Ah yes the modern world wide web ... or more accurately heading towards the special region, circumstance (have permission)and browser web.

I'm a huge fan of a higher information to fluff ratio, with videos on site, not say some other fremium pay by tracking service.

As for older browsers mentioned, it's surely not to hard to add to a web site to add an If older browser then do old html layout, minus the candy.

i would like the web to go to here:

https://htmx.org

https://hyperscript.org

The problem usually is not a framework / tool / whatever technical thing used.

The problem is overloading a site with stuff that aggressively consumes user's resources and tries to hijack user's attention, in an attempt to make a few cents on ads.

If HTMX were all the rage, I'm certain that many terribly heavy sites would be created with it, given the same incentive structure.

Everybody, everywhere, thinks it's easier or even 'better' to just keep cramming more things into the same eight pages on a site, instead of continuing to make more pages.

So everything becomes garbage and quickly.

It’s getting closer to the point where we call the entire current “web” a Google-specific network, Google Chrome is renamed a “Google” browser instead of a web browser, and we re-make a new interlinked network which does not require one specific company’s product to use. (Never mind an advertisement company.)

The “Google” network and sites can be kept on as a necessary evil proprietary service, like Facebook is for many, and also LinkedIn.

(re-post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33210846)

I keep saying that Google's plans is to bring ChromeOS everywhere, and the folks shipping Electron apps are doing nothing short than helping Google achieve that goal.

I guess my parents were way ahead on this. Already 10 years ago they couldn’t tell the difference between ‘Google’, ‘Internet’, and ‘Browser’

That was intentional

Why would people pretend to not understand the distinction? Free tech support?

Or is the comment missing `/s`?

No, but my brevity was unclear. The general population was taught to consider Google to be the Internet (not even just the web.) A couple of examples:

- Chrome obscuring the full URL in the address bar, which makes people use Google Search as if it were the address bar.

- Gmail being so popular that people assume `@gmail.com` is a suffix for all email addresses. You might tell a cashier your email address to sign up for discounts. When you say `[email protected]` they might end up typing `[email protected]` (this is, of course, an example.)

- Web search as a generic trademark "Google it" which most people now take for granted.

When people don't type in URLs but instead "google" everything by query, it's no surprise people conflate these different systems. My point in essence is that people who confuse Google/Web/Internet are just laypeople, not ignorami; they've been subject to a deliberate campaign by Google to make them think that.

You can still write web apps with 90s HTML. If you want it, do it.

Most people don't, both as users and as authors. I was there for the 90s web, and IMO the nostalgia is misplaced. The modern web is far more useful and easier to create meaningful services for.

   > Although taking Google on head-first would be foolishness worthy of Don Quixote, there are ways that we can change things for the better. One is to demand that websites we use and/or maintain follow either the Progressive Enhancement or Graceful Degradation design philosophy. The latter item is something that is integral with HTML and CSS designs, with the absence of, or error in any of the CSS files merely leading to the HTML document being displayed without formatting, yet with the text and images visible and any URLs usable.

Hopefully the strategy laid out in this article is adopted more and more. Frameworks such as SvelteKit [0][1] and NextJS [2] already allow developers that were used to develop bloated SPAs to create progressively-enhanced websites that work without client-side JavaScript. Also, the landscape of frameworks that don't really require client side JavaScript is getting pretty good with HTMX [3], Rails and co adopting HTML Over The Wire [4][5].

Unfortunately, the market incentives simply aren't there, there's not a lot of money in developing websites (or web apps) that work without client-side JavaScript and bloated browser APIs, so we're left to see if simply improving the tooling will be enough for developers to create less bloated websites (whether that's intention or not).

[0]: https://kit.svelte.dev/docs/form-actions

[1]: https://kit.svelte.dev/docs/glossary#hydration

[2]: https://nextjs.org/docs/guides/building-forms#part-5-form-su...

[3]: https://htmx.org/

[4]: https://hotwired.dev/

[5]: https://turbo.hotwired.dev/

I don't think the article called for 90s like software, just the general user experience. There were a lot of problems under the bonnet. One of those things though harder for a site developer was writing for the different browsers that surfed the net back then, and I still recall looking at page sources that streamlined use for a couple of different popular browsers of the time since otherwise the site would appear a bit broken.

A lot of people think texty stuff is over rated ... but also scream blue murder that the spiders crawling the web aren't doing a great job, because only big search has the permission to crawl and can correctly understand which version of the can can dance to represent the information a particular site uses.

Including a simple html text version minus bells and whistles of the same always seemed common sense to me, it opens it up the site to those with simple text browsers as well as anyone contemplating a better or real search engine.

For those really nostalgic for the old school web I'd recommend checking out free net when I. When I browsed it it literally was like the web from the '90s with every feature that that entailed, so if you're interested I'd recommend giving free night to look at to see what the web would have been like without so many of the changes that we've had. I'm not saying it's better or worse it is different and it does make me a nostalgic.

This article is doing a great job discussing browsers, but overlooks the real discussion which is about content.

Is there an alternative to the corporate ad-based web app model?

Is there merit to some of the forgotten early internet? Of course. Forums, for instance, are much better at retaining information than facebook groups. But there is no massive corporation making a huge profit off of forums.

I feel like the internet could be infinitely better but we have very little say about it. It's completely owned by corporations which don't care about their users besides being a source of money. Leaving the most important resource available to humanity to be developed by corporations is a double edged sword.