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Comment by Taikonerd | Hacker News Reader

I love the idea behind Gemini, and on a similar note, I'm wondering: is there a name for the back-to-basics, web 1.0 philosophy? Like, a name for the "sites that look like https://motherfuckingwebsite.com " ?

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I feel like I've heard of this world of exclusively hyperlinked simple web pages referred to as "the document web".

But in my brief searches I can't find another source for that term. Maybe I'm inventing it in my head right now, but regardless, it feels like a good name.

the Semantic Web?

The Semantic Web is what you're part of if you make your content explicitly machine-readable, especially if you do it with RDF[0].

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework

Perhaps the idea of brutalist web design fits? (https://brutalist-web.design/) HN is a good example of it IMO.

It looks alright but to me the simple-web ideal is rather like.. no design. Like, you don't design an essay, or a comment, you just write one. And so was the web. Initially you did not do "web design", you wrote hyperlinked documents with some markup to support formatting (not design!) and embedding images; how it looks in the end is up to the user agent (and transitively to the user who could pick and configure their UA).

Then web design happened and it all went to hell. Web "designers" started doing "cute" things and business owners started wanting more and more branding and fashionable stuff.. and here we are. I've said it before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22608293

HN looks simple, but its under-the-surface table-based layout is ... actually something of a mess. Especially if you want to parse or reformat it readily (e.g., by parsing the structure, not just reskinning CSS).

No, because the only traction it has ever had and will ever have is with techies who are capable of recognizing (and issuing) a description of "HTML documents with only very minimal client-side JS, often without any CSS whatsoever".

or, you know, Craigslist and Wikipedia.

I don't think a case can be made for Wikipedia being on http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ style level. Craigslist--maybe the listing pages, sure. And that's a fair point! It has more penetration than I was allowing. But I don't think it's going to get a designy sounding name because designy sorts of people don't feel the same nostalgic affection for fairly raw HTML.

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