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Comment by mard | Hacker News Reader

I think the Web Dark Ages are yet ahead of us. I've grown extremely pessimistic with the state of modern web, with corporate censorship and disinformation on ad-driven social media, dissolution of many open Web standards and WebKit/Blink hegemony that is impossible to topple. A decade ago I expected Web to become more open, but instead it has become a hellscape of closed gardens where maintaining even reasonable amount of privacy is nearly impossible.

90s web was a wild west, but it was a far cry from its "dark ages".

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For what it's worth, during those "dark ages" web pages conveying useful information were typically no heavier than ten times the character count of the information. Sure, we had the <blink> tag, and garish geocities pages, hamsterdance and the rest. But that web delivered information really efficiently. Maybe we can start a movement to bring that back. Let's call it MarsMission: let's build web stuff that might be usable by the crew of a mission to Mars when they're hundreds of gigameters away.

Really all we need is to stop the worship of the mobile. Mobile is uniform and limited, and sadly it has made desktop uniform and limited as well.

Somehow even highly technical interfaces, e.g. DNZ zone editors are now made mobile-first. I wonder, is the majority of people really editing zone files on their phone? don't people value their time anymore?

While the mobile-first movement may sometimes go to far it can be a life saver in places where fully featured interfaces are out of reach.

I think the sweet spot is mobile-compatible controls and progressively enhanced design that can scale up or down. Preferably using the simplest tools, even if unfashionable.

Controversial opinion -- I think the era where we had separate, mobile optimized `m.domain.com` sites was best. We had more code to write, but it gave us two separate experiences tailored for each device.

Unless you're just reading a text-only article, there's a big difference between what a mobile interface can and should offer, and what a desktop interface can and should offer. I agree that we've sacrificed desktop for the sake of mobile.

I understand why this is done for sites whose goal is to show advertisements. If the majority of the users are mobile and you get most of your money from them, it becomes harder to justify creating a proper desktop experience.

I suppose I wish more people spent the time to build desktop-class interfaces regardless.

I'd say the m.domain.com concept was terrible. You'd often get redirected to the mobile homepage instead the mobile version of the link you clicked on. Then even if that worked correctly, you'd just have random features missing so you'd have to switch to desktop anyways.

>MarsMission

I'd join that movement. The modern web is such a disappointing mess.

Although MarsMission could not say anything at the first time, I like the idea. I've collected a couple of links around the same topic, to build a corpus:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-low... https://theconversation.com/yes-websites-really-are-starting... https://twitter.com/QuestForTori/status/1211561864326332416

Host it on IPFS, which was literally made to be eventually consistent across planets:

https://docs.ipfs.io/how-to/host-single-page-site/

We need the search engine to display some stats along with each search result link, for example:

# of bytes the page downloads.

# of scripts/stylesheets the page downloads.

# of ads the page downloads.

# of http requests the page does.

If that happens, the minimalists will typically choose the most efficient page because competition has already ensured that content quality will be top notch in almost all of them for most popular searches.

I've come to believe that, in retrospect, 'AJAX' was a mistake. For the first decade of the web, nearly all its functionality was implemented using HTML tags.

What roles does the web serve that benefit humanity? Some of the most important are: 'literary', 'research', 'educational', 'financial service', 'commercial service', 'audio/video'.

Then we have a 'typesetting/graphic-design' role, which is 99% of the reason the web 'requires' JS and CSS. As long as we were happy with a "one-size-fits-all" design, we could enable the other roles via (existing, and future) HTML tags alone (the way we did prior to the introduction of JS).

Now, what are the trade-offs we make to gain the 'typesetting/graphic-design' role? They are a loss of: security, privacy, legibility, compatibility, accessibility, ease-of-use, and page load speed. To be fair, we also gain fantastic abilities for web developers to innovate, but we could probably find some workaround, without 'AJAX', to allow devs to experiment.

The world would be better off, in may ways, if we scrapped the web's dynamic features, created a few new HTML tags, and re-implemented them using HTML alone.

CSS is sucky for large projects, but it's enabled truly beautiful sites. JS on the other hand...

I agree completely. Without CSS the web would be much more boring and visually dull.

The point I wanted to make with my comment is that the dullness also has advantages.

No doubt! I regularly use Reader view in browsers, Instapaper, and RSS readers to escape the ad strewn hellscape we've created online.

There is absolutely no reason great typography should come at the expense of privacy, unless you are unable to upload custom fonts or have something against CSS.

You also don't need JS to support it, although you may have to give up on the idea that your site has to look the same in all browsers, because not all browsers can do things like automatic hyphenation.

And frankly I am happy that I don't have to read source code in Courier just because it is the only available monospace font.

    > There is absolutely no reason great 
    > typography should come at the expense of privacy

I agree to the extent that there is an order of magnitude less reason to prohibit CSS than Javascript.

However CSS is not benign. There are features that bad actors regularly exploit. For example, setting the opacity of an evil button to 0, and positioning it above an innocent button.

Also, CSS, as currently designed, is a barrier to reuse. The model I like is one where users are at liberty to display web content however they (the user, not the website) prefer. Since CSS is basically reusable only in theory, it inhibits that.

    > I am happy that I don't have to read source code in 
    > Courier just because it is the only available monospace font.

It's true that, as a web developer, you can provide Courier. As a user, it's not, by browser default, your choice whether you get Courier. If the server decides a user should see Comic Sans, that's what the client will use, no?

CSS is literally designed so that you can override previous definitions by loading your own stylesheet. Thats not just the standard, it is in the name (Cascading Style Sheet). The fact that no main-stream browser supports adding user specific styles out of the box is an issue with the browsers not acting as the user agents they are supposed to be and not really CSS.

CSS is reusable in some ways, but not in the sense that you can take a stylesheet from one site, apply it to another, and have a guarantee that the result will make sense.

This is partly because HTML has its own competing presentation features, and partly because there is an infinite number of cases for which a designer would have to write rules (eg: many html elements, that can also be nested)

Yes, let's reinvigorate AOL! Disrupt the internet!

It's the internet today that feels like AOL: a great mass of ignoramuses, posting nonsense at each other on some proprietary web property.

I want an internet that helps to enlighten society, not mainly induces it to pump out memes, insults and prank videos.

Trends like using medium.com as blog replacements are also troublesome. These companies own your content. When they go away, so does your content. When they want to censor you, then can.

I've noticed that many people abandoned their blogs in favor of Twitter, where they developed a habit to build long threads in form of 1/2-sentence paragraphs. It troubles me, because I think Twitter is not a healthy medium for public discourse.

I believe microblogging is reshaping the way we approach public discussion as a whole. Limited capacity for expression and implicit ability to take everything out of context can lead to frustration and miscommunication.

why did medium.com become so popular? I never understood

Is it popular? The only time I ever encounter it is here on HN.

It used to be a very good experience, both for the blogger and the reader. Unfortunately, they took on lots of VC funding (as if building a blogging platform was that difficult) without a clear and ethical path to profit and now have no choice but to be nasty to try and make money.

And, somewhat related, there was period when I think a lot of people assumed, however incorrectly, that content on Medium was somehow differentiated and could be taken more seriously than content on a random individual web site. Anything I ever put on Medium was always mirrored elsewhere, but I did use it for a time--mostly for professional content that my company wanted to link to from newsletters and so forth.

There was a period during which Medium was a signal of quality, probably because it was a niche platform only known in the tech circle and I believe it was invite-only for a while as well.

Now that every marketer, "growth hacker", "entrepreneur" and their dog are on there it's the opposite. Medium is now a signal that some idiot is trying to build credibility in an unrelated field by rehashing basic facts/existing content and peppering it with stock images and "sign up for my newsletter" forms.

I agree that when Medium goes, so does the content.

But so do personal pages and other pages.

I was tasked with dealing with a old webapp based on some old technology. When googling the sheer amount of "here's the answer" with a link that is now dead ... and that same link spread across dozens of sites is very common.

The web is ephemeral by default.

Similarly Substack. I've been trying out Zotero and notice that even if you take snapshots of Medium or Substack articles and try to later access those snapshots, they'll briefly flash some content on the page and then it disappears. (Bizarrely, the replacement text for Medium pages says 404.)

If you dig through the HTML, the article content is all there, and it could be fixed with changes to Zotero's Medium and Substack translators[1], but that it should even been necessary to do what amounts to a site-specific hack is a problem in itself.

1. https://www.zotero.org/support/translators

try firefix addons singlefile[1]

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-file/

Well that was the endgame here. Our beloved overlords now control the tech, policies and 'privacy' of the Web. They're the ones proposing the 'standards' they want and control the direction of the browsers they have. It's either Chrome, Firefox (Gecko) or Safari (WebKit) / Edge (Chrome again). There is little choice here for the users.

We all know this is not true; nobody is _forced_ to play by their rules.

I could make a frameset page today, all browsers still support it. I could make a strict xhtml 1.0 page, browsers still support it.

Stop using Google-agenda driven features, and they'll perish.

(Remember how FF went against the monopoly of IE6? It's doable.)

The transition from Flash -> WASM means we have come full circle.

I may get my Photoshop in the browser dream, but it is another nail in coffin for the free and open web.

A big difference to me is that there is no gatekeeper for WASM like there was (Macromedia/Adobe) for Flash. Yes, it's true that you can't "view source" on WASM and get something meaningful like you could with JavaScript in the early days, but I'd argue that in the age of minification, most JS and the textual representation of WASM are comparably (il)legible.

I think the "gatekeeper" of Macromedia/Adobe is a bit of an overstatement; the proliferation of open SWF player projects shows it wasn't an obfuscated or challenging format. Additionally, they partnered with Mozilla to write the the JS engine for Firefox, then ES4 got scrapped. Adobe, having already built and shipped it for Flash, rebranded it as ActionScript 3. But it literally was a JS engine (what was supposed to become JS, anyways) and meant to be shipped in the most "open web" browser in wide use!

Also, before Atom and VS Code, Adobe worked on Brackets, which was a text editor built with web technologies (pre-Electron) with a lot of the same goals.

All this to say… it still wouldn't have been my preference (I love "View Source") but there's plenty of evidence they made attempts to engage the broader developer communities and do a fair bit of work in the open.

Good points, I wasn't aware of how supportive of third-party players they were. Was it possible to create .swf with open tooling as well? (I vaguely remember OpenLaszlo being a thing)

A little OT, but have you tried https://www.photopea.com for a "Photoshop in the browser" type experience? It's by no means a total replacement, but I've been impressed without how much is possible!

I think that's exactly what he's referring to.

I thought the "Web Dark Ages" refered to people imagining us looking back on it in 20 years and finding it had dissapeared with only a tiny fraction of it archived. Under that definition the web dark ages ended when web archival services started to save snapshots of a majority of sites.

Most stuff is still not saved though. Sure, we might have a semi complete archive but it's not possible to archive the complete experience of e.g. old youtube.

Exactly, perhaps I'm just revelling in nostalgia but to me they were more like the golden ages of the web, when everything still seemed possible.

corporate censorship and disinformation on ad-driven social media

Censorship as opposed to moderation?

In any case, the corporations exacerbate the problems of dredge going viral, prioritizing engagement over information.

Our corporate overlords choose what to display, and thus they choose what to take away.

> WebKit/Blink hegemony that is impossible to topple

The hegemony you're referring to is Blink, and it doesn't help the "toppling" effort when you lump WebKit in with it. WebKit is an effective check against Google's power, but not if folks continue imagining that two distinct projects that diverged years ago are one and the same.

At least the modern web looks better though.

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