The Modern WWW, Or: Where Do We Want to Go from Here?
hackaday.com
hackaday.com
The “Google” network and sites can be kept on as a necessary evil proprietary service, like Facebook is for many, and also LinkedIn.
Or is the comment missing `/s`?
- Chrome obscuring the full URL in the address bar, which makes people use Google Search as if it were the address bar.
- Gmail being so popular that people assume `@gmail.com` is a suffix for all email addresses. You might tell a cashier your email address to sign up for discounts. When you say `example@example.com` they might end up typing `exampleatexample@gmail.com` (this is, of course, an example.)
- Web search as a generic trademark "Google it" which most people now take for granted.
When people don't type in URLs but instead "google" everything by query, it's no surprise people conflate these different systems. My point in essence is that people who confuse Google/Web/Internet are just laypeople, not ignorami; they've been subject to a deliberate campaign by Google to make them think that.
Most people don't, both as users and as authors. I was there for the 90s web, and IMO the nostalgia is misplaced. The modern web is far more useful and easier to create meaningful services for.
> Although taking Google on head-first would be foolishness worthy of Don Quixote, there are ways that we can change things for the better. One is to demand that websites we use and/or maintain follow either the Progressive Enhancement or Graceful Degradation design philosophy. The latter item is something that is integral with HTML and CSS designs, with the absence of, or error in any of the CSS files merely leading to the HTML document being displayed without formatting, yet with the text and images visible and any URLs usable.
Unfortunately, the market incentives simply aren't there, there's not a lot of money in developing websites (or web apps) that work without client-side JavaScript and bloated browser APIs, so we're left to see if simply improving the tooling will be enough for developers to create less bloated websites (whether that's intention or not).
[0]: https://kit.svelte.dev/docs/form-actions
[1]: https://kit.svelte.dev/docs/glossary#hydration
[2]: https://nextjs.org/docs/guides/building-forms#part-5-form-su...
[3]: https://htmx.org/
A lot of people think texty stuff is over rated ... but also scream blue murder that the spiders crawling the web aren't doing a great job, because only big search has the permission to crawl and can correctly understand which version of the can can dance to represent the information a particular site uses.
Including a simple html text version minus bells and whistles of the same always seemed common sense to me, it opens it up the site to those with simple text browsers as well as anyone contemplating a better or real search engine.
I'm a huge fan of a higher information to fluff ratio, with videos on site, not say some other fremium pay by tracking service.
As for older browsers mentioned, it's surely not to hard to add to a web site to add an If older browser then do old html layout, minus the candy.
The problem is overloading a site with stuff that aggressively consumes user's resources and tries to hijack user's attention, in an attempt to make a few cents on ads.
If HTMX were all the rage, I'm certain that many terribly heavy sites would be created with it, given the same incentive structure.
So everything becomes garbage and quickly.
Is there an alternative to the corporate ad-based web app model?
Is there merit to some of the forgotten early internet? Of course. Forums, for instance, are much better at retaining information than facebook groups. But there is no massive corporation making a huge profit off of forums.
And this is why while the internet could be infinitely better, we have very little say about it.