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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

Alternatives we have?

Regular good old html without or with minimal amount of javascript. Absurdly fast compared to todays site. Many orders of magnitude less power.

Faster to develop and better user experience too.

But I also think we should think about alternatives. Things like gemini are interesting but will have a hard time go mainstream. But I do believe we need something completely new because the user hostile nature of the web today is so devastatingly toxic that I see no hope for the future.

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The best thing would be to split webpages and webapps. Webpages can keep using HTML with some minimalistic, gracefully degrading javascript, while webapps need something better than hacks upon hacks upon hacks upon ... on top of technology that was meant to display static interlinked documents.

Isn't that whats happening to a certain extent with wasm?

I don't see how

It depends on what you mean by user hostile.

Gemini is cool but probably just repeating the pattern. If companies and users wanted that, HTML use would have gone a different way.

The truth is that both consumers and producers of even “simple”, “static” content want a lot more than these kinds of solutions offer. We have web fonts, animated gradients, SVG logos, responsive layouts, and the like because people want them. Choosing another tech that lacks them will only result in them all getting added back again.

I really, really, don't think the consumers care about that at all. They were never asked and they have no choice in it.

Yeah, that's why absolutely nobody bought color TVs back when those first became available.. /s

People care about things looking nice. In particular, people who pay others to create websites also obviously want their stuff to stand out, look nicer, and "pop" more than the competition - and the things the person you replied to listed is part of that.

And then they put on full page banners and autoplay videos? Bullshit

Todays pages do not "pop", they abuse.

That's not the fault of the underlying technology, if anything it will be EASIER for predatory adTech to display such things when the entire UI is rendered in an opaque <canvas>-equivalent. How do I get uBlock to block specific elements (like a video player) when there is no longer a discrete video element to block?

It isn't, but the sad state of affairs is that if it exist it will be abused.

... yes, and welcome to this thread which is about alternatives that tries to avoid that.

> Regular good old html without or with minimal amount of javascript.

You just described Svelte. All the JS minimalism and speed without sacrificing the power.

(Not a web developer just curious): does Astro also offer this?

I know next to nothing about Astro.

I looked into this and here are my thoughts:

Astro is a static site generator, which is different from a full dynamic component library and rendering/routing framework.

Looks like a stripped-down version of SvelteKit with prerender = true. https://kit.svelte.dev/docs/page-options#prerender

I wonder if Astro will remain a simple static site generator. If it tries to add dynamism (and complexity), I think it will lose some of its luster. But if all anyone needs from it is a static site generator, it looks very clean.

A lot of the functionality and minimalism leads me to believe it was inspired by Svelte and other recent web tools. That said, the complete lack of JavaScript in the output seems to me like a stylistic—even ideological—choice rather than an established use case. Still, it's easier to make a simple solution elegant than a complex one.

Astro fits into its intentionally small niche very well.

> I do believe we need something completely new because the user hostile nature of the web today is so devastatingly toxic that I see no hope for the future.

Capitalism ate the HTML web and it's native to expect that it wouldn't eat the gemini web given there's a profit to be made. The thing that makes an alternative technology non-hostile is simply that it's too unpopular to make a profit from making it suck.

I know Microsoft tries their hardest to change this we barely see this on the destkop.

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