For my own peace of mind, I have resolved to no longer think of websites as "websites". Instead, there are *web documents* and *web applications*. I find it easier to accept to use a browser like Firefox like a virtual computer for web applications. Many of the websites these days are in fact web applications.
There's no point in railing against web applications. I like to write web applications! And I use many of them myself, too. Things like Face Generator, Text Mapper or Hex Describe are impossible to do as documents. In an emergency, you could have a form that then generates a PDF to download, maybe? But is that really preferable? I don't think so.
And don't get me started on writing native graphical user-interface applications. It takes so much energy to get it right. It gives me a headache. I tried. Take a look at Gridmapper with Common Lisp and SDL2, if you want. Compare it with regular Gridmapper. Is that really preferable? I don't think so.
Gridmapper with Common Lisp and SDL2
And the reverse is also not cool. I wrote a text user interface tool to generate maps, which can then be downloaded as SVG files. Give Hex Populate a try, it works over SSH. Is that really preferable? I don't think so.
I've tried Gemtext for a long time. I was very much into Gemini. But these days I no longer think it's the answer. It's like a piece of performance art: the doing of it is a statement. People who step into it are confounded, their beliefs challenged. It's good art! It's interesting technology. But it's not a replacement for *web applications*. It's not even a good format for *web documents*! I want inline emphasis – bold, italics, code – and accessible tables with captions and cell navigation, and row-spans, and column-spans. I tried writing code that translated Wikipedia tables into ASCII tables to be used as pre-formatted text in Gemtext. It's hard to do well with the sizing of columns, the line wrapping in cells, the limited space available in a terminal, and when you've solved all of that, it's still hell for people with bad eye-sight or cognitive problems trying to understand what they're seeing. It's terrible. You could of course do away with all tables. But is that really preferable? I don't think so.
And so… there's that bifurcation in the road. For this site, for most of the pages that I think of as *web documents*, I write (or generate) HTML that doesn't require fonts or scripts. If one uses browsers such as eww, links2, w3m, lynx or dillo, it should just work. I wasn't going to convert the corporate web, anyway.
I still serve my site as Gemini and Gopher. But I do it as a political statement, as a piece of performance art.
At the same time, I swallow my pride and setup Firefox.
⁂
I still wish we would all push for a web that does not require a lot of resources.
Nearly all growth in smartphone sales volume since the mid '10s occured in the 'budget' and 'low-end' categories. … if portals fail to work well on phones, smartphone-dependent folks are predictably excluded … Framework-based, "full-stack" development is now the default in Silicon Valley, but should obviously be avoided in universal services. – Reckoning: Part 1 – The Landscape
Reckoning: Part 1 – The Landscape
#Web #Gemini