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Comment by OliverJones | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

>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/

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