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Comment by elliottinvent | Hacker News Reader

I think there's so much that can be done with web design to make browsing the web more energy efficient, but in many cases users don't want or need a website – they just want some key data.

> "People just want to access content quickly, without distraction, without friction, and without it using a tonne of data."

Absolutely, most new websites for small businesses are 90% identical bloated single page scrolling Wordpress sites. When we visit those sites we're often looking for contact info, opening hours, menus, or maybe links to social media so we can interact with the company. So really we want ~100 bytes of data (e.g. address / socials / telephone / opening hours) but we have to download 5mb+

A small team and I have been working on an alternative to the web for structured data. It's a DNS-based protocol that domain / email owners can use to provide data direct to users:

https://www.num.uk https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24354559

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I have recently been building simple sites (HTML+CSS) for small-ish businesses with Hugo, with great success. I am currently building a base theme that will contain all the basic scaffolding, much like how Wordpress have the concept of child themes. I plan on open sourcing this base theme, but it is far from stable and under active development atm, but I have used it for several projects already and it enables me to put up a basic site within a day. The sites are super-lightweight and loads instantly, and contains all the features the client needs.

What is still missing to some degree is an admin panel for the clients to easily publish their own content, although there are some alternatives (Forestry, Netlify etc). So far my clients are happy to leave the actual content management to me, as their sites are only occasionally updated.

EDIT: Also, NUM looks really interesting!

Have you got some examples?

Some people we've spoken to are interested in serving _very_ basic site content out of NUM records. So this could make the DNS your CMS which is interesting and terrifying in equal measure.

How do you get around the fact that it's entirely possible to chuck "contact info, opening hours, menus, or maybe links to social media" on a plain text file on a domain right now yet no small businesses are doing it and are instead going with heavy Wordpress sites?

If that's what most users want and they want it bad enough to warrant a whole new protocol, then my thinking would be that it would have to provide some sort of competitive advantage. What has prevented it spreading despite this competitive advantage and why is that factor not present when it comes to adoption of your protocol?

No small businesses are publishing useful data to text files because it's not standardised, since it's not standardised there's no devices / apps / services consuming data in that format and so no incentive to store it in that way.

Some businesses publish data using structured formats for the web (microdata, JSON-LD) but have not reached critical mass, other examples like .wellknown are for more technical use cases and are not that, errrr, well known.

> If that's what most users want and they want it bad enough to warrant a whole new protocol, then my thinking would be that it would have to provide some sort of competitive advantage.

Users want the data – they search Google (Knowledge Graph / Google Places) for it and scour websites for it – but there's no way for companies to provide the data directly to users, other than through websites. That's what NUM is – a way to do that.

> What has prevented it spreading despite this competitive advantage and why is that factor not present when it comes to adoption of your protocol?

It's the classic chicken and egg problem – no one stores data using method X because no one's looking for it using method X and no one's looking for data using method X because the data isn't there. We aim to overcome that by publishing millions of pieces of useful structured data to DNS.

We announced NUM on 1st September and it's experimental, so there's a long road ahead.

I think people just do what they know.

Most laypeople that choose Wordpress do so because they want some editing interface. The bloated Wordpress templates are a consequence of them looking good in ThemeForest. There's no incentive for template makers to make super fast 100%-static templates, as those don't attract attention.

But given the chance, site owners would replace their sites with whatever works. For instance, and a lot of local businesses where I don't have webpages anymore, but only Facebook profiles with a bunch of photos and text. Some of them even have custom domains that redirect to Facebook!

Apple App Clips in iOS 14 is something similar: you don't need an App for scooters or for buying Ice Cream, so I foresee some people moving to those just because it's cheaper to make... and because customers will probably be familiar with them.

Yes I agree. I think small businesses go down that route because it's what everyone else does. I think the majority of small businesses don't choose Wordpress, the web designer does.

I don't think most companies need a website, Facebook offers great tools to engage with customers but as a website it basically just lists key data. So all they really need a website for is to provide customers with key data.

So I click the "visit the NUM Server website" link. I then get asked to register with my email and password.

Surely, not requiring me to register would be another way to make web more energy efficient. No?

I'm interested in NUM's approach though.

Thanks for the comment.

If you want to experiment with NUM then this page is the best starting point (and doesn't require login): https://app.numserver.com/tools/editor/add

We're due to publish a page to numserver.com that explains more about the service and allows you to experiment before requiring sign up.

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