Comment by southerntofu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by southerntofu | Hacker News Reader

I really long for a modern, declarative web without client-side scripting. 99% of websites should not use JavaScript at all. There's a lot we could do if everything was more standardized and implemented client-side.

For example why can't we have auto-refreshed content standardized? Something like <section refresh-from="https://foo.bar/example-section" refresh-time="60s"> where user could accept/deny the auto-refresh and adjust the timer would make JavaScript completely meaningless for websites like Twitter.

The overall experience would be much greater: no trackers, no tab using half of your RAM/CPU to mine cryptocoins, no targeted ads, no weird behavior when switching internet connection (because everything would be handled by the browser itself, not by JS requests which may or may not randomly fail).

Gemini is a really cool protocol but i appreciate some aspects of the web like images and videos (with the builtin players, no JS please).

We actually do have auto-refreshed content standardised. <frame> instead of <section>, and <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="60; https://foo.bar/example-section" /> (where the URL to refresh from is optional).

The web could do all the things we really needed it to (except embedded video and games), a long time ago. But programmers wanted more natural ways of doing it, which converted a document format into an application framework into an operating system.

Yeah you're correct what i had in mind as more like dynamically loading new articles, for example for a webchat. Not "refreshing" as in reloading the whole iframe. Like built-in RSS but using semantic HTML.

> But programmers wanted more natural ways of doing it, which converted a document format into an application framework into an operating system.

I think it's more like hostile actors (including Microsoft itself) had so much of the market share that trying to standardize things was perceived as a lot of effort without success, despite lots of people trying. JS was the worst we could come up with, but everybody supported it more or less...

> Yeah you're correct what i had in mind as more like dynamically loading new articles, for example for a webchat.

Oh, you mean chunked transfer encoding? Yeah, we've got that too.

> I think it's more like hostile actors

The hostile actors had to get the ideas from somewhere.

So you would like basically modern gopher? And some RSS for a good measure?

> Gemini is a really cool protocol but i appreciate some aspects of the web like images and videos (with the builtin players, no JS please).

With Gemini it's up to the client to add the appropriate players. lagrange does this just fine when presented and audio link.

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