The "Cheap" Web
potato.cheap
potato.cheap
Or maybe OP wants higher level CSS and HTML, and this is a problem because this leads to the invention of a new language with yet another complex ontology that claims to be "simpler than its lower level counterpart" but is not.
Of course you could create some markdown with basic styling options, but I am pretty sure learning basic html and css is not that more complex than learning that specific markdown and how to operate it to finally get a website served on a specific server.
Today our browsers are almost OSes and it's almost like the complexity of what you can share with them is superior than the complexity of you could create on a 1990 pc natively. I mean, you can run godot engine on your browser : you can develop prototypes of projects with your friends just for fun, create your own private platform for communicating with people you like.
I notice a lot of hate toward JS, but honestly when I first stumbled upon it I felt like a dream came true; it gives you the power to create experiences and share them almost effortlessly, and the fact that bigTechs decided to make boring websites on crazy over-engineered frameworks doesn't change anything to this.
The complaints about JS are almost never about the concept of a programming language that runs in your browser, and the upside you describe seems to apply to any language that runs in your browser.
I'm not talking about documents/articles that have useful embedded video, or informative interactive graphs and things.
I'm talking about "documents" that require a multiple javascript libraries to load in order to inject a "<p>Hello, it's a nice day and I had waffles for breakfast" into a DOM.
There is no "graceful degredation" with these things anymore; it's either javascript on, or no content, which is baffling and frustrating. It's not just a "get off my lawn" thing, it has real implications on energy efficiency, bandwidth, and most of all accessibility: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiven...
I mean, sure. But if our rubric is whether a technology being misused constitutes it having no business existing, that puts a shitload of tech on the chopping block.
> I'm talking about "documents" that require a multiple javascript libraries to load in order to inject a "<p>Hello, it's a nice day and I had waffles for breakfast" into a DOM.
You're misunderstanding the function. The function is not to distribute documents efficiently. The function is to place documents somewhere they can be distributed in such a way where the business majors can edit them without needing to pay a web developer to do it correctly. Hence the absolute plague of BMS systems, which are sold to the aforementioned manager/consultant vampire class so they can make the website pop and don't need to deal with a 20-something rolling their eyes at them when they ask for that.
That's exactly where the hate comes from: I don't want you, the web designer, to have the power to create experiences, because you (collectively) use that power to force experiences on me that I don't want to have.
I want the power to create experiences for some people I know, in a niche setting, without intentionally inviting anyone else.
But what do you do when the website gives you an 'experience' instead of info about X?
And no, <the company formerly known as Twitter> has no right to take X for themselves. Keep using it for unknown/unspecified items.
When I read some of the thread above what I am hearing is: "I don't want people to be able to run programs on my computer without asking explicitly". Which is exactly what the modern web and modern web browsers enable.
If you learned computing in the 90's you were very much told not to install things you do not trust. Everyone remembers downloading some game from the internet and suddenly their OS was trashed via malware or non subtle virus. The modern web is essentially a giant way to circumvent that. Sure only your browser can get shitted up but its the same browser you do your finance in and has access to your GPU.
Certainly it enables easy sharing of programs but so does something like java. Most OS's still recognize a .jar file as an executable and ask you about it before you can run. They never do that before javascript starts processing in your browser.
There are several other issues here such as: - Many essential processes such as banking, medical records and education all rely upon the modern web paradigm at this point. One cannot simply access them on an e-reader or using a browser with javascript disabled. Are you saying you think that someone should be left uneducated or lack medicine if they don't like running an unsecured browser? Should those with privacy concerns just incur the cost of having one "safe" device and one they do their "interacting with the web" one? - The modern web sandbox includes very high access to sensitive things. Many people's file systems are from a cloud platform all of which malware in the browser can access for example. - The modern web can be highly performant but generally its not and requires ever increasing hardware cost simply to do things like read a book.
... As opposed to not liking to run an installer for an unsecured program?
App stores have the same issue. You just juggle the trust from some third party to another third party
If you want to do anything more complex than transfering text and images you'll need to trust a lot of things
Yes, exactly; that's why I wish the web were still based on the transfer of text and images.
Because Javascript can run in the browser without the assumption that you completely trust it, browser developers have put a load of work into restricting what it can do, even within the browser. Of course, sometimes there are holes in the sandbox - nothing is perfect - but I think it's vastly better than giving any program you decide to run complete access to your computer.
(Better for the majority, that is. If you're truly paranoid and have enough time, explicitly deciding what to trust can be better. But I think that's <1% of people - certainly not including me.)
But what about all of the "not security" but bad things that happen because we allow people to run code we have no choice over on our computer. The attention tracking features marked as tools to understand user intents are exfiltrating information from you perhaps when you don't expect.
Are you happy for example for someone to be logging where on a screen you are sitting and reading within a book or video. Do you not find it problematic for example that you could purchase a subscription to medium, but medium finds out you pause your computer to read descriptions of guns? Would you mind if they then sold this knowledge to Glock who then showed these ads on your work computer?
I get what you are saying for security. But "knowing" if and when something is happening is important. I may be worse or better at evaluating applications to run on my machine than the chrome team. But at least I know when I am entering into a risky situation.
This is HN. 90% of the time, the nitpicking here isn't about computer security, bandwidth efficiency, free speech, or whatever the high-minded principle of the day might be. People nitpick because they don't like something about the website, full stop.
It it wasn't the design, it would be the ideological bent of the writer. If not that, it would be annoyance as to why they put up an email signup form or use an analytics script, as if those aren't present on any of the other websites that are featured on the front page every day.
I'd wager that a good chunk wouldn't be happy unless they can extract your article into their homemmade RSS reader.
Don't like the topology of a parking lot? Tough luck, either navigate it or don't park there.
Hate the hospital's maze-like corridors? Sure they suck, but you are still getting operated there.
Your department's bulletin board is an unorganized mess? I'm sure you'll not drop out because of that.
Apps vs. Content. Web is for both but if you can and want to do just content it should be easy and simple.
As a user, I choose textmode. I use a text-only browser as an HTML reader, works great for EPUB. No graphical fonts, no Javascript, no CSS, no color. Often I will save to .txt so I can read with less(1).
Mostly, ebooks are perfectly fine to use without images, but not 100% of the time.
Below is a quick and dirty script I use to make a single HTML file from an EPUB file. It outputs a _script_ that when run will output the HTML files in the EPUB as a single file to stdout. It is not perfect, e.g., sometimes the order of the HTML files may need to be adjusted, but I rarely bother. I open the HTML file in links and optionally save as .txt. I don't care for UTF-8 or other non-ASCII characters.
EPUB to single HTML file.
#!/bin/sh
test ${#1} -ge 1||exec echo usage: $0 1.epub;
printf "(\n"
for x in ${1-*.epub};do
echo printf \'\\n\\n,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, "$x" ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,\\n\\n\'
7z l $x|sed -n "s/.* /7z x -so $x /;/nav.xhtml/d;/[tx]ml$/p"|sort -n
done
echo ")|tr -cd '[\\\12\40-\176]'"I'm not a web developer, and I really don't understand how we've ended up in this state where:
- web starts as a means to share documents, HTML is built around that
- eventually people want to build general applications (a la google docs) so they build tools that let you build non-document things by pretending they're documents
- everyone thinks those tools are great and starts using them
- 90% of the web is still documents, but now its all built in frameworks where you build a non-document by pretending its a document, even though in actuality, we're normally just building a document in the first place.
The whole thing is a batshit crazy mess and I don't understand how as a global engineering culture we view it as anything other than completely insane.
The JavaScript tools for building web applications are nice when used correctly. I can't imagine the product I work on would be easier to build with HTMX, but perhaps I'm ignorant. I wonder though, are there more enjoyable, non-web UI engines out there? Given that web app UI was glued together on top of a document sharing platform, it makes me think native UI dev should be more coherent.
Content-Type: text/markdown
That's not the same as having browsers support the markdown content type.
There's probably a pithy "every internet protocol expands until it can serve ads" lesson in there somewhere.
When every feature has different syntax, like in Markdown, it makes parsers much larger and leads to an extreme amount of edge cases that every parser has to handle. For example, when you see an asterisk, you have to decide whether it denotes italics, bold or a bulleted list, which might not be trivial.
Generating correct Markdown from a different is also much harder. In HTML, you just need to escape all your less-than signs, ampersands and quotes. In Markdown, you need to check whether your content is going to trigger various edge cases and deal with them accordingly.
generating Markdown is tricky, but that's fine. In this scenario, Markdown would be hand-written and machine-read. There are plenty of use cases where Markdown wouldn't (and shouldn't) replace HTML, and "computer-generated web pages" is one of those use cases.
I think the biggest hitch would be metadata. A lot of Markdown parsers have support for a YAML header, but that behavior is heavily implementation-dependent (even relative to other markdown features). Coming to a consensus on this could get ugly.
I set up my blog with that kind of mentality - I just want to write some markdown and have the browser render it whatever way it needs to - and found a one-liner to pull in some Javascript to do that. But the kind of people who like this stuff tend to hate Javascript, so I get it from both sides.
> I set up my blog with that kind of mentality - I just want to write some markdown and have the browser render it whatever way it needs to
I made my own blogging platform where I write Markdown, and it transforms the markdown into HTML before delivering it to the client. The only JS involved is highlight.js, and that's only loaded on posts where I specifically ask for it - the whole blog works normally with no JS at all. It's still missing some core features like RSS, but I'll get around to that.
There are plenty of platforms that will render markdown into HTML (e.g. Jekyll); I specifically wanted to actually serve the markdown as-is, so that the "source" for any post is always available.
Removed in 2018. I don't totally disagree with the reasoning, but when the web kills amazing flexibility points for lack of heavy adoption it makes me sad. There's so many good ideas that should be left in, even though society isn't actually so bloody awesome as it should be. https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.dev.platform/c/jeTDLz38_...
Also, scoffing at 0.2% of users of a web browser is multiple orders of magnitude away from where the line should be; these people are a fucking joke & shame the fuck on them, losers. Jonathan Kingston, what the heck dude? What the frelling heck?
Also no other browsers implemented it! Adoption needed help! Not to be murdered.
Tl;Dr, adding new content types used to be easy & simple & you could register a site as a content handler but they always kept the feature locked down then killed it without ever letting people go for it at all. Gatekept.
They are already the decision makers of who open source software is for.
The thing people fail most at realizing is that you can't have a lot of rich people with a lot of power without having a lot of poor people with no power. The interests of the former will always effectively undermine the latter.
Similarly, you can't have software that serves multinationals and regular people at the same time because the interests of the former will always effectively undermine the latter.
Might be a nitpick, but the point is ruined by the god awful aesthetics of the page
Another huge reason for the status quo is a lot of companies actively try to obfuscate their frontend code for a variety of reasons, and a lot unwittingly do it as part of minification to squeeze out a little bit of extra efficiency both in terms of payload size and parsing time for clients (every token counts!).
That said, I would love a world where the de-jure frontend syntax was less ambiguous to the point where minification is essentially a lossless operation other than the actual names of things.
At the browser level we have to make the decision: do we want clients to be able to figure exactly what is running in their browser? If the answer is no, the current situation is great, if the answer is yes, the current situation is pretty bleak, and will actually get bleaker with the advent of WASM-based payloads where we now need to disassemble on top of everything else.
Yeah! This was basically how I taught myself to write effective HTML. Great fun!
Is that not the case now? I don't do a lot with javascript myself, but I always assumed the minification process wasn't changing the code itself.
Sadly that, combined with the changes Google made to deprioritize results from personal sites like these, all but destroyed these neat bespoke pages.
Google, meanwhile, sees that everyone is setting up Facebook profiles instead of websites because it's easier, and now businesses websites are sometimes quite out of date compared to their Facebook pages so they begin prioritizing results from network sites over regular pages. And now people can follow their favorite businesses on Facebook and be at least somewhat assured they'll always know if, for example, they have to close up one day unexpectedly and won't be doing business again until tomorrow.
This is not meant to be an argument against the cheap web, mind: I'm just saying that people trend towards what is the lowest-cost option (by money, time, effort, or any combination) and use it because it works and gets the job done. I still keep a website, because I value my independence and have no interest in having my thoughts dumbed down to suit the preferences of corporate America. But the vast majority of people do not care about that (until they get smacked with a ban-hammer anyway) and will just stick to the easy option.
Also, I would state: there is no reason we couldn't have a social media site that functions as a public utility instead of a for-profit corporation. We could just... have a Facebook that doesn't need to piss everyone off to make money. Social media without profit motive could be a massive boon to our society.
Well, I can have a really basic HTML site but that's a little late-90s.
OK, a Wordpress site then. Now I'm dealing with introductory rates that shoot up after a year unless I just use a standard VPS and now I'm having to do a lot of stuff myself. And, as far as I can tell, most of the literally thousands of templates/themes out there don't make it straightforward to just have a nice homepage with a simple blog post that doesn't require a high-resolution photograph to go with it.
I'm probably settling on just sticking with Blogger using a new theme. I'm not really happy with that solution--but I'm not a web designer. I'm willing to spend some money but I haven't really found an answer I love.
I mean, there's a floor right? The floor being that you need a server that can respond to HTTP requests, yours or otherwise; you need said server accessible from an address to which you can map a DNS record to; and you need HTML files that can be served in response to that request. Few of these are free, but many can be had for very cheap.
> So I don't want to do a Facebook page. What are my relatively low-cost options?
Amazon S3 with Cloudflare in front of it and a domain name. Probably about $15 per year unless you manage enough traffic to get billed by Amazon.
> Well, I can have a really basic HTML site but that's a little late-90s.
I think that's a little reductive. HTML sites can be just about anything and they can be quite fancy if you're willing to put the time in to learn something like Jekyll. As a side hustle I maintain a couple of basic HTML websites for local businesses, and just bill them for the annuals + the time I spend tweaking things for them, which thanks to my workflows, isn't much.
> OK, a Wordpress site then. .... I'm willing to spend some money but I haven't really found an answer I love.
I mean, that's just the platform-ification of the Internet described. There's a floor of technical requirements and software experience required to publish on the Internet, and the vast majority of people like yourself do not possess it and aren't interested in acquiring it. That's fine, but it's akin to saying "I want to print a newsletter but don't want to learn how printers work." You've selected yourself out of your own goal.
HTML, CSS and a bit of JavaScript can make dynamic and beautiful websites. But it's not without a learning curve, and if your response to that is "well I want to do this without learning HTML/CSS/JS" well, that's the central conceit of Facebook pages, Shopify websites, and Wordpress.
But, if I'm going to be on Blogger anyway for blogging, my best bet is probably to find a reasonable way to also make it my home page destination. Or maybe not. We'll see. I'm just not sure I'm especially interested in spending a lot of time on tech that isn't my ultimate objective.
There's some level of complexity in all of those choices compared to just having a FB page.
I liken it to taking the bus everyday over buying an e-bike. Buying a bike is complicated, expensive, easy to make mistakes. But at the end of the day, you'll have a vehicle to take you from A to B.
You don't have to buy one, as long as the bus keeps running. But one day the bus route or schedule might change, and it no longer takes you where you wanted to go. This is when having a bike, warts and all, would've been be useful.
Good news is you can still go to mastodon, after all.
I'm gonna need a real big citation on that. If by freedom you mean what a lot of people mean, which is that it opens potential revenue streams and markets and the oppression has it's origins in capital holders, then sure. "Freedom" in it's modern vernacular tends to mean this, hence "bringing freedom to Iraq" actually meaning "making sure Iraq's oil and other assets are open to exploitation by western corporations." By this definition the Internet has never been more "free."
Which is the opposite of "we need an official social network" intervention
Being able to set your own background, color, font, potentially animated, with auto-playing music of your choice was like letting the average person be a web developer.
It also feels very anti-hacker to me. A core ethos across open source software is that each user should be in charge of how their software behaves, should they choose to be. That includes the lowly "average person" who is not a web developer.
I am not sure if the way to go is a cheap web, small web, slow web, indie web, or maybe some combination of these attributes, but something about the current web feels off, mass produced and superficial.
The old sites created by people who did cool stuff just for the sake of doing it are so hard to find now. I miss them.
That feels impossible without a feasible alternative to the ad-based revenue model.
a) Websites change hands frequently and enshittify rapidly.
b) Nobody was getting paid to check in on websites and make sure they were still on-topic
c) Most 'good' websites don't update every day, and people hate RSS and email signups. So activity and engagement on those sites are completely overshadowed by the bottomless pit of content that is social media.
Simple HTML will do this, so long as a browser that supports that version of HTML and CSS is still around. A static Go binary serving dynamic HTML will do this. I struggle to imagine Python, Ruby, etc being able to accomplish this though. That's to say, I'm not sure that's a good rule or could use some reworking to make it more achievable.
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/post...
> Cheap to maintain: Most webpages should work indefinitely without falling over.
YES, holy crap this is what I find most annoying about some of the things I've made recently. Moving between computers, bringing over old projects, and of course dependancies break down and rot. Why can't I start this Gatsby 3 app? Who knows, the install fails. Aggravating.
> Cheap to leave: Opting-out of the web should be painless.
The age of total anonymity on the web is gone I think. Even if you try to be totally anonymous, it's pretty advantageous to have successful online media tied to your name. That makes it pretty hard to opt-out. It's a good ideal to have though!
> Cheap to access: Most websites should be compatible with screenreaders, etc.
Machine readable information is a shallow measure of accessibility. Just because everything is labeled doesn't mean your website is usable. It's a whole interface you need to consider. I would reword as "Most websites should be usable with only a screenreader" or "assistive technology".
> Cheap to participate: Interacting with the web should be possible on a Wii.
... what? An old, outdated, version of Opera?
> Cheap to explore: Exploring the web should be pleasant on 1W of power.
Why are we measuring power draw? Yeah your website can be intense enough to draw more power, but this just seems like an odd metric.
> Cheap to contribute: Making/hosting websites should be easier than scrapbooking.
Yeah, squarespace, wix, wordpress, etc... facebook?
Why are we measuring power draw? Yeah your website can be intense enough to draw more power, but this just seems like an odd metric.
Regardless how you'd measure it, a pretty useful metric imho. A nice catch-all encompassing:
Complexity of a website + efficiency of common software implementations + efficiency of common hardware platforms.
Any content that requires a 'beefy' setup on client side to view (or consumes a lot of power doing so), automatically cuts a large chunk of potential audience.
What you're saying as a more all-encompassing "efficiency in general" metric makes sense.
I think that things started going wrong when the anti-intellectual/anti-education movement gained prominence after 9/11 in the push towards privatization and outsourcing. Before that, we could rely on publicly-funded academia to deliver techniques designed from first principles to decrease our workload.
But since then, we seem to get leftovers like endless Javascript build pipelines handed down to us from the private sector. It's almost like best practices today are designed to mire a startup in endless red tape. While multinational corporations just throw money at it to create a billion dollar pair of scissors that we can't afford.
The way to undo all of that is to do the opposite. Realize that our freedom and prosperity start with our tools and techniques. Find the underemployed exhausted people and give them any resources at all to design better stuff and then leave them alone. Start funding bottom-up and middle-out policies instead of waiting around for trickle-down economics to toss us more scraps. Don't let any one person become a cult of personality preaching how things should be. And stop worshipping capital and focus on getting actual resources (the most important being time) to the middle class through automation and recycling to avoid war. This stuff is so obvious and evident in history that the main challenge is to unlearn one's own programming to be able to perceive alternatives.
Edit: we're talking about HTML not macroeconomic policy. But after spending my entire career having to do things the "easy" way because there's never any time or budget to do things the simple way, I view the complexities of the modern web and the barriers standing in the way of our self-actualization as one and the same.
Edit 2: think scholarships, grants and UBI - not loans, investments and contests.
I'd honestly love to be a beginner again learning modern HTML and CSS today, it's not bad at all.
I understand the urge to throw out the old and replace it with a new system, but that would be a huge blow to accessiblilty and adoption.
Something to put in a meta tag or something early in the page that lets the browser know this webpage will only use a known-to-be-fast-and-predictable subset of html and css and only use js from a standardized library that provides things like autocomplete and other actually high value interactions.
A lot of basic high value interactions are more directly encoded in HTML today than a lot of developers expect to need JS for. Some other tags to pay attention to: summary/details, progress, meter, input type="color|date|time|datetime|range".
It's an interesting relearning project, sometimes, how much the high level interactivity bits of HTML have changed since, for instance, the jQuery era.
This does not seem to load data dynamically, it seems to be a way to show data from a predefined list?
Sure, you still need JS to fetch a dynamic changing list, but you can also just update datalist options elements with JS rather than implement a full separate UX for autocomplete today. You are limited in the ability to CSS style datalist options so a lot of developers are still going to feel pressure in 2023 from "pixel perfect" UX designers to continue to reimplement that wheel, but the version of the JS that just updates a datalist after a fetch is likely much simpler than building a full "autocomplete control".
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Quirks_Mod...
But it is an idea that I keep getting reminded about.
It could work adoption wise, since if it can be done technically it can be adapted independently of everyone else on backend and frontend:
- backwards compatible, if a browser doesn't take advantage of it it renders completely ordinary and in supporting browsers if a website doesn't use this trick it just renders as any other website
- If just one browser and one website does implement this then there will be a full setup. If the idea worked and for example Firefox supported this and Wikipedia or someone else took advantage of it suddenly everyone who used Wikipedia would se faster load and less battery usage.
amp isn't meant to solve our problem but Googles problems.
I do absolutely agree we need more accessibility and more sites that aren't endless scrolling trash. I don't think we need old fashioned simple HTML to do it, although that's certainly one of the tools that can be used.
I think we mostly need more things like neocities that make it actually easy and maintenance free to set up a site. To me the important part of the old web was the content and the people, not the tech.
I've got a few different competing ideas at various stages of development.
One idea builds on the programming language I'm building. I am growing more doubtful that it's going to provide the beginner-friendly experience I yearn for. It might be as easy as Elm one day, but that's not good enough for grandma.
Another idea is like "markdown, but with a grid model". That one also does not feel very good right now.
I've also been toying around with something called "BYOD" (bring your own data), where you stitch things together in a simple layout format. This ends up feeling like powerpoint via plaintext, and surprisingly pleasant.
<h1>this</h1>
<h2>this</h2>
<h3>this</h3>
really "more complex" than something like:
# this
## this
### this
You still need to know that '#' means header / title, and that more of them leads to a lower header level... and this is just for the most basic concept of web pages: headers. Okay, even if it's not markdown, no matter what system you cook up, the syntactic complexity to support the huge number of elements that exist in HTML has to live _somewhere_ right? (Yes, you can argue maybe not ALL of the 100+ HTML tags aren't needed, but probably most of them are!)
While there is something to be said for mega purists who don't even like JavaScript, we're supposed to not even like HTML anymore either? I think at some point you have to accept that building things for the web involves some minimum level of complexity...
If you haven't done it before, try teaching a non-programmer how to make and deploy a website. It's easy to forget where the sharp edges are because we cut ourselves on them so frequently.
I've observed that HTML/CSS/JS sets a minimum level of complexity that is a non-starter for most people.
I personally believe that most webpages could be written, arranged, and styled in formats easier than markdown (without a scripting language). But I could be wrong! Maybe nobody's done it yet because it's simply not possible haha
I want a FUN standard. I want to make cool looking sites that are relatively scalable based on user hardware.
Alternatives like Gopher and Gemini never really scratched that itch due to how sterile they are.
There are clearly many points between Gopher/Gemini and the modern web... but I'm not sure any of them are stable. Between the difficulty of keeping out features in a principled manner in what will inevitably become a group effort and how easy it is to accidentally spec something that turns out to be a lot more complicated than you thought it was, you're pretty much working in a space where the Horrors of the Web are lurking just outside your door, and you'd be surprised which missteps will let them in.
As a bonus, here's another IMHO highly underrated gem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coevolution Not only are there characteristic patterns intrinsic to evolution (in all its forms, far beyond just biology), there are characteristic patterns to interacting evolving systems. And that's, like, basically everything in the world. Super useful tool.
I do think HTML is a fun standard though. There's so much "big business productization" chained to it. Web companies announce updates to frameworks as if it's an apple keynote now. I think that gives a false impression of the "bones" of the web though. HTML/CSS is still fun! :) Nothing beats the visual-focus and short lag time between code->website in browser.
Can ChatGPT et al make good beautiful HTML/CSS pages? Or take an existing one and actually beautify it?
I don't have the expertise to write this, unfortunately.
You can still totally just do that, no one is stopping you.
But even if you went the whole Gemini route and published a custom protocol to be explicitly incompatable with HTTP and a spec supporting only early HTML, you still wouldn't be able to capture the early web, because it isn't the 1990s anymore.
> HTML remains hostile to beginners.
What? HTML is dirt simple. There are some fiddly bits, but if you are creating simple documents (like this one) you don't need them — just use the subset of HTML that you are comfortable with.
> HTML is generally unkind to people of limited hearing, vision, etc.
Only if you mess it up. Clean and simple markup is usually pretty accessible.
But really, this page is 1.4 MB of code for less than 20 KB of text (300 ms to load!). You want the 'cheap' and simple web, then set an example.
How is that hostile to beginners when it was the only language that I could ever grasp? Are there coding language out there easier than HTML?
The tadi web is built with a slippy mindset. We try to be as ‘slippy’ as possible.
Being slippy means you’re not stuck.
When you’re slippy, it’s easy to change plan, or rebuild something from scratch. It means you’re not locked in to using a certain tool.
If something breaks, you can choose to fix it, or let it die. It’s ok, because it won’t take long to rebuild it from scratch.
Every time you grow back, you’ll be a bit different. You might be stronger. Or you might be better equipped for your changing needs.
[0]: https://www.todepond.com/wikiblogarden/tadi-web/ [1]: https://www.tadiweb.com/
- Cheap = a pain to read
Good and modern visual design exists explicitly to deliver information to a person in the most accessible way. If you show a Japanese website to someone who grew up in Ireland, they will be overwhelmed. Not catering to different cultures, like the website suggests - only makes it worse.
- Cheap = a lot of spam
Having low cost of equipment and almost unlimited anonymity, makes fighting against spamming or "enshittification" exponentially hard. Just ask anyone who bothered to run their own mail server or open forum board. It's just not feasible for us to be able to have a nice experience without a level of trust.
Also: The YouTube homepage uses twice the memory of the NicoNico homepage to show fewer thumbnails, and has basically been unchanged for years, while YouTube can barely resist keeping their layouts the same for a single month. Japanese web design has quite a few issues with being stuck in the 2000s but I'll take consistently bad over rolling the A/B testing dice every week to see what page I get.
Your issue with the content, doesn't negate the designs. Japanese websites are also filled with a lot of junk content.
As for the Japanese websites, they aren't bad. They are bad for you, maybe... they're very much good for people accustomed to Japanese culture.
Still though, it would be ideal to remove that from a11y tree since it's totally useless in there.
I assumed that since my browser's "reader mode" was all good, then screen readers would know how to parse it too.
I do like the heart aesthetic, so how exactly would I make it more accessible?
https://graypegg.com/2023/11/25/the-private-definition-of-ac...
Edit: decided to post it here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38683774
You might also want to change the element from a `header` to something else, like a `div` or a `span` or even a `figure` instead. Then put "potato.cheap is home of the... The "Cheap" Web" inside the `header` instead.
So it's difficult in the sense that people don't think about it, there are not so many tutorials available and so on.
It's an interface like any other. We'd be weirded out if designers graded their screen specs as "visual" enough. More pixels are required in this area, think of our screen users! They need more pixels!
I've been thinking about making a "VO for Web Devs" cheat sheet at some point, would that be a useful thing for you?
(Of course, I'm making assumptions about being in the apple garden.)
I imagine you can make a solid guide if you really focus it on the use case of "here's how to evaluate your site for this specific purpose".
I think I'll get moving on that cheat sheet then! Thanks eh! :)
> Until we adopt simple and stable building materials, all websites will continue to look the same.
Yeah, big deal. Who cares if websites look the same? Wait, let me put that another way: we should care whether websites look the same in the sense that more of them should look similar to one another than they do today—namely, they should look how you and I (the readers) wish for them to look for our own comfort and convenience—which means fewer dark starry sky backgrounds, fewer text drop shadows and typefaces reminiscent of comic book speech bubbles, and fewer distracting marquees. Way less kitsch, not more.
HN, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, SMS, etc. all have a limited range of expression through form. Somehow we get by. Completely dissimilar books look a lot more "the same" than websites do, and that's not a bad thing. You never see book authors complaining about control over the printed page the way that you see self-styled web designers insisting on their manifest destiny over the user's viewport for the purposes of self-expression. Webdevs need to get over themselves, and the wider world needs to stop letting them get by with (or encouraging) this kind of narcissism.
If somebody invented a "forum view" to make all forums look the same on our browsers, then I think the circle would be complete. It shouldn't be too difficult either, since most run on similar software.
Here are some informative webpages on the topic, neither of them mine:
As I understand it, forum functions are not a feature of the Gemini protocol?
I love Del Taco. I love the speed and consistency I get from franchises.
At the same time, my best friend recently sent me a picture of a fancy swordfish dish he cooked up, and I'm bummed that we don't get to see each other as often as we used to.
And as my daughter grows older, I'm becoming a bit frustrated at how difficult it is to purchase foods that were not doused in neurotic pesticides. So I'm learning how to grow our food.
Growing food isn't easy, but the farming community is cool, and I've been having a good time of it.
And so sometimes I wish building a website could be more like learning farming, and I think it could be.
A lot of books look the same too, but that works pretty well for me tbh. I do not find books to be homogeneous as a result.
What a presumptuous statement! Authoritarian, even. It's one thing for someone else's website, such as HN, Reddit, Wikipedia, etc., to impose a homogeneous form on posts submitted by guests on the site. It's quite another thing to assert that "the wider world" should "stop letting [independent webdevs]" deviate from a similar standard of homogeneity.
If you don't like the appearance of someone else's webpage, maybe just don't go to that webpage?
(And choosing to read my comment as an "authoritarian" imposition on "independent webdevs"—not actually stated anywhere? How presumptuous.)
Disagreement exists as to how well this is going for us. (cf., content collapse)
So I should send them extra money because I keep using it? I bought the discography of a band (0.2665 € / hour according to last.fm so far, obviously falling), should I now set up a monthly donation just because I keep listening? It seems like advocating to only use subscriptions and never owning anything.
This is such a weird take.
I've found that "$1 per hour" is simply a good starting point for figuring out which things in my life are worth supporting. Obviously, it may be different for other people :)
It's because you value the artist, and want to support them continuing to make new things that you'll like in the future.
Rapidly changing economic structures can strip away sufficient economic reward via the ordinary way of 'purchasing' things, such that continuing to make them is no longer viable. E.g., Spotify paying artists $3.3 per one thousand streams, but almost no one buying CDs.
They are proposing ways — in this environment — to direct more of the funds directly to the creator, so that they can keep creating. But if continued creation is not of value to you, you are free to skip it.
Sure, apple.com's source might not be as beautiful as their products but potato.cheap immediately turns around and says it's not apples fault, and trashes the web and says it needs sto be replaces by something else.
It just seems to be like the industrial world isn't going to improve without being lead there, but that there's so much leeway for the better awesome web to evince itself. The manifest possibilities are what so many people see as a bad and awful thing, but I think taste & discernment & internal structure are incredibly complicated & any kind of broad scale human hyper-engine of note is going to take more than a decade of effort for us to really suss out where to go & what looks & feels right. There isn't going to be the perfect system created out of nothing that makes everything great; it's power flexibility and possibility that we refine &harness onward to get to exceptional, and the web has ongoingly been an amazing host to that dialog in ways nothing else has been or from what I can see could be.
I'm so tired of those who most strongly clearly advocate for better online systems being so retrograde. I miss the hope & buoyancy of those excited for stuff! Web Components and webrtc and QUIC and moq, our new awesome css flexbox and grid and layers, css variables. I'm still as thirsty and in love & still a believer that we can keep honing new & great. To shock industry into not sucking we just need to lead towards better, towards protocols & interoperation & elegance personally. The virtue will come out, and will be aped, as we develop, if we dare be better.
Oh no. Why did you patron Walmart when you could have gone to your local mom&pops. That but for the Web. Petite bourgeoisie sentiment.
maybe it's the "solarpunk philosophy" and the "synthesize serendipity"-ies or quoting steve jobs, one of the biggest a*holes in the history of tech (imo).
although i agree strongly with everything here https://potato.cheap/#cheap
I don't go in for fancy coffee with any regularity, but I do care a lot more about what goes in my body than what covers it, so I don't really see a contradiction here. Honestly, the older I get, things that may help my health (and I think there's a lot of "woo" there, but I think we can all agree that a decent restaurant is on average healthier than a McDonald's) are where I'm willing to spend money.
The funny thing is Starbucks is by far the most expensive and crap quality coffee you can get most anywhere. "hipsterIndependentCafe" is consistently cheaper and better if you're a coffee snob.
Also people like me prefer to buy used as much as possible not to save money but to reduce waste. The romantics amongst us also prefer to have our goods well-storied
Starbucks makes consistently good espresso. The amount of times I had - "oh, this hipster cafe is number one in the area" to just go dump the coffee and dip into Starbucks - is very high.
But going back to the topic - the consistency of Starbucks and the inconsistency of coffee shops (even in places like NYC) is reminiscent of why we gravitated to repeatable designs that we see today.
The visually appealing websites, that are not hard to read is "Starbucks". Be it visually "extravagant"(TheVerge) or simple(Yahoo Finance) they are fairly standard... these follow time proven visual standards set out by printed magazine, books and newspapers.
This potato.cheap website is a pain to read. Hard to focus on the message and the text is way too clumped. So are many of the sites it lists as examples.
HN is barebones Starbucks, not a pointlessly overbearing hipster cafe.
Very often hipsterCafe commoditizes a demand for quality in food by offering something slightly better than average at five-fold the price, but I can see that hipster-vegan-bum would find themselves in a perfectly coherent way of life buying clothes from thrift shops and spending a lot for food, sourcing for ethical cooperatives or whatever. It may be a reflection of their privilege, it may be a virtue signal-ist modus operandi, but aren't contradictory habits.
>maybe it's the "solarpunk philosophy" and the "synthesize serendipity"-ies or quoting steve jobs, one of the biggest a*holes in the history of tech (imo).
Don't you think that Steve Jobs scammed a lot of artsy people selling them a dream of olistic tech and sustainability, and that it's perfectly sane and just for them to clasp at that dream and trying to realize it, rejecting the evils of the false prophet while not throwing the baby with the bathwater?
This says nothing about the article or topic, but says a lot about your mental baggage.