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The web has moved so far away from its original purpose that we need something to fill the role the web was originally supposed to be for. I hate having to hav

The web has moved so far away from its original purpose that we need something to fill the role the web was originally supposed to be for. I hate having to have a massive complex piece of software that takes up a GB of RAM and includes an entire programming language just to be able to view simple text documents that link to each other.

hollerith 12y ago
I agree. Browsing is important enough that there should be browsers just for browsing. What we have now are browsers that support browsing but also support access to web applications. The need to serve two masters makes the browsers we have now suboptimal for just browsing. In particular, a browser just for browsing would be able to be significantly simpler than a browser that serves two masters, and as a general rule, when we are talking about something as complicated as a browser, making a program simpler makes it more reliable and makes it easier for a human to predict what it will do and consequently makes it less frustrating to use.
- krapp 12y ago
  Regardless of what the web once was, it now is an application environment, for which one application is documents ("browsing".) You already have what amounts to a "browser just for browsing" when you turn off javascript in the one you're using now. But a browser which only interprets html and css and not javascript is just a broken browser.
  - imanaccount247 12y ago
    That's the point. The web is completely broken for the use case of "browsing the web". We need a replacement for the web, and for web browsers, to do fill that use case again that the web used to fill.
    - krapp 12y ago
      Your use case, and your definition of "browsing" which excludes dynamic content, isn't typical though. Most people keep javascript turned on by default, and for most people, it isn't broken. Nothing has changed about HTML or browsers that prevents anyone from building a minimalistic site, or one that degrades gracefully, they just choose not to. This isn't a problem of the web, but the culture of web design, and the tendency of people to only use a few corporate sites which follow the same design paradigms.
      - imanaccount247 12y ago
        I didn't say it was typical, what does that have to do with anything. It seems like you are trying very hard to avoid reading my words and instead read what you wish I said. Yes, it is a problem with the web. The culture of web design is part of the web. This is why we need a replacement for the use case that the web was originally designed for but no longer fills.
        krapp 12y ago
        No, I think you're misunderstanding my intent. I'm just saying basic html and hyperlinking still works perfectly fine, and most people read the web as hypertext in almost exactly the same way they always have. The original use case still exists and it still works.
        hollerith 12y ago
        It does not work as well as it used to, and more to the point, it does not work as well as it would if it did not have to do double duty as an application-delivery platform. On a very long web page, do you ever hold down the mouse button on the slider in the scroll bar so that you can scroll up and down rapidly? If you do that on the web page on which these words appear, it will (probably) work smoothly and well, but on certain Javascript-heavy pages, it is very jerky. The whole page blinks rapidly. It is tedious and difficult to see the text while the page is moving up or down. That is just one of many examples where a particular functionality useful to people who read and who "browse" (which might be defined as deciding what to read next among many, many alternatives) does not work as well on the web of 2014 as it did in the past because of the need for the web of 2014 to support ever more complicated or sophisticated web applications. (The many examples include tasks that are not strictly part of reading -- tasks like making a copy of part of a web page or making a copy of the page's URL in preparation for emailing the URL.) Publishing static documents and reading and browsing static documents over the internet is an important enough function in our society that we should feel sad that it does not work as smoothly and as quickly as it could. The next Einstein and the next Charles Darwin will use the web to learn and to share their discoveries. What the next Einstein and the next Darwin need the most from the web is the ability to browse static web pages quickly and reliably without their having to devote a lot of their attention to the user interface or to getting a particular page to work with their browser.

hollerith 12y ago

I agree. Browsing is important enough that there should be browsers just for browsing. What we have now are browsers that support browsing but also support access to web applications. The need to serve two masters makes the browsers we have now suboptimal for just browsing. In particular, a browser just for browsing would be able to be significantly simpler than a browser that serves two masters, and as a general rule, when we are talking about something as complicated as a browser, making a program simpler makes it more reliable and makes it easier for a human to predict what it will do and consequently makes it less frustrating to use.

krapp 12y ago
Regardless of what the web once was, it now is an application environment, for which one application is documents ("browsing".) You already have what amounts to a "browser just for browsing" when you turn off javascript in the one you're using now. But a browser which only interprets html and css and not javascript is just a broken browser.
- imanaccount247 12y ago
  That's the point. The web is completely broken for the use case of "browsing the web". We need a replacement for the web, and for web browsers, to do fill that use case again that the web used to fill.
  - krapp 12y ago
    Your use case, and your definition of "browsing" which excludes dynamic content, isn't typical though. Most people keep javascript turned on by default, and for most people, it isn't broken. Nothing has changed about HTML or browsers that prevents anyone from building a minimalistic site, or one that degrades gracefully, they just choose not to. This isn't a problem of the web, but the culture of web design, and the tendency of people to only use a few corporate sites which follow the same design paradigms.
    - imanaccount247 12y ago
      I didn't say it was typical, what does that have to do with anything. It seems like you are trying very hard to avoid reading my words and instead read what you wish I said. Yes, it is a problem with the web. The culture of web design is part of the web. This is why we need a replacement for the use case that the web was originally designed for but no longer fills.
      - krapp 12y ago
        No, I think you're misunderstanding my intent. I'm just saying basic html and hyperlinking still works perfectly fine, and most people read the web as hypertext in almost exactly the same way they always have. The original use case still exists and it still works.
        hollerith 12y ago
        It does not work as well as it used to, and more to the point, it does not work as well as it would if it did not have to do double duty as an application-delivery platform. On a very long web page, do you ever hold down the mouse button on the slider in the scroll bar so that you can scroll up and down rapidly? If you do that on the web page on which these words appear, it will (probably) work smoothly and well, but on certain Javascript-heavy pages, it is very jerky. The whole page blinks rapidly. It is tedious and difficult to see the text while the page is moving up or down. That is just one of many examples where a particular functionality useful to people who read and who "browse" (which might be defined as deciding what to read next among many, many alternatives) does not work as well on the web of 2014 as it did in the past because of the need for the web of 2014 to support ever more complicated or sophisticated web applications. (The many examples include tasks that are not strictly part of reading -- tasks like making a copy of part of a web page or making a copy of the page's URL in preparation for emailing the URL.) Publishing static documents and reading and browsing static documents over the internet is an important enough function in our society that we should feel sad that it does not work as smoothly and as quickly as it could. The next Einstein and the next Charles Darwin will use the web to learn and to share their discoveries. What the next Einstein and the next Darwin need the most from the web is the ability to browse static web pages quickly and reliably without their having to devote a lot of their attention to the user interface or to getting a particular page to work with their browser.