If you ask a layman to differentiate between "the browser" and Facebook, they might not know the difference. In a lot of ways, Facebook is a browser for a set of content types like posts, videos, business pages, etc. Same logic applies to say YouTube: it's a specialized "subbrowser" for videos. If pressed I think I'd say the only reason YouTube or Facebook aren't browsers is because they're not decentralized. They browse a fixed set of end points.

AMP project, kind of similar, it's a specialized sub browser for mobile articles. And it's like what you describe, actually: constrained, but not decentralized.

I don't think we need a new browser or web to accomplish your ask

Browsers could specialize by running "sub browser" overlay applications. If you want to a constrained subweb with markdown-only sites, then sure, why not? It's not that different than a markdown-only publishing service-- the YouTube of markdown-- except the app logic is on the client side, and it's browsing a decentralized web

our markdown website feature is built in, but it could be moved to userland as an overlay, as an app that's triggered when the user turns it on, or goes to a certain type of site. It may sound like a stretch, but out bigger picture is to invert the relationship with services to create thick client side apps, in which case an overlay app is just a particular class of app with a particular class of permissions

Being realistic though, this would only serve highly functional computer users seeking simplicity and privacy.

A lot of internet users view "beautiful" webpages as a display of trustworthiness and importance. And that's a very important trait if you are a business.

Not so much. A lot of web users like simple, predictable pages. Flyout menus spazzing all over the page, giant headers breaking the space bar, and obscure hamburgers hiding useful features just confuse and annoy people who don't know about CSS element blocking.

We geeks, who can understand the code, decry the complexity of a beautiful page and prefer not to go there. But we're 1% of the audience.

The other 99% are used to equating beauty and style with quality. More style == more quality. Less style == less quality.

The pages we love because of their simplicity don't do well in the mass market because of their simplicity.

I have taken to calling this the "Kardashian Problem" - I don't understand why the Kardashians exist. I am forced to accept that they do exist. Therefore I do not share a worldview with the people who pay money for the Kardashians to exist. The Kardashians are very wealthy, so there are a lot of those people. I am a taste minority, so building things that I like won't make money. I have to build things that the Kardashians would like. I don't understand what they would like, so I must test everything!

Why are they so popular? Total mystery to me.

> The other 99% are used to equating beauty and style with quality. More style == more quality. Less style == less quality.

I dunno. Try sitting down with an older relative and watching them try to use a heavily-styled page. There's a decent chance they won't think to click the hamburger. They may accidentally mouse over a flyover and get confused/annoyed when an unwanted menu covers the screen. Or they may try to use the flyover and fail when it retracts because they moved the pointer off the menu for a moment on the way to a nested submenu.

I admit the floating nav-bar breaking page down is a personal pet peeve, though. Seriously, folks. When I page down, I expect the text at the bottom of the screen to appear at a specific place near the top of the screen, and my eyes subconsciously jump there to continue reading. Instead, your nav-bar covers up some unread text, or changes size because "reasons," or you hooked page down and got the scroll distance wrong. You probably won't get it right, so please don't do it. If I want to "nav", I can go back to the top of the page. Or you can put the "nav" on the left, since vertical space is precious, and narrower text is easier to read.

They don't care if it's hard to use, as long as it looks good.

We're weird because we think form follows function.

How can a discussion forum signal that one message was sent in reply to other message? Or how can a wiki say that one word links to another article?

If you don't have a standard for all this (which means a standard for everything anyone could invent to run on top of this style-free web) then people will come up with their own way of doing it, and the browser should support different ways of doing it, thus people will start inventing new ways of signalizing that a message is a message, a user profile is a user profile, a link is a link etc.

Thus we end up with styles and the web as it is today.

I wouldn't say this is the actual answer, but it would go some way if browsers supported nicer default styling.

Businesses are always going to want their sites to look conspicuously "designed", because it signals to the user that it's a successful business that can afford to piss away money. But for the rest of us it would be nice if you could publish an unstyled website that looked a bit prettier / more modern than current unstyled HTML. Maybe with a modified doctype or meta tag or something to say "it's OK to render this with nice styling".

A lot of websites work and I appreciate those sites even more. Gmail still offering a HTML version for example.

Then there are those that don't like Youtube. I've had to effectively give it up or find a workaround like youtube-dl and mpv.

What does suck the most is I can't use my banking site!

If you must have some JS in your life, Sunday is my cheat day. All the JS and all the calories you can handle, one day of the week!

Whenever I see something interesting here on HN or somewhere else and the site wants me to turn on JS, I realize that the subject may not be that interesting at all and just close the tab. Big time-saver! Win-win. :)

It depends on what sites you browse. I don't do any social, use google or any other crap, so it's enabled to 0 internet sites with no problem.

If I need to activate it I have a shortkey (vimperator) that opens a new firefox profile (private and prepared to load crap) for the current site so I don't load any terrible UX in my default profile.

NoScript, ublock and SDC are a must for the current state of Internet. It's like drop the garbage out the window than in the garbage bin, you need to put care into it. :)

All considered it's an interesting developer experience and the sites I work on keep working even if some scripts don't load.

Well behaving sites end up on your whitelist. Everything else gets tossed into the "yet another bloated crap page" bucket.

If the web is broken, it's not because of the technology, but the shaky economic foundation upon which it's built.

What ad revenue did was wildly expand the number of people trying to exploit the web for revenue, by generating sheer quantity regardless of content. I agree that that's a shaky foundation to base the web on.

    <a href="adverts.com?ad-id=12345><img src="adverts.com/ads/12345.jpg></a>

As long as information can be rendered then adverts can be included.

Granted, I think such a world on the web would be difficult for all the tiny blogs that earn (usually very little) money through ad networks, where the advertiser has no idea on which page their ads will show up. But for larger sites, the "fraud" issue doesn't arise as much (because they have a reputation to lose) and you might also just pay for being visible there. The Deck is pretty succesful in their niche with this model and I am sure for brands like the New York Times it would also work well.

At the end of the day if someone wants to promote a product and someone else wants to make money promoting products then there will be an advertisement model that will spring up

Wikipedia I think is a small picture of what it could look like. Especially if better monitors are enforced.

That's the price you pay for a web that isn't controlled entirely by governments or the media. The alternative is some service like Facebook determining what the truth is on your behalf, and you becoming nothing more than a pig feeding at their trough.

People cite disinformation, bad information and "fake news" as evidence that the web is broken, but it's not. That's evidence the web is working as intended - the problem is with the humanity it's reflecting.

My N=1 anectada seem to show the opposite:

More trustable correlates with no gimmicks and ads - Wikipedia, academic articles, expert's and organization's blogs, sometimes even HN.

Less trustable correlates with flashy - average online news, facebook & co.

(as I said, N=1, bare with me)

This should be on top.

That sounds a lot like the Semantic Web, another thing that Berners-Lee has promoted over the years but that has gained limited traction so far.

How is that different from anything you can already do?

Creating a new thing for producers to use when they could just do that with their existing medium changes nothing.

It's like devising new receptacles for discarding unused apple cores so people don't throw them on the ground. It's not going to help. People don't litter apples because they have to.

Can you elaborate on what creating a parallel, information-dense system would achieve? I mean, I agree the web could be more efficient and lighter weight, but there's nothing stopping us from doing that on the web.

Because the site is static, but the creator still wants to be interactive, you tend to get a lot of JavaScript dependencies that fire off a bunch of 3rd party requests instead.

Form handling, comments, user profiles and the like, along with the usual analytics and ads.

The resulting mess can be much heavier.

I'm seeing both cultures, and hoping that the lighter wins.

But the dichotomy is a interesting statement on how the wider public thinks.

The step to a default style doesn't seem such a large one.

When enough people use Twitter Bootstrap, we could just support that natively in the browser.