Hacker News Reader

Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

I reject the framing.

The problem isn’t the lack of personalizabilty(?) or customizability. The problem is that we’ve collectively allowed providers of content to warp the www into a state where they have the ability to control our experience.

Consider what the web would look like if instead of html and JavaScript, it only consisted of a content description language devoid of any ability to control layout, fonts, colors, etc. My browser, under MY control, can present the content to me in whatever way I prefer. There might be a rich marketplace of both free and paid experiences that I could download and install into my browser.

Just because the web currently acts a certain way doesn’t mean that things HAVE to be that way.

View on HN

Right on! Imagine if the web served up content and I could write my own processors for it to lay it out however I want...man, that'd be great.

But the Web became about branding the moment they introduced images and font choices. I remember designing a website for my local skate rink in 1997 that had a left navbar with buttons I did in photoshop and cut-n-paste javascript to add a lens flare when you moused-over them. Haha! Suh-weet.

This was at least the direction we were headed with XHTML. The source document could be something more akin to raw data and the presentation could be rendered on the client with an XSL stylesheet. Instead we got... something else.

> Imagine if cars came in a kit and I could assemble it and choose the fittings myself ... man, that'd be great.

I mean, for a niche certain audience, yes it is great.

But for mass market, people don't necessarily want to take on a whole new hobby in order to experience the thing.

Worse, it's contextual within the same individual: the person who wants to customise the car doesn't want to make their own sourdough pizza from type-00 flour, and customised web browser. And vice versa: each thinks "why waste time on that other thing"?

Instant messaging in 200x was based on "naked content" that could be parsed by anyone, so there was a lot of different programs supporting various forms of communications. If you weren't a programmer you simply relied on 3rd-party software and that worked quite nicely.

Exactly. likewise most people go to a dealer and get a "third party car" that works quite nicely on the shared infrastructure of roads, signs, gas stations etc. Maybe with a few configurable options such as color.

And then there was non enthusiast software and it won, so I guess that's what the people want.

This is sort of what Reader Mode and Pocket achieve. However Pocket is now trying to get into the recommendation game, and devoted some of its interface to this sort of personalization.

> Although most of the time the styles of a web-page's author would suffice, the Opera browser has long provided facilities for its users to modify the appearance of the page, and all recent Opera versions up to and including 12.17 allow user style-sheets. Versions beyond this point, version 15.xx was essentially next, have not permitted such facilities.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Style_Presentation_Modes_in_Op...

I really miss old Opera and it's features: https://wikiless.org/wiki/Features_of_the_Opera_web_browser?...

Old Opera was the greatest, I stopped using it after the jump from 12, but about a 1-1.5yr later in late 2014 I discovered the pre-alpha version of Vivaldi, made by the original Opera team who did a Jerry McGuire and decided to make their own browser following their original vision. I've been using it daily as my main browser ever since.

It still doesn't have some of the later features of old opera, but it has rocker gestures, speed dial, tab panels, and a bunch of cool features for maximum usability in a range of workstyles.

They also released an android version with some neat cross-compatibility like accessing open tabs from other devices through the cloud and sending pages from your desktop to your phone.

The CSS standard defined user stylesheets and specified their behaviour.

Unfortunately, it seems most browser vendors are slowly attempting to destroy this feature.

Which is sad, because in real life many users really want this feature.

"--Can you please implement dark mode for your site/webapp?"

"--Dude, just use whatever css you want."

Actually, it's possible with https://userstyles.world/

That sounds a bit like Gemini.

"Gemini" can be a bit tricky to search for, so here's a link for the curious: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

It genuinely strives to do essential what the top-level comment describes. It presents content in a very raw form. All styling and presentation details are left up to the client applications. Gemini users are a small, but passionate, little corner of the internet.

> Consider what the web would look like if instead of html and JavaScript, it only consisted of a content description language devoid of any ability to control layout, fonts, colors, etc.

Then another web will be invented with all the controls, and companies will use that instead. Web app proponents are constantly campaigning for more capabilities even today.

We could all pass around something closer to the notion of pure data (JSON, plug for EDN) but we don’t. Even when we could. Maybe we should more? I don’t find “companies make us do otherwise” to be a compelling answer of why we’re not. Even in spaces where that isn’t a constraint it doesn’t happen much.

> There might be a rich marketplace of both free and paid experiences that I could download and install into my browser.

To what extent would you vs the author control these experiences? The author may express their freedom by giving different experiences to different people based on how we respond. Then we’re back where we are.

There’s a bit of a freedom vibe through this whole conversation, but there’s also a strong element of control. It’s a “my house my rules”, libertarian, property owner, “you’re free to do whatever I want” vibe.

The author’s analogy of a company painting their walls seems off. It seems more like a wall that paints itself. And since this criticism is going against software I wouldn’t call critical infrastructure, it’s more like an invited house guest that isn’t singing the songs you want.

You said the same thing that the author did..

That's a ridiculous idea. 99.9% of people want a default experience that works well without configuring anything.

I don't think you took this part into account.

> There might be a rich marketplace of both free and paid experiences that I could download and install into my browser.

If 0.1% of people can build and customize things, the other 99.9% benefit without having to work for it.

But the moment the default stops working well, there had better be a configuration somewhere to change it so it works well again.

95% of people also want a stable experience, and dislike changes. Which is violated when they don't control the interface.

Spotify is the worst. Elements "randomly" change spatial location all the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com