Browsers are too big and the web is too complex. Engineering failures all around.
As engineers, we should not accept this status quo; we should replace it. We need a new web and new software.
As engineers, we should not accept this status quo; we should replace it. We need a new web and new software.
Seems pretty cool tbh
So people imagine splitting off a simpler web, where the main focus is on reading documents, rather than interactive applications, and browsers could be much simpler. But it's pretty hard to see how this could actually work in practice.
So probably the most you can hope for is that we split the document part of the web from the application part, so that it's easier to make a viable document browser. But it's not clear what advantage this offers for anyone who's not trying to make their own browser. Security is probably much simpler for the document browser, but the logins and sensitive data you care about securing are probably in the application browser anyway. And we've spent the last 20 years blurring the lines between documents and applications (think of a Github issue page, for instance), so even if it was possible to access information as a pure document, there would be advantages to looking at it in an application browser.
> it's not an alternative to the web
Right. You can't have a lightweight drop-in alternative to the web, pretty much by definition. Any platform capable of everything modern browsers are capable of, is by definition enormously complex.
> it is a very very small subset
That's not a flaw, it's a design goal. It isn't meant to be a half-baked portable GUI toolkit the way the modern web platform is, it's meant to be a simple and minimal format, stable and easy to implement. There are other formats somewhat like this in common usage, like man pages and, of course markdown.
https://dustri.org/b/the-web-browser-im-dreaming-of.html
Gemini might be a good replacement for the web: