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From: Doc O'Leary <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com>
Subject: Re: Web considered harmful
Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2022 20:49:37 -0000 (UTC)
Message-ID: <stk3h1$aq7$1@dont-email.me>
For your reference, records indicate that
news@zzo38computer.org.invalid wrote:
One problem in general is that software is not designed for advanced users.
Computer software should be designed for advanced users.
Underlying that, it is often the case that software is not designed *by*
advanced users. Which is to say, that even if the developers are tech
rock stars, the are usually answering to some MBA who doesn’t have a
clue what it means to have software that is well-architected.
If a new browser must be written, another alternative is just to not implement
CSS at all, maybe. Some things will not work without CSS, but maybe if you have
HTML and ARIA, and possibility of user customizations (even if it is its own
simplified kind of variant of CSS that only can be used by the end user) then
it might be suitable for most, maybe.
I think the kitchen-sink nature of the modern web is just too brittle to
into HTML, including ARIA, is not a great approach. I mean, if there are
parts of a web page that are semantically navigation links, I’m not sure
why that is getting served up as part of the page content in the first
place, never mind layering CSS on top of it to display it in some
particular way that is not in the viewers best interest.
Another feature I would want is to remove many animations.
Auto-load videos (especially with sound) are something I could do
without, too. I remember when there used to be a click-to-play
extension that disabled Adobe Flash, but now that multimedia is “standard”
on the modern web, it has become harder and harder to eliminate such
things, especially on mobile platforms.
Another feature along those lines would be to put a limit on how much data
you’ll allow a page to load. There is no web page that I want to visit
sight-unseen that requires 400MB of data to be loaded and consumes 2GB of
RAM.
It makes sense to have different things in different programs, but is sometimes
to be suitable to have multiple protocols/formats available in one interface,
even if it calls external programs to do so.
Sure. Even browsers themselves these days spin up additional processes to
sandbox pages for security and UI responsiveness. The problem remains
that, for the modern web, things are all fundamentally controlled by the
remote server. So long as that transaction is more about rendering a page
a certain way rather than transferring information for the user to do with
as they please, the web will increasingly become bogged down by its own
weight.
For example, IRC can be a separate program, but it can make sense to support
HTTP, HTML, Gemini, Gopher, etc together in one program, although I think that
it might be better having the core program not supporting any of these and only
the interface which calls extensions to implement them, instead. This way, you
can use the links between them, bookmark, etc.
I’ve always liked the idea of a common UI over some kind of middleware. I
mean, whether it’s email or Usenet or Reddit or chat, I should be able to
do acknowledge that most people are simply unable or unwilling to separate
the content from its presentation.
--
"Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
River Tam, Trash, Firefly
Parent:
Re: Web considered harmful (by news@zzo38computer.org.invalid on Thu, 03 Feb 2022 11:54:36 -0800)