💾 Archived View for bbs.geminispace.org › u › norayr › 15195 captured on 2024-12-17 at 13:32:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-08-31)
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Re: "Which parts of the web want saving? Which can we do without?"
@mediocregopher i agree, but in today's web most of the web pages will stop working. they load shitload of scripts from different domains.
so the problem is indeed a human problem. i think we can get more people to know about gemini. i didn't know for years when gemini already existed.
and i consider myself curious.
Feb 20 · 10 months ago
🐐 satch [OP] · 2024-02-20 at 16:53:
Yes @norayr some people have complained to me when watching YouTube (on their browser with no adblock) that I skip ads when they want to watch them... very interesting to think about why
🐙 norayr · 2024-02-20 at 17:41:
unbelievable.
we don't have youtube ads here in armenia, our region is not (yet?) interesting to advertisers, but i force vpn from our apartment via openwrt wifi router, so my wife has to tolerate youtube ads, as well as has one less reason to tolerate me, which i don't know why she still does.
🖥️ mrrobinhood5 · 2024-02-20 at 18:24:
@norayr that's so funny. but for reals most YT ads are.really bad and not entertaining to watch. I remember TV ads (commercials) and they were light, original, creative, and interesting to watch.
🦉 ResetReboot · 2024-02-20 at 21:35:
@norayr @mrrobinhood5 With how many examples that a well thought advertising campaign can install itself into the social collective conscience, advertisers decided to go the annoying route.
Given too, that nowadays anyone can really launch an ad campaign. So that show in the quality of those and the things sold...
👻 mediocregopher [...] · 2024-02-21 at 07:45:
@norayr
in today's web most of the web pages will stop working. they load shitload of scripts from different domains.
True, but I consider this a good thing... people will have to bear the bandwidth burden of their bloated JavaScript monstrosities themselves, rather than outsourcing to some cdn which is selling analytics data and centralizing the web besides.
🐐 satch [OP] · 2024-02-21 at 14:24:
Loading JavaScript from CDNs is bad and unnecessary. But using an iframe to embed? Not so clear.
🦉 ResetReboot · 2024-03-02 at 21:43:
I was thinking about the "throwing the distributed application system" and I have a few handful reasons to throw it away.
1- Ownership. It is something being talked about a lot in videogames, with everything turning into digital downloads tied to an account on a service. The day the company goes belly up... you lose what you paid for. Same principle here, and I will cite Google Reader and its untimely demise.
2- The freedom to know what your computer is running. A coworker, sysadmin, asked the frontend team "Can we see what's exactly the code that is running on the client". The reply was "You doin' drugs, mate?". Not even the devs can really say
(Goes on)
🦉 ResetReboot · 2024-03-02 at 21:46:
3- Overcomplicated system to develop: Try to start a new JS application. Do a simple hello world. You have a lot of frameworks (phased out in mere months!) with a lot of dependencies and requirements. With other programming languages, you can get the compiler, create your hello world and in a minute, you are up and running. There's a lot of well seasoned developers that sigh and reach to see how to start a new JS project.
4- (And this is a personal take!) Starting your base on a language that was only thought to be a glue with Java applets and make a couple nice effects. Then drop a ton of patches to make it more usable.
☕️ tenno-seremel · 2024-03-19 at 17:23:
I’m with no-scripters. Once you allow scripting it is only a matter of time before it will be extended. Exactly as it already happened. Forms, which can be validated client-side, should stay, though, so every website didn't have to do things this one had to do. And they should be useable without spending lots of time to drag them to present times.
🐙 norayr · 2024-03-20 at 01:17:
btw there is now this new technology called nextjs which runs js only in backend and only gives the browser prerendered html and css but i doubt corporations will give up browser side scriytss, they need their tracking scripts in your machine.
😎 decant · 2024-05-28 at 04:01:
script must go, we all know not to download software from random website in cybersec 101, why run script from random website? javascript is the worst case, I mean, webusb? webmidi? webgl? I think if you need rich graphical designs you could just put up some compressed bitmap. Printed media are just images on paper, we will do ok with image over the wire. even pdf over gemini:// is ok. I like what lab6 are doing.
I think there are certainly things that should be changed, and that could be completely redesigned. There are also some things that you probably should do away with entirely, e.g. DRM/EME (which are not the same thing; EME is not DRM but is a API for it and is rather worthless anyways).
One thing that should be done is to make it simpler. The protocols and file formats could be designed better to avoid the mess that they currently use, is one thing. For example, many of the security issues and compatibility issues and other issues can be avoided if it is designed better. You could also hopefully reduce power usage (by reducing complexity and by reducing unnecessary requirements, e.g. don't require user-specified proxies to be encrypted, and other ways too).
Other things that should be done is to improve possibility of user control, and to use them in better ways (the specifications are also used badly). Using data files is also helpful, since user can use their own data handling software with it, and interoperate with other software in a better way. And, it won't be appropriate to use one protocol or one file format or one character set or one programming language etc, for everything, anyways.
Other things should be done with better user controls, e.g.: If you have scripting, allow the user to override scripts with their own (which might also be native code). If you have styling, allow the user to override styles with their own. etc.
I wrote a protocol specification that is intended to be between Gemini and "WWW as it should be if it was designed better", so some of its innovations would be appropriate for "WWW as it should be if it was designed better", too, such as:
In reply to comment 15133: I agree that it is a problem (I made up the protocol to fix this problem, and other (in my opinion) issues too).
In reply to comment 15142: WWW is a rather complicated way to do "a universal basis for distributed oftware applications that work on any architecture", and has many other problems too. Making the scripts execute automatically in a document is one problem (e.g. TerseNet insisted on putting them in a separate menu, which must be manually selected by the user, to avoid this), but also there is complexity and there is many other issues (although some are more of issues that could be fixed by an improved implementation; e.g. access to camera does not necessarily mean a camera but can be any video source specified by the user (including other programs running on the computer)). There are much simpler ways, including uxn for some programs, and/or other protocols for some uses, etc.
In reply to comment 15136: There are benefits to avoid (at least automatically) third-party loading. Even if you can do automatic first-party loading, being able to turn them off and select them manually can sometimes be desirable. Supporting more document formats (that are simpler than HTML and PDF) is something that I think is helpful too. However, different implementations might not all support the same formats, which is why I had the "conversion file" that I mentioned above.
In reply to comment 15172: The aesthetics could be not entirely controlled by the author but also controllable by the user. The user could configure to disable most (or all) styles and external resources, which would also redice it. Your idea of marking cross-site resources by the URI scheme seems unnecessary and unhelpful; the user could be able to configure the browser to disable them, and this can be identified easily enough regardless of the URI scheme; the router does not need to be involved in this.
In reply to comment 15463: These are very good points, and are also my reasons why I would want to avoid these scripting, but the top message says, what if you keep that capability? There are still ways to do that and to allow ownership and freedom to know and reprogram what your computer is running. Sometimes it might be useful to have server-side code, either when you deliberately want communication with others in the same server, or if your computer cannot run the program locally (e.g. not enough RAM or CPU speed, or unsupported instruction set, etc); however, being able to download a local copy that does not require an internet connection, is also helpful. They do not necessarily need to be mutually exclusive nor overly complicated. And they should definitely not be executed automatically.
In reply to comment 15464: You do not need "a lot of frameworks" to do "a simple hello world". (Many people (unfortunately) do anyways, but this is not a requirement.)
😎 bababooey · Nov 25 at 20:29:
I think it's gonna be hard to put the genie back in the bottle. Websites are analogous to software now, and it's going to be hard to come up with a way to only restrict the parts that can be exploited by advertisers without also removing functionality that is needed to serve the kind of rich web experiences that people have come to expect. I think rather than rebooting the internet, it would be better to offer a lo-fi web experience that is truly attractive to at least a non-negligible part of the population.
Which parts of the web want saving? Which can we do without? — Let’s have an unrealistic hypothetical here. Suppose the http web were replaced entirely by a new protocol (or maybe set of protocols?) which allowed for client side scripting, unrestricted styling, and all the other aspects of the web which make it distinct. Except this time, everything was being built from scratch, with person-first values in mind, like privacy, accessibility, ease of use, etc. The designers of this protocol are...