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Comment by Andrenid | Hacker News Reader

I would truly love a new "web" which is effectively style-free. I think the existing one is fine to continue for the general public, online shopping, social networks, etc.. but a parallel information-dense system that uses ultra light weight browsers that work on every device and platform, accessing machine-readable data with some standard stylesheet that concentrates in readability, and the "good" bits of the modern web, without the fluff.

It would be great for technical blogs and news, project sites, wiki type data stores, discussion forums, etc.

Maybe everything in this "new" web is static, no stylesheets except browser-side for users to customise themselves.

I'm not sure what the actual answer is but I know the existing web is broken beyond repair.

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I work on Beaker Browser. Version 0.7 will have markdown sites. Here's what that looks like: https://twitter.com/pfrazee/status/840228255529590784

If you ask a layman to differentiate between "the browser" and Facebook, they might not know the difference. In a lot of ways, Facebook is a browser for a set of content types like posts, videos, business pages, etc. Same logic applies to say YouTube: it's a specialized "subbrowser" for videos. If pressed I think I'd say the only reason YouTube or Facebook aren't browsers is because they're not decentralized. They browse a fixed set of end points.

AMP project, kind of similar, it's a specialized sub browser for mobile articles. And it's like what you describe, actually: constrained, but not decentralized.

I don't think we need a new browser or web to accomplish your ask

Browsers could specialize by running "sub browser" overlay applications. If you want to a constrained subweb with markdown-only sites, then sure, why not? It's not that different than a markdown-only publishing service-- the YouTube of markdown-- except the app logic is on the client side, and it's browsing a decentralized web

our markdown website feature is built in, but it could be moved to userland as an overlay, as an app that's triggered when the user turns it on, or goes to a certain type of site. It may sound like a stretch, but out bigger picture is to invert the relationship with services to create thick client side apps, in which case an overlay app is just a particular class of app with a particular class of permissions

Thanks for the reminder to try out Beaker! It looks like a really cool project and I hope you find success with it.

Could Beaker be distributed as a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome?

I think this would constrain the vision of Beaker. I can't point to any concrete examples (like, where the extension API doesn't support something beaker does), but I can imagine wanting a less sandboxed environment when developing the platform for distributed web apps.

Sounds a bit like Opera Unite.

This type of "web" would run perfectly over encrypted networks as well since it would carry much less data. It would solve the problem of cluttered/fluffy web and insecure/easily-surveilled communications.

Being realistic though, this would only serve highly functional computer users seeking simplicity and privacy.

A lot of internet users view "beautiful" webpages as a display of trustworthiness and importance. And that's a very important trait if you are a business.

The nicer the package, the worse the contents.

> A lot of internet users view "beautiful" webpages as a display of trustworthiness and importance.

Not so much. A lot of web users like simple, predictable pages. Flyout menus spazzing all over the page, giant headers breaking the space bar, and obscure hamburgers hiding useful features just confuse and annoy people who don't know about CSS element blocking.

Those aren't beautiful pages.

We geeks, who can understand the code, decry the complexity of a beautiful page and prefer not to go there. But we're 1% of the audience.

The other 99% are used to equating beauty and style with quality. More style == more quality. Less style == less quality.

The pages we love because of their simplicity don't do well in the mass market because of their simplicity.

I have taken to calling this the "Kardashian Problem" - I don't understand why the Kardashians exist. I am forced to accept that they do exist. Therefore I do not share a worldview with the people who pay money for the Kardashians to exist. The Kardashians are very wealthy, so there are a lot of those people. I am a taste minority, so building things that I like won't make money. I have to build things that the Kardashians would like. I don't understand what they would like, so I must test everything!

I know what you mean. Frankly I think the Kardashians are a force for evil. Promoting selfishness, superficiality and female independence through hyper sexual objectification.

Why are they so popular? Total mystery to me.

"selfishness, superficiality and female independence" One of these things is not like the others.

I hope this is a case of forgetting the Oxford comma.

I was hoping for an erroneous "in" ;)

I think we can be charitable here; I'm 99% sure most of us would agree with the intent of the OP.

The implication seems to be that female independence gained at the price of "hyper sexual objectification" is not as noble as that gained through e.g. hard work and responsibility?

"female independence through hyper sexual objectification" is meant as a single element in that list, at least that's how I read it.

I'm not the OP but I read the third item as being "female independence through hyper sexual objectification".

Maybe because it let's everybody feel superior over someone else.

Maybe I misunderstand what you mean by beauty.

> The other 99% are used to equating beauty and style with quality. More style == more quality. Less style == less quality.

I dunno. Try sitting down with an older relative and watching them try to use a heavily-styled page. There's a decent chance they won't think to click the hamburger. They may accidentally mouse over a flyover and get confused/annoyed when an unwanted menu covers the screen. Or they may try to use the flyover and fail when it retracts because they moved the pointer off the menu for a moment on the way to a nested submenu.

I admit the floating nav-bar breaking page down is a personal pet peeve, though. Seriously, folks. When I page down, I expect the text at the bottom of the screen to appear at a specific place near the top of the screen, and my eyes subconsciously jump there to continue reading. Instead, your nav-bar covers up some unread text, or changes size because "reasons," or you hooked page down and got the scroll distance wrong. You probably won't get it right, so please don't do it. If I want to "nav", I can go back to the top of the page. Or you can put the "nav" on the left, since vertical space is precious, and narrower text is easier to read.

Most of the really unskilled users struggle with the complexity of the average webpage. Ads that imitate contents, videos, pull-down menus... they get lost in it.

Remember that for the 99% of the population that aren't us, form > function.

They don't care if it's hard to use, as long as it looks good.

We're weird because we think form follows function.

I think I get what you're saying, but after thinking a little about it I can only see the big problem of standardization.

How can a discussion forum signal that one message was sent in reply to other message? Or how can a wiki say that one word links to another article?

If you don't have a standard for all this (which means a standard for everything anyone could invent to run on top of this style-free web) then people will come up with their own way of doing it, and the browser should support different ways of doing it, thus people will start inventing new ways of signalizing that a message is a message, a user profile is a user profile, a link is a link etc.

Thus we end up with styles and the web as it is today.

So, basically, Gopher with user style-sheets?

And better search engines to find obscure documents on the servers of small, obscure colleges.

> I'm not sure what the actual answer is

I wouldn't say this is the actual answer, but it would go some way if browsers supported nicer default styling.

Businesses are always going to want their sites to look conspicuously "designed", because it signals to the user that it's a successful business that can afford to piss away money. But for the rest of us it would be nice if you could publish an unstyled website that looked a bit prettier / more modern than current unstyled HTML. Maybe with a modified doctype or meta tag or something to say "it's OK to render this with nice styling".

You can experience a better web. It's not easy though. You'll need to give up a lot. I turn off javascript in Firefox (must it really be done through about:config?).

A lot of websites work and I appreciate those sites even more. Gmail still offering a HTML version for example.

Then there are those that don't like Youtube. I've had to effectively give it up or find a workaround like youtube-dl and mpv.

What does suck the most is I can't use my banking site!

If you must have some JS in your life, Sunday is my cheat day. All the JS and all the calories you can handle, one day of the week!

Can't your browser turn off JS on a per-domain basis? Just wondering.

uMatrix does this well (if you are on Firefox)

Chrome can do the opposite, white list per-domain.

Firefox doesn't seem to afford this beyond installing an extension. Somewhat annoyed that Firefox, with the reputation that it has for privacy and choice, doesn't offer a simple toggle in their settings panel.

I recommend NoScript(Firefox plugin) for blanket or selective JS removal from web pages.

Browsing with NoScript is fine if you just visit the same websites over and over. If you actually like to _surf_ the web, the experience is reduced to a never ending configuration nightmare. At least that's my experience. Nice in theory, but a terrible UX.

I don't see that as a problem, really.

Well behaving sites end up on your whitelist. Everything else gets tossed into the "yet another bloated crap page" bucket.

I do that. One discovers that some sites include a dozen of third party js. Often enabling the first party one is enough. Sometimes I have to enable some obvious js for displaying videos or comments. Many sites work well enough and display their content without all the related links, advertising, trackers etc. Some sites insist using js to display content that is already inside the main html file. Others break because their main script cannot handle the failure to load some other file. That used to happen when blocking Google analytics. The popularity of adblockers fixed that.

All considered it's an interesting developer experience and the sites I work on keep working even if some scripts don't load.

Seriously, I'm been using it for more than 5 years and I've only enabled it for local sites and everything is working.

It depends on what sites you browse. I don't do any social, use google or any other crap, so it's enabled to 0 internet sites with no problem.

If I need to activate it I have a shortkey (vimperator) that opens a new firefox profile (private and prepared to load crap) for the current site so I don't load any terrible UX in my default profile.

NoScript, ublock and SDC are a must for the current state of Internet. It's like drop the garbage out the window than in the garbage bin, you need to put care into it. :)

If I'd use something that required configuration, I think I'd use https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix. I did use it for quite awhile, but ended up ditching it. Now I'm on uBlock Origin, HTTPS Everywhere and Self-Destructing Cookies. Although I might lose some control, it just works.

I have JS off 99% of the time and I don't feel that I give up a lot! Rather the opposite:

Whenever I see something interesting here on HN or somewhere else and the site wants me to turn on JS, I realize that the subject may not be that interesting at all and just close the tab. Big time-saver! Win-win. :)

Exactly my approach. I only enable it for work (sometimes I actually need to do webdev) and web sites that I really need to use, like travel agencies.

We already have it. It's called HTML. Disable CSS and JS and you've got it! Standard UI only.

The uncomfortable truth is that even if style-free information-dense content would be better for you, it wouldn't be better for the advertisers that currently fund this content. And nobody is going to pay for this content out of pocket when they can pay for it though the tax of terrible UX and being reduced to a data product bought by businesses.

If the web is broken, it's not because of the technology, but the shaky economic foundation upon which it's built.

The web wasn't built on an economic foundation of ad revenue. The web was built on the economic foundation of both university-provided and personally/privately funded servers.

What ad revenue did was wildly expand the number of people trying to exploit the web for revenue, by generating sheer quantity regardless of content. I agree that that's a shaky foundation to base the web on.

I don't think you can just throw out everything produced by professional newspapers as useless content.

Just 90% of it.

You can still have adverts on style free sites:

    <a href="adverts.com?ad-id=12345><img src="adverts.com/ads/12345.jpg></a>

Then there's paid for promotional content, which is one of the current trends on the web at the moment anyway.

As long as information can be rendered then adverts can be included.

Trivial to defraud.

Only if you see the current "pay-per-click" model as inevitable. In fact, for a long time advertisers were very happy to just pay for a certain space on a newspaper page, without even knowing how many people would actually look at this page. Many advertisers still pay for space where they have no precise figure on how many people will ever see their ad (billboards, TV, radio).

Granted, I think such a world on the web would be difficult for all the tiny blogs that earn (usually very little) money through ad networks, where the advertiser has no idea on which page their ads will show up. But for larger sites, the "fraud" issue doesn't arise as much (because they have a reputation to lose) and you might also just pay for being visible there. The Deck is pretty succesful in their niche with this model and I am sure for brands like the New York Times it would also work well.

So are the current ad models. That's why ad networks have heuristics to detect click patterns and time spent on the advertisers page. The former is easy to replicate since it's all done server side anyway. The latter would require a less information dense page with a "read more" link to approximate what's currently done in JS et all. Not a perfect solution by any means, but it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if the standard and banners were replaced with more tailored solutions like affiliate links (eg blogs about building tools would link to online stores. Blogs about software could link to online bookstores selling books on that software).

At the end of the day if someone wants to promote a product and someone else wants to make money promoting products then there will be an advertisement model that will spring up

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

I agree completely with the need of a new web. The bad information all across the web is gimmicky and flashy click bait is everywhere. Many people are becoming weary and desensitized to everything out there. We need to create a clean and simple, no bs web where information is clear and reliable.

Wikipedia I think is a small picture of what it could look like. Especially if better monitors are enforced.

> The bad information all across the web is gimmicky and flashy click bait is everywhere.

That's the price you pay for a web that isn't controlled entirely by governments or the media. The alternative is some service like Facebook determining what the truth is on your behalf, and you becoming nothing more than a pig feeding at their trough.

People cite disinformation, bad information and "fake news" as evidence that the web is broken, but it's not. That's evidence the web is working as intended - the problem is with the humanity it's reflecting.

> People cite disinformation, bad information and "fake news" as evidence that the web is broken, but it's not. That's evidence the web is working as intended - the problem is with the humanity it's reflecting.

This should be on top.

>> The bad information all across the web is gimmicky and flashy click bait is everywhere. > That's the price you pay for a web that isn't controlled entirely by governments or the media.

My N=1 anectada seem to show the opposite:

More trustable correlates with no gimmicks and ads - Wikipedia, academic articles, expert's and organization's blogs, sometimes even HN.

Less trustable correlates with flashy - average online news, facebook & co.

(as I said, N=1, bare with me)

I would truly love a new "web" which is effectively style-free ... a parallel information-dense system that uses ultra light weight browsers that work on every device and platform, accessing machine-readable data

That sounds a lot like the Semantic Web, another thing that Berners-Lee has promoted over the years but that has gained limited traction so far.

That what we already had/have.

How is that different from anything you can already do?

The difference is that the author doesn't realize nobody else wants this, or people would be styling their sites like that.

The rise of "readability" features appears to differ with your assessment.

Readability is driven by (a minority of) consumers. The fact of the matter is that if the producers want to deliver crap by default, they will deliver crap by default.

Creating a new thing for producers to use when they could just do that with their existing medium changes nothing.

It's like devising new receptacles for discarding unused apple cores so people don't throw them on the ground. It's not going to help. People don't litter apples because they have to.

There's already a proliferation of minimally styled sites and blogs like this one. There's also a proliferation of tools—particularly static site generators—that are meant for creating that kind of site. Finally, there's a proliferation of browsers that "work on every device and platform." (Admittedly, they're not lightweight, but they're not that bad if the sites are lightweight.)

Can you elaborate on what creating a parallel, information-dense system would achieve? I mean, I agree the web could be more efficient and lighter weight, but there's nothing stopping us from doing that on the web.

Static site generators are an interesting case, which can go either way.

Because the site is static, but the creator still wants to be interactive, you tend to get a lot of JavaScript dependencies that fire off a bunch of 3rd party requests instead.

Form handling, comments, user profiles and the like, along with the usual analytics and ads.

The resulting mess can be much heavier.

That's a good point, although there are many static site generator and theme combinations that don't have that problem, either by not being interactive or by limiting the interactivity to when the creator is editing locally.

Indeed. They can let you save on bytes, or let you drag megabytes.

I'm seeing both cultures, and hoping that the lighter wins.

But the dichotomy is a interesting statement on how the wider public thinks.

If you look at pages today and compare them to pages some years ago, it seems to me that because of usability best practices, they have become a lot more alike.

The step to a default style doesn't seem such a large one.

When enough people use Twitter Bootstrap, we could just support that natively in the browser.

Vannevar Bush had this kind of idea back in the 40s. I'd love it.

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