I don't know how you enforce it exactly, and maybe it's redundant with pastebin.
It still nags at me that sometimes I want to go to the web to just read a thing, measured in the tens of kilobytes, and all this other nonsense just gets in the way.
It's my kooky nostalgia probably. Old man yells at cloud. But other times, for fleeting moments, I think about applying for that TLD and feel just a bit like Ray Kinsella...
That would be great -- I'm imagining a whole TLD full of sites like http://text.npr.org and http://lite.cnn.io/en.
There's no reason I should be required to go through the "app" web (Flash, JS, Silverlight) to get something off the "document" web.
... and most use cases don't require an "app" web.
Or allows only the minimal subset required to implement AJAX type functionality.
The argument for expanding web standards has always been "if we don't, then they'll just appify it and we won't have any say" (see DRM debate).
An explicit decoupling of information from interactivity would lessen the pressure for that.
In my experience, of all the websites that don't work without JS, only a minority actually need it. Most of the time it's silly things like articles and blog posts that just show a blank screen without JS, or drop-down menus that rely on JS even though there are perfectly fine non-JS ways to do it, etc.
What does make sense to me is a new platform based on WASM, with related tooling. Photoshop in the browser or something running the Unreal Engine or .Net is not the web enough to maybe deserve its own thing. But a new platform based on what are essentially complaints about complexity or efficiency would be too messy.
Right now there's next to zero incentive not to use JavaScript. And only slightly more to engineer a working fallback page.
Bifurcating the web would provide one.
Or to put it another way, extrapolated down this path README.txt files on the web in the future will only be accessible with a pair of VR goggles.
The web as we know it is much better suited to applications, where websites have behavior as well as content. Whether the rendering is server-side like HN or client-side like Facebook is irrelevant.
I once had a site beg me to enable JS "for a better user experience", one which didn't need it to work. I did, and promptly turned it off again when I realised what the "better" actually meant (see above). Not going to fall for that one again...
Yet for some reason (hint: money) newspaper websites load megabytes worth of scripts to display kilobytes of text.
Just make a separate "document web", with a standard that isn't utterly lovecraftian and has all the functionality that current ostensibly "document-only" sites (i.e news, forums, etc) rely on JS for. Then, disguise it inside some hip web framework where the client end just acts as a viewer, client-side rendering to boot (with a fallback for users with JS disabled). Make sure an independent implementation can access the underlying "document" through the endpoints the clientside rendering uses. Now you're able to essentially fool people into supporting it.
Also, you could choose to represent your document sites as a pile of data and non-Turing-complete "scripts" that do the presentation, with state that can only change upon user interaction. That may seem like a really backwards way of doing it, but if done right, it would give you a really good bang for the buck in terms of functionality/UX vs implementation complexity.
> I regard anything that runs javascript as inherently malicious, out to violate my privacy and drain my battery.
Tech people like those on HN may understand the centralizing corporate control that's embedded in the current structure of the internet.
Average users a) have zero technical understanding b) mainly use JS-heavy, DRM/surveillance-loaded "big tech" websites c) lack the skills, awareness, and desire to change anything for increased user freedom. There's more reward for positive features than lack of negatives.
Unless a compelling case can be made to the minimally-competent user who sees only speed, usability, and immediate real-world social use (I can watch DRM movies, play DRM music, use FB / YT / Google Apps / other "big tech"), any shift seems unlikely.
The problem is less technical than social. DRM / surveillance tech crapware is now a social norm, and there's rarely a good time to have a discussion. Most non-technical people just don't know or care.
I would say Brave is better here. By default Brave blocks 3rd party cookies and ads. Brave has browser fingerprint blocking as well, but that is not enabled by default, presumably because that would break a lot of web applications and give the users a bad first impression of Brave.
Brave also comes with built in cryptocurrency micropayments as an optional way to sustain websites without advertisements.
The least bad actor in my view currently, is Brave.
The problem starts with regulatory capture of standards and standards bodies. It is in the interests of large organizations to pack a standard with every bit of code they have created internally. It slows down the other members and it keeps small groups and independents out entirely.
You could in many cases have a standard that five people sharing an apartment could implement. Or you could have one that only half a dozen groups could, which is just enough competition to make it sportsmanlike.
It’s part of the disconnect between new and old employees. Everyone who has been there for three years learned the system one piece at a time. They don’t understand why the new people look at them like they’re crazy.
Unfortunately it seems the spec by fiat process is the least problematic this way.
Someone standardizes a thing that has been working for them for a while and they want their partners and maybe competitors to work with it.
It has to be a fairly conservative spec as well, something that can be defined concisely.
And let me be clear: this is a necessary but insufficient quality of a good specification. Ramming an opinionated spec down everyone's throat that is clearly tilted to only be achievable with your company's patent portfolio is not playing nice, and people tend to sense the insincerity.
I continue to find it ironic that Mozilla (and to a lesser extent, Google) have been pretty much continuously complaining about Microsoft/IE "holding back the Web", with a lot of people in agreement, when MS/IE's lack of support for the latest standards (not authored by them, naturally) is what keeps the former from having too much power over the Web as a whole. Imagine the company with huge browser marketshare rejecting all proposals to add new and more complex things to the standard, or refusing to implement them.
If you want free, open systems, competition needs to be easy.
By MS/IE "holding back the Web", it's actually making it easier for alternative browsers to compete, and I think that's a good thing. Consider that the non-mainstream alternatives like NetSurf and Dillo are probably at a similar level of Web standards support as IE6/7.
Now that I think about it, I actually miss the Internet when the combination of XP and IE6 ruled --- certainly some sites tried to push the boundaries, but a lot of the rest remained "un-appified" and usable from other simple browsers too, with a bigger emphasis on content...
If GNU/Linux were to die, so would all the distros, because it’s far too much work for any individual distro to maintain all that codebase. In much the same way, the intensive bit of maintenance work with Firefox is the rendering engine; there exist lots of “distros” (forks) of Firefox but they all rely on the same underlying codebase. It’s just not viable to have more than a small handful of rendering engines, much in the same way that there are only a very small handful of operating systems that can run on modern hardware.
But there is no such entity as GNU/Linux. It's hundreds and hundreds of independently working engineers who would all have to be hit by buses at the same time.
What we don't have is any browser that's a multi-company project, though. WebKit used to almost be that, but then the blink fork happened. The closest currently would I suppose be Chromium as it's also backed by Opera.
Furthermore in the study you are referencing, the "8% volunteers" is larger than any company's contribution besides Intel and RedHat - even more if you add in the individual "consultants".
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/the-top-10-developers-a...
I think the Web is unredeemable at this point; there is so much entrenched complexity, ugly hacks, centralization, and misuse of various technologies that it can never be undone. The only solution is to refuse to contribute to the Web at all, which is hardly an option for most of us here.
The hard part would be enforcing behavior so you don't end up with venders adding their own bits which destroy the entire point of the thing.
Somewhere, an AMP developer coughs indignantly
I like the latter idea.
Go build your new web and leave those of us who believe the existing web, despite its faults, has value, be.
It sounds an awful lot like you are complaining, but about what, I am not sure.
I don't see how I am not letting you be, either. Creating a new system does not involve you at all, until you find a personal interest in that system, or its development.
that doesn't really speak to the value of progress, reflecting on the status quo, or creating something fresh with lessons learned from the past.
i don't really get the 'leave you be' bit.
Simple. More than a few people here seem to believe, as the grandparent comment suggests, that the web is a lost cause, or irredeemable, and all those people seem to want to do is to constantly complain about it.
I'm simply suggesting that if people feel the web has nothing to offer them, that it would be more productive for them to kindly leave it for a network that better suits their needs. Otherwise, rather than wanting to "fork the web and start over" they could consider working to improve what we have.
Why are you taking those complaints so personally?
You don't need us to be content with the status quo. If all we are doing is complaining, we really aren't doing anything to you.
I disagree - if it has something to offer then it's not a lost cause. A lost cause by definition isn't worth saving, or even engaging with.
> 'leaving the web' also doesn't seem very pragmatic, at least until something better is available.
The comment I replied to earlier suggested that the only reasonable solution to the web was to fork it or start over, with starting over being preferable. I'm merely suggesting that someone should actually get started on that.
Or maybe revive Gopher. I hear that's still around.
the real question is whether the New Thing can avoid the problems of it's predecessor.
Yes, that is a lofty goal. That does not make it unreasonable.
> Is the solution to break that into its component parts, so that each part can be maintained by a smaller group, and composed together to produce the browser as a whole?
Possibly, but currently, a "web" browser depends on its monolithic qualities. A web page is a DOM, defined by HTML, styled by CSS, and manipulated by JavaScript.
I think it may be time to start designing something less inherently monolithic.
One advantage to modularity is that we don't need to finish before we can use it.
> Guys, there is a _reason_ why microkernels suck. This is an example of how things are _not_ "independent". The filesystems depend on the VM, and the VM depends on the filesystem. You can't just split them up as if they were two separate things (or rather: you _can_ split them up, but they still very much need to know about each other in very intimate ways).
I imagine so.
And?
[0]: https://heropunch.io
This is essentially how teams that build huge software systems work. Like for instance, operating systems like windows/linux. The various teams at Microsoft, or trusted comitters for Linux, organize their various modules, components, subsystems, etc. independently, and eventually compose them into a coherent functioning whole to ship the whole system.
There are a few methods:
1. Libraries linked by binaries.
This is the usual method, but it generally demands modules share some things, which usually couples them too tightly to their implementation.
2. IPC (Inter-Process Communication)
There are a few ways to accomplish this. Some are OS specific (named pipes), others are fairly generic (sockets). This requires modules to share a language, and has some overhead, but at least they aren't coupled.
3. Microkernel
Essentially the best points of 1 and 2, but generally a design challenge itself.
The biggest advantage to modular design is that you don't need to create all the modules before you get something useful.
Not only do they all rely on Torvalds and everyone else for the kernel (heavily funded by donations, companies, etc), but most Linux distributions are just cosmetic variations of the largest upstream distros.
If Debian died tomorrow, Ubuntu is on life support.
Plenty are not. I am impressed by how usable community-based (non-corporate) distros are (e.g. Gentoo, Arch). This is truly indigenous technology.
> they all rely on Torvalds and everyone else for the kernel (heavily funded by donations, companies, etc)
This is an interesting thought. I believe the Linux kernel would continue to be viable on a purely volunteer basis, without corporate subsidies; I can't prove it though.
And you're right about "most" being wrong. "Many" would have been a better word, particularly if talking about the most popular.
(Another non-upstream-reliant distro that I find fascinating is GoboLinux. Very against the grain/orthodoxy!)
If anything the major distributions are defined by their package managers, of which there is a large and healthy number - aptitude, dnf, pacman, protage, and a heap of weird and wonderful other ones with minuscule usage.
My understanding is that Mozilla is supposed to be a nonprofit first and foremost: the Mozilla Foundation. The for-profit Mozilla Corporation is a subsidiary which is owned by the Foundation. I don't know whether this is still reflected in practice nowadays, but this is how it's supposed to be structured...
But isn't this the same as all the Chromium/Firefox forks? I mean I understand they aren't as popular as the major players but you could say the same about all the Linux distributions compared to Windows or OS X.
So yeah the web is complex but so are most popular runtimes.
C++ is at least an order of magnitude more complex, but there have been plenty of C implementations, some even entirely the work of a single person[1]. "I wrote my own C (subset) compiler" seems to be a reasonably common thing on HN too.[2][3][4][5][6][7]
On the other hand, I haven't see very many "truly independent" webpage rendering engine implementations (e.g. HTML4 or HTML5-subset, CSS2.x), so if anyone wants to give it a go (or Go, if you like...), they are more than welcome to, if only to increase the diversity of available implementations --- something that could probably handle HTML4/CSS2 might not be all that difficult, and especially so if you don't care for 100% identical results to the mainstream browsers (which often differ slightly too.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_C_Compiler
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13914137
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15463738
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13778353
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8558822
As someone who did a lot of the work to implement a from-scratch HTML4/CSS2 engine, I struggle to come up with words that would adequately express to you just how much you are underestimating the difficulty of this.
If anything, the monstrosities produced by committees are less powerful and less beautiful. (That we put up with them says more about us.)
Yes, it is huge and gigantic, but worth it's weight in gold. The stuff "just works" and has almost no limits. I'd say that spec is a masterpiece.
Also, do we count all the pages expended on SRFI's? Or not?
Mozilla is great because they have good management, not just because they have great coders. The rest of us should take an example if this. This means that we should stop scratching our itches, and do some real thinking and have discussions before engaging in our next side project.
There has been tons of attempts at this. Maybe we should start examining why these attempts have failed to succeed.
In light of recent events, this would seem to be up for debate.
What do you suggest to do to make competition easy? We could throw out most of features, but then the resulting standard won't be useful, and almost no one will use it.
I'm still looking for a Linux distro that runs on my phone without hassles.
Yes.
Interestingly Mozilla Foundation is not asking for donations.
Mozilla Corporation is selling traffic to ad-supported search engines, and profiting handsomely.
Instead they are asking for user cooperation in their experiments.
Why not create a different breed of browser that does not expose users to advertising. Profit motive?
Let users support it with donations.
This should be the mission.
That's the price of doing business, isn't it? It's why communism doesn't pan out as well as capitalism. What's that a red flag against? The human animal?
I agree--let's replace 'em with super AI instead or something, but, in the interim...
>we need to live in an ecosystem where making our own platforms is easy enough that you can have 10-20 viable options simultaneously supported. Linux distros are a fantastic example of this.
They are not. Pale Moon is about as "viable" against Firefox or Chrome as Ubuntu or Mint are "viable" against Windows or MacOS for the average user. (And one of those [the better, much more popular one] has a corporation backing it!)
Funny, I appreciate the Pale Moon community (I'm "officially" part of it since I use the browser) more than I appreciate or support anything to do with Mozilla for years now. I don't see it being non-viable, because there are plenty of people who are actively involved in providing a better browser with specific goals. And, there are plenty more people on top of that who act as concerned watchdogs to make sure the browser doesn't lose sight of those goals. That's what Mozilla lost. When the powerusers turned into an echo chamber, Mozilla lost the way. When the community openly approved of the offloading of plugins (the start of multi-process nonsense), the new interface, the move to WebExtensions... this is the fault of the people who kept saying, 'yes keep changing stop being Mozilla stop being Firefox be Chrome-2'.
That's how we ended up in this mess. You can't compete in the web browser battles unless you have hundreds of full time engineers behind you. That's a failure of the web.
None of this new decentralized technology is going to mean anything if we haven't learned that lesson. If you want free, open systems, competition needs to be easy. We need to be able to respond to a abusive platforms by making our own, and that means we need to live in an ecosystem where making our own platforms is easy enough that you can have 10-20 viable options simultaneously supported.
Linux distros are a fantastic example of this. It's easy enough to create a viable linux distro that there are 5+ popular ones, and if you don't like those there are 10+ less popular ones which are perfectly viable and reasonable choices for an OS.
We need to take the web back in that direction.