Comment by asark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asark | Hacker News Reader

We need a Web again. A hypertext document browsing system. Update the basic elements like they should have been updated 20+ years ago (sortable tables seems like a no-brainer to include in base HTML, there's got to be a way to update frames so they suck less and fit 90+% of the legit uses of AJAXy page updates, improved form elements like you get in a real GUI toolkit, file upload with preview, and so on) but NO javascript, NO talking to any server behind the user's back. Once the page loads my network connection should be silent until I click a link. I should get a preview of what a form's about to send. Anything but a GET to any server but the one I'm currently on, flatly disallowed. Somewhere you can browse hypertext documents with high performance, in safety, with no spying.

This one can be abandoned to spyware and apps. Whatever. That's fine. But I don't want safe hyptertext browsing comingled with the same program that can and constantly does load spyware and other abusive junk.

There's nothing stopping you from browsing that way if it's what you want. Install uMatrix, uBlock, and a couple other extensions, and you can lock down pages as much as you want. You can even take it a step further and use an older browser that doesn't support the modern features you're complaining about.

Unfortunately, what you can't do is force everybody else to participate. HTML3 still works great in modern browsers, but the people making the sites want to use modern features.

> There's nothing stopping you from browsing that way if it's what you want.

There is. Pages that don't work without Javascript.

That was my point. You can control your browser, but you can't control what other people offer up.

And that's what's stopping them from browsing a sane web.

Sorry, but nobody's twisting their arm to use those websites.

Making yourself out to be a victim doesn't make it so.

Saying that you have perfect choice when half of the things you need to use use dark patterns rife with abuse does not make it true either.

>And that's what's stopping them from browsing a sane web.

What, that people have too much freedom to express themselves?

When did hacker culture become so... fascist?

Heil Lee!

https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html#PLP

> You can even take it a step further and use an older browser that doesn't support the modern features you're complaining about.

> HTML3 still works great in modern browsers, but the people making the sites want to use modern features.

I'm not disagreeing with your point, but I disagree with words like "modern" and "older".

The most "modern" browser that I'm aware of (not counting the myriad Webkit/Gecko skins) is EWW, which was first released in 2013. It's now a built-in feature of Emacs, a reasonably widely used piece of software. I think this fits the parent's desire for a readable hypertext renderer.

In contrast, Google Chrome dates from 2008. If we include that in our definition of "modern" then I think we should include Netsurf (first stable release in 2007), which is a full graphical browser but might still be acceptable to the parent. If we call Firefox "modern" then I'd say it includes everything back to Netscape Navigator.

If we're instead talking about maintained and up-to-date browsers then w3m, Links and lynx have all had releases in 2019. Again, those are readable hypertext systems like the parent describes.

We might consider "modern" to mean implementing certain Web standards; yet that seems precisely against the nature of this discussion. Plus, many of those described above have support for e.g. HTML5, certain ECMAScript standards, etc.

In contrast, "older" browsers would presumably include bloat like Internet Explorer's support for ActiveX and VBScript; and the IRC client + WYSIWYG editor + mail reader + news reader from Netscape/Mozilla/SeaMonkey. Precisely against what the parent asked for.

Ill go a step further, and say I wish the view was decoupled from the data in a way that my browser controls the view template. The fonts, the column size, the page colors. So whether i browse to cnn, nytimes, espn, etc, the pages look identical.

My browser can have maybe 20 page templates built in, and sites can specify which templates work best for their content (article, video, forum, search results, recipe, howto)

Due to techniques and services like jsdelivr, many sites will prevent you from even seeing any of the content without loading all of the JS they want you to be running.

No problem. Hit the back button and select one of the alternatives from 10k+ search results..

Edit: and don't forget to add the broken website to your "remove from search results" addon, so you never see it again in search results..

Can I change websites for paying my electricity bill? How about accessing government services?

Sure they offer an in person alternative, but due to the prevalence of online usage they've been able to dramatically cut the number of physical agencies.

Try booking a flight and hotel without js. It's just not possible, you can't simply "use another airline" you have to use an entirely different booking medium.

Inject this HTTP header and you have the web 1.0 back:

     Content-Security-Policy: sandbox allow-forms allow-top-navigation;

Restrict default-src to self and your second requirement is covered.

You misunderstand, I think. The problem is that the ecosystem of the modern web is entirely and irreverisbly full of spying and user-hostile junk, due to decisions that were made. TL;DR you can't have Javascript with anything close to its current capabilities and also have a safe and user-controlled Web.

I don't want some restricted version of web sites that work OK in current web browsers, provided you're very careful not to leave those sites. I don't want constant fiddling with umatrix or custom privacy settings that break 90% of the Web. I want a safe hypertext browsing system back, in its own program that will kick open a "real" web browser (with warnings and flashing lights) if you try to link from it to the spyware web, like if you try to open a PDF. As long as I'm in it, I shouldn't have to worry about any links I open trying to spy on me. I shouldn't have to track down which tab in this system is making my nigh-supercomputer laptop's UI stutter (hi, Asana, Trello, Slack, Jira). None of them should break because of my privacy settings—privacy, old-school web style, should be the only way it operates.

I want a safe-only Web that is for browsing hypertext documents. The current web can keep the spying, security vulnerabilities, resource-eating, and apps. I know I'd still have to use it, and that's fine, I just don't want safe, secure, resource friendly browsing to happen alongside this shitshow, because then it's not safe and secure.

> open a "real" web browser

I'd call that launching a Javascript app, which rarely touches the World-Wide Web beyond that single point.

i think we still have it, with wikipedia and personal blogs for example. it's just been largely subsumed in our minds by web apps and the commercial web. but there are plenty of interconnected hypertext documents that are primarily documents to be read and shared using http(s) without an intermediary organization (like facebook or google).

> Somewhere you can browse hypertext documents with high performance, in safety, with no spying.

How do you propose the no-spying part? With laws passed by country? Nothing in your setup prevents spying, and spying is extremely lucrative in a capitalistic society, so people will still find a way to spy.

You are putting all your trust in the server. But those servers are where the spying would move to if it needed to. You cannot create a technological system that prevents spying, since you have not removed the incentive to spy.

Make it illegal to do targeted marketing and then you will have a dramatic reduction in spying. You'll also have a short-term dramatic drop in economic efficiency, something the HN crowd is likely to decry as equal to the end of the world. But I think it's much more likely that we build a sustainable society with good, long-term-growth economics if we put more limits on capitalism.

Edit: Facebook doesn't care if you're reading those documents on some simple text-web. They'll find out anyway, either via your absence from the 'regular web' or any other clue they can find. The spying won't stop just because you're using some primitive technology.

Under what I propose you could only do stuff like recording a user's entire session, including mouse position and typing-in-progress in text fields, which is commonly and easily done on the modern web for "UX research", with the complicity of the browser itself. The point is that the server may log your requests, sure, but they can't gather tons of extra info without your seeing it (post previews) and they can't effectively stick a camera over your shoulder while you look a their pages. No more abusive, close session tracking. Best you can get is "the user, personally, made this request at this time". Which is way the hell better than where things are at now.

I agree we also need to outlaw mass collection of info about people, or at least put in place such massive penalties for leaks that no sane company without a really compelling reason would dare store such things. Hopefully that'd end the damn credit card company and loyalty card and credit system spying, too, or at least force them to shape the eff up. I'd just also like a hypertext network that cannot constantly spy on me or eat an entire core because "programmer productivity". That's all.

I don't know how perfectly you could do this. If there are going to be arbitrary mouseover effects then JS has to be able to see your mouse. If you want Jupyter notebooks to indent text & do tab completion then JS has to see text you haven't submitted.

That said, I'd like my browser to be much more on my side -- by default disclose very little about my setup, by default partition cookies according to the headline site I visited, and delete them soon. I'd like JS completely off on most sites I visit, and more convenient ways to turn on as much of it as needed on some sites.

> If there are going to be arbitrary mouseover effects then JS has to be able to see your mouse. If you want Jupyter notebooks to indent text & do tab completion then JS has to see text you haven't submitted.

Just don't allow those things. Those aren't hypertext browsing, they're app-things. Wikipedia or Timmy's Ninja Turtle Fan Club or even banking and ordinary ecommerce sites don't really need those things, and having those things on the same platform as all these "apps" get them all mixed up in a spying and vulnerability nightmare for no good reason. I think hypertext browsing is distinct enough from what the current web is, and that it's still a useful enough idea, that it'd be nice to split that off from... whatever this has become.

Indeed. I guess you're picturing two apps, where I'm picturing one app with much easier per-site settings, with much the same goal.

My current plan is to make lots of Fluid-app browsers, for certain sites, and then leave JS off most of the time. But there are enough sites which don't work at all, yet I want to visit, to make this a bit of a pain.

One major benefit of a separate program and network (network of hypertext, that is, not IP network or whatever) is that if you can overcome an initial usage hurdle (big if, I know) it'd provide an audience incentive to get current websites that could work just fine on it (which is lots of them) to provide a second experience on it. The way they do now with web+mobile app, but it'd obviously be cheaper to provide than either of those, by a long shot. Gaining the ability to access, banking, ecommerce, and government resources in particular through a hypertext network that's not also a spyware and application delivery platform would be huge for security.

I wonder whether pushing accessibility is another way forwards. Maybe the simple-browser should present itself as a screen reader for the blind, and automatically send threats of ADA lawsuits if a site isn't usable.

I know for instance that UK govt. websites are designed for such use first, which just means sticking close to the original spirit of hypertext. Bank websites I have little hope of... and anyway I trust my bank quite a lot! But commerce would be great.

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