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From: rtr <rtr@haraya.invalid>
Subject: Re: Web considered harmful
Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2022 08:48:46 +0800
Message-ID: <871r0qcakx.fsf@haraya.local.net>
David <david@arch.invalid> writes:
On 2021-12-18, Doc O'Leary wrote:
> On 2021-12-17, Scientific (she/her) wrote:
>> On 2014-03-22, mw wrote [re-adding full quote]:
>>> Web considered harmful
>>> ======================
>>> Over the past decade, the internet has seen a transition from
>>> single-task protocols to the web to the extent that new functionality
>>> is often only exposed as a web-API with a proprietary protocol.
>>> While the base protocol (HTTP) and information serialization
>>> (HTML,
>>> XML, JSON) is standardized, the methods for extracting information
>>> from the received data varies from website to website.
>>> The solution in the 1990s was to make a standardized protocol,
>>> e.g. IMAP or NNTP, which could be used to access email or news in a
>>> standardized manner.
>>> For interfacing with, say, google mail, however, a client
>>> application
>>> will have to speak the google mail API which is incompatible with the
>>> mail API of another provider. This transition is turning the internet
>>> into a collection of walled gardens with the obvious drawback that
>>> most websites -- if an API is present at all -- will only have the
>>> official client implementation to said API available. Mostly there
>>> will be a few closed-source implementations provided by the vendor,
>>> most commonly a combination of the following:
>>> * a website (often with mandatory javascript)
>>> * a mobile website (possibly without javascript, but optimized
>>> for
>>> small screens and thus not very practical on a desktop browser and
>>> often not exposing all available features)
>>> * Android or iPhone app (sometimes not exposing all available
>>> features, restricted to a single platform)
>>> leaving users little choice in case they are using a different
>>> platform or want to collect their data in a unified format.
>>> Even worse is receiving information from websites where no API
>>> exists.
>>> There is no standard for logging into websites which have a mandatory
>>> username/password login prompt and implementations will have to handle
>>> cookies, referer headers (ridiculously many website mandate one for
>>> XSRF protection even though the standard makes them optional) and site
>>> specific form locations to which POST and GET requests will need to be
>>> made in a site specific order.
>>> For the most part, there has been no effort in changing any aspect
>>> of
>>> this problem, which has existed for more than 10 years. On the
>>> contrary, companies have consecutively started to discontinue support
>>> for open web standards such as RSS/Atom.
>>> Conclusion: The web as it is now is harmful to the open standard
>>> culture of the internet.
>>> Related readings (please expand):
>>> https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html
>>> Comments and discussion would be appreciated.
> Quite a necro, but I approve! :-)
>
>> I have noticed that after all these years too - I fucking hate modern
>> Internet. I fucking hate how social media has taken over us, I fucking
>> hate how hard it is to do anything in modern Web.
> I’m right there with you. One of my projects for 2022 is going to
> be to
> move away from the web as a primary means of sending or receiving
> information. I’m looking at things like Jekyll to get away from having
> a heavy stack for my site(s), but even that might be too closely tied to
> the way the modern web works.
>
>> I will take the good ol' times of internetworking on Unix command line
>> in 80s over this modern crap every day.
> Well, it’s not like everything was perfectly executed back then,
> either.
> For example, no standardization on configuration files has been a constant
> annoyance for decades. But there is a lot to be said for text file formats
> of increasing complexity based on need. I mean, web browsers do *so* much
> these days, yet if you hand them a bit of Markdown they’re left clueless?
At least there's reader mode, but that's like using uBlock Origin
instead of serving only what's needed.
I'm surprised that Gemini managed to get quite popular within like one
or two years and Firefox still cannot render Markdown natively.
I think one of the main strengths of gemini is that it's simple enough
that it allows a lot of people to dip their hands into it and implement
servers and clients for it but it's also modern enough that we don't
have to deal with esoteric behavior such as with gopher.
--
Give them an inch and they will take a mile.
--
gemini://rtr.kalayaan.xyz
Parent:
Re: Web considered harmful (by David <david@arch.invalid> on Sat, 29 Jan 2022 19:45:22 +0100)