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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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 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.

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.

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