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Comment by bblb | Hacker News Reader

"IndieWeb movement". It's just the web, right? Always has been?

Do we already have entire generations of people who never open web browsers and live their whole online life in Apps? Sad.

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It's less about apps vs web, and more about the web monoculture that arose. It's like that quip, "the web is 5 sites, sharing screenshots of the other 4".

> Do we already have entire generations of people who never open web browsers and live their whole online life in Apps? Sad.

Absolutely. Look up Facebook Free Basics. It was Meta's plan to become "Thee Internet" for developing countries.

Z generation is not the youngest generation now, so there are two generation.

it's about who controls content for the web. if the indieweb is just the web then indie movies would be the same as all of hollywood. just like major film studios effectively dictate what movies get made and promoted, major tech companies dictate the content they promote.

The web browser is just another app. It's not sad to check out multiple apps vs being locked into one platform.

Technically correct. The best kind.

Maybe _I_ am the sad old person here, with my stale opinion of World Wide Web equals the browser?

Nah. It must be children who are wrong.

Old people get sad by what modern tech has to offer them. My elderly non-technical mother is forced into "digital transformation", this mindless 'tech-is-good' hype that is marketed as making our lives better, but which is really mostly about disruption and cost savings and not serving the actual needs people have. To my mother each website that she is forced to use to do her administrative tasks, is a completely different app with its different look & feel and terminologies used. And all of it is not increasing her quality of life.

I am still alone in my digital crusade for better UI and UX. I have been thinking started doing courses on it, because so many times I just proverbially weep a little when I see rookie mistakes in big apps. (Looking at you Apple and Google, big car companies)

The browser is a platform lockin. One with shitty search and spam on most pages and javascript.

Maybe we need a new type browser that doesn't try to be an app platform but rather tries to be a document browser.

There is gemini which is basically that (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol))

I mean, you could just turn JavaScript off in your browser, but we all know your experience of the web will be abysmal.

I think what you actually want is a web without JavaScript. One where you can only find documents and not accidentally run into apps.

I would like to see more common browsers like Netsurf and Dillo. All of HTML 5, with CSS and stuff, but no JS at all.

Some promotion and branding and badges for how to build a site that contains no scripts at all.

I don't see the need for a new protocol and new clients. Just a plain ol' JS-free Web.

And, equally, something similar for the back end. No scripting languages, no PHP and no JS and nothing akin to them. Just native code, compiled from safe languages with bounds-checking.

No CMS, just dump text or markdown in a folder and presto you have a website.

I think we agree but you missed my point. You can create JavaScript-free websites (“documents”) and you can use a JavaScript-free browser, but there will still be websites with JavaScript (“apps”) around that your favorite websites (“documents”) will link to. You won't be happy with this arrangement until it becomes possible for your browser to cleanly separate the document-web from the app-web.

OK. How do you propose to do that?

It doesn't sound impossible. So let's think about how.

While true, we're at the point where JS is often used to pull static content to display anything useful at all. 20 years ago it was done on the server with PHP. Disabling JS ends up with a way worse result than it used to.

That was indeed my point. You can't just disable JavaScript and expect the web to work for you.

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