The thing that’s usually on my mind when people are lamenting how the Web has evolved is that all the tools are still there to build websites however you want. So the lamentation is really, “other people are doing things in a way I don’t like and that upsets my experience.”

Which is this mix of… yeah I guess that’s true. I feel the same. But also, I have absolutely zero right to really externalize that grievance. People can do whatever they want for good or bad reasons, whether I’m equipped to understand those reasons or not.

But what we can do is be the change we want. Just make my own little oasis. Find other oases and hook ‘em all up.

Which then got me thinking about if there could be a special Web Classic experience we could voluntarily hook into. Maybe someone runs a search engine that only indexes crawled pages that have a X-Web-Classic header or whatever. If people actually want it enough to put the work in, can’t we make it? I guess corporations would come to capitalize on its success if it became successful. But I’d be willing to fight that battle if we got to that point (ie. curation or tech limitations or whatever…)

I’d love a browser that I switch into Web Classic Mode and it pretty much only reaches these resources. Example.com doesn’t implement an X-Web-Classic header response? Give me a 404. Does it try to load cross origin resources that aren’t X-Web-Classic? 404. Straight to 404.