Comment by Grumbledour | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Grumbledour | Hacker News Reader

The Gophersphere seems to prosper and I have seen some interest in Project Gemini[0] over on Mastodon in the last weeks. So I guess People are trying and somewhat succeeding.

Personally, I am also quite skeptical of the benefits of these approaches. I would like a web more focused on documents, but many of the "forbidden" features these communities define are actually things I was excited about when they were introduced and still would not want to miss on the web. At the same time, just limiting the technology will not make it magically better.

I would love to see more experimentation towards more hypertext and the things it could offer to the user, but just using a subset of old technology seem not really like a great way forward.

At the same time, why can having a cleaner, more performant web not be a social movement amongst developers? I still remember when many of our websites features "Valid XHTML" or "Made with Web Standards" Badges, to show our peers and the world what was important to us. Maybe setting some rough guidelines what we envision a modern, performant and user respecting web to be and whipping up a few badges to show our colors could get as further then trying to reinvent the technology from scratch?

[0] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

Once upon a time (aka the early '90s), Gopher and WWW were both simple systems for publishing hypertext. Neither one was appreciably more complex or ambitious than the other.

WWW eventually pulled out into the lead, due largely to licensing considerations; WWW had been developed at CERN, which explicitly disclaimed any ownership over it, while Gopher had been developed at the University of Minnesota, which preferred to leave its ownership claims ambiguous. People gravitated towards WWW for the simple reason that they knew no one would sue them for using it.

As WWW's userbase grew, demand grew as well to add features to it. Mosaic added images and image maps; Netscape added JavaScript; and on and on and on. Eventually WWW grew to the ginormous, do-it-all system we know and (ahem) love today. Because Gopher had been left behind in adoption, it didn't have those pressures to extend its capabilities; it was free to remain the simple hypertext system it was in the early '90s.

I see a lot of people today point to Gopher as an example of what the Web should be. But this misses the point; the Web isn't what it is because of some design decision it made that Gopher did not, the Web is what it is because it had users. The more users there were, the more things people wanted to do with it; and the more things people wanted to do with it, the more features got tacked on.

If Gopher had been the one with the permissive licensing back in the '90s, it's very possible that it would have been the hypertext system everybody used, and today we'd be complaining about how complex Gopher has become and asking "hey, whatever happened to that toy Tim Berners-Lee was hacking on back in the day? Remember how simple that was?"

That’s not why the web won over gopher. This is why:

“Both Gopher and the Web embraced the idea of hypertext. Both allowed users to follow a conceptual path through a virtual space by following links, with little need to understand the structure that existed underneath. They differed considerably, however, in the information architecture that they established for laying out hyperlinked information. The main difference between the two is that the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) of the Web was built up around documents in HyperText Markup Language (HTML). This markup language allowed document creators to place links within documents, whereas Gopher provided pointers to documents through menu files, which existed separate from the documents themselves. The indexing component of the two information architectures -- i.e. the part that enumerated what items existed within the information space and where they could be found -- thus differed considerably.” From https://ils.unc.edu/callee/gopherpaper.htm

I was using Gopher and WAIS (nobody seems to remember that), both improved versions of FTP, when the web appeared. It immediately captured my imagination, and I and everyone around me forgot about the other protocols (except FTP, which hung on for ever). It had nothing to do with licensing. It was hypertext.

Search engine that prioritizes pages with no JS and minimal CSS would help.

JS requires audit - even small script can game rank by encoding JS and CSS in other resources to pretend there is not much of it. Audit requires reproducible response, can be gamed, requires web of trust.

In the end it is all about goodwill, which may be hard to find in spyware ridden web.

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