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Comment by anderspitman | Hacker News Reader

My dream is that someone will spec out a nice simple subset of modern HTML/CSS, and folks will start making compatible static sites. A few years of that and we could have some nice truly lightweight browsers again. Imagine how fast sites like Wikipedia or YouTube could be if JS wasn't even an option.

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Is the first step really needed? Nothing technical is stopping folks from making such websites. If browsers use a lot more RAM than needed when viewing such simple websites (I'm not even sure that is the case!), there should be low hanging fruit improvements to decrease RAM usage in this scenario.

The most frustrating thing about web standards is that if we were going to do the whole apps-over-HTTP/HTML thing we could have features and light weight, by building way more functionality directly into HTML. Better form elements with more built-in features, better tables more like what's available in native UI kits, maybe even direct built-in support for major, complex UIs to support ecommerce and banking workflows and such, bring back frames but make them less-shit (seriously, how much of "AJAX" use is, in practice, basically just slightly-less-shit frames?), that kind of thing.

... and then cripple JavaScript so everyone has to use the built-in features and can't get "cute" at the user's expense.

But no, instead we're burning enormous quantities of person-hours doing the same damn thing over and over with bad tools and creatively-broken a11y support and shitty custom animations no-one wants, and wasting huge amounts of energy and users' time.

That could be cool but mostly I just want it for the read-only portions of the web.

I saw something like what you wish for mentioned here once or twice but the name escapes me. Documents consisted of just text and styles, but the project made the strange choice not to use HTTP for transport.

The Gemini protocol? It's a cool project but I think for anything to get big it would have to remain compatible with current browsers. The idea is a crowd-sourced embrace-extend-extinguish, except the opposite of extend.

Yeah that is what I was thinking of, thanks for the assist. Agree that it won’t get big for the same reason.

Big tech players have been happy to create 'lite' versions of their apps for the developing world market, so this doesn't seem completely far fetched to me

The problem is that nobody is going to migrate unless a major web player swings a big and likely anticompetitive stick.

You don't need to migrate. Keep it compatible with current browsers. Users will reap the benefits of the lightweight sites regardless of what browser they use. It would sort of be like AMP that way. But over time if you get enough major sites with compatible versions it would become useful to have a browser that only speaks the lightweight web, and that's when things could start to snowball. At no point do you need big companies or browser vendors to do anything other than not break current HTML/CSS compatibility.

> It would sort of be like AMP that way.

You may have noticed that this was pretty much exactly what I was talking about ;) Usability issues aside, nobody fixed their stuff until Google threatened their SEO.

Yeah you got me. AMP really is close on a technical level but my blood boils every time I see a /amp/ url.

I've found this extension https://www.daniel.priv.no/web-extensions/amp2html.html rather useful for dealing with that.

It also means I am less likely to share an AMP link.

If server side rendering and a subset of js were sectioned off, the browser could have an alert icon that says "this website has dreadful performance, click here to quarantine it" that allows people to disable js forever. Websites could comply with the new standard or risk being user quarantined.

Not completely unlike Apples handling of flash.

The JAMStack is a thing, and it seems to be gaining momentum.

It's very JavaScript-heavy though. What I'm thinking of would be HTML/CSS only.

That’s AMP, or at least the good parts of it.

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