page is absolutely reliant on a graphical interface (Google Maps, a game, etc) there's no reason that it shouldn't render passably in lynx. Even in those cases it should have noscript guardrails to provide at least an explanation as to why it can't work.

dlcarrier 2y ago

By the time it caught on, HTML did allow for very graphical web pages, and that's not even considering how popular Flash Player was when the internet had its initial growth spurt. Technically, very early versions of HTML, especially predating CSS, were closer to epub than modern HTML, but there were so few web pages it's not a meaningful argument against your supposition. I think what's more important is that a significant portion of web pages have no more complex layout than a newspaper or slideshow, so why not make them easy to parse? Not only would it make browsing in Lynx easier, but it would work well with screen readers, which are the only way some people can browse web pages.