I read this article back when it was published, and I feel the same way now as I did then. I feel absolute hopelessness. I would love to see the "minimal web" or Web 1.0 brought back....
I read this article back when it was published, and I feel the same way now as I did then.
I feel absolute hopelessness.
I would love to see the "minimal web" or Web 1.0 brought back. Specifically, I would love to see a resurgence of niche websites and forums. But I just don't see it happening. Most people are just not interested enough. Even those of us who are interested don't seem to have the energy or the motivation to push for it. And on the other side, you have the large corporations pushing, really hard, for exactly the opposite of that.
I suspect the World Wide Web will continue to move toward becoming a platform for advertising and other commerce activity, and will become ever more hostile to those of us who yearn for the simplicity of text based communities and a distinct lack of consumerism.
I do feel we are seeing the collapse of the web, especially accelerated by LLMs. The web will become a place filled with AI generated articles and AI generated comments replying to them. Each...
I do feel we are seeing the collapse of the web, especially accelerated by LLMs. The web will become a place filled with AI generated articles and AI generated comments replying to them. Each sneaking in mentions of some product or service. Already many ads you see are AI generated and landing pages for businesses are filled with AI text. It’s completely useless, meaningless content.
That said, there is hope, just far away from mainstream web. There’s been a resurgence of the “small web”. People are building personal sites on neocities, chatting on BBSs on Pubnix servers or posting long, thoughtful text articles on Gopher/Gemini protocols. There’s a higher barrier of entry to participation, but much like the invite system on Tildes, that barrier protects the communities from rampant corporate greed.
If you've run an email server, forum, or small blog, you'll be familiar with how much spam there is on the web. An unprotected form can generate hundreds of messages in a single day. The spammers...
If you've run an email server, forum, or small blog, you'll be familiar with how much spam there is on the web. An unprotected form can generate hundreds of messages in a single day. The spammers have an extreme amount of resources available to them, and are constantly evolving new tricks to make the web a worse place.
And yet... most people don't have to deal with that. We use filters, captchas, and human curation to clean it up, so most of what people see online is real content by other humans. Sure we occasionally click onto a search result that rips content from reddit or StackOverflow, but 99% of the time, we get the source material.
I expect LLMs and AI to offer new opportunities for spammers, but I don't think it's going to be the dystopia you're envisioning. AI will provide new tools for spamming, but also for catching spammers. New mechanisms will be introduced as needed, like SPF and DKIM for email, and the cat and mouse game will continue.
I don't think the wasteland of AI generated content shows itself in StackOverflow comments or other behind-a-captcha discussion forums. Where I see it most is on self-hosted sites that clutter...
I don't think the wasteland of AI generated content shows itself in StackOverflow comments or other behind-a-captcha discussion forums. Where I see it most is on self-hosted sites that clutter Google results with content that looks superficially relevant, but surfaces no original insight or work.
Google any home improvement task, for example, and you'll get dozens of pages of listacles regurgitating each other's questionable advice, but few truly original pieces made by someone who has actually done the work.
Search for the best commuter motorcycles, and get treated to a horde of sites that seems to have just crawled spec sheets and other lists.
That's why people suffix their searches with forums they trust: stack overflow, reddit, advrider, etc.
Yeah, it's all becoming one big ad toy. Colorful moving noisy stuff to capture monke's attention, then make it angry, busy, and easily parted with its money.
Yeah, it's all becoming one big ad toy.
Colorful moving noisy stuff to capture monke's attention, then make it angry, busy, and easily parted with its money.
This site kinda emphasizes how I'd like a modern minimal web to look like. I definitely wouldn't want to got back to 90s-2000s web design, but this site is both nice looking and lightweight, it...
This site kinda emphasizes how I'd like a modern minimal web to look like.
I definitely wouldn't want to got back to 90s-2000s web design, but this site is both nice looking and lightweight, it loads about 30x faster than new reddit would on a phone using data.
New reddit would eat so much data so quickly that I had to make sure to always use old reddit, not just because it was better overall, but it used so much less data as well.
Since the Reddit API stuff, I have been going on Reddit from the browser for a few subreddits I still need (time spent there is down by like 95%!), and Reddit SUCKS in a web browser on mobile. It...
Since the Reddit API stuff, I have been going on Reddit from the browser for a few subreddits I still need (time spent there is down by like 95%!), and Reddit SUCKS in a web browser on mobile. It takes forever to load and then when it does load, sometimes you start reading the post and the comments fail to load so the whole webpage gets replaced by a "failed to load" message. Everything I needed had loaded, why would you do that!
I'm in complete agreement. I don't want to go back to iframes and, god forbid, flash elements everywhere - it's very much the type of websites and the smaller but very intimate communities that I...
I'm in complete agreement. I don't want to go back to iframes and, god forbid, flash elements everywhere - it's very much the type of websites and the smaller but very intimate communities that I yearn for. Tildes absolutely ticks that box for me in terms of having a general community, and I really have come to love this site in it's current form.
What I really miss is making a connection with people online. I used to frequent forums and get to know usernames. I would see a name and know what to expect from them before even reading a post. I miss having forum friends - and not the modern concept of social media friends, but people I'd made a connection with and enjoyed catching up with. I am at least seeing some of the former part here as I start to recognise regular users.
I kind of wish Tildes would emphasize usernames more, as just like Reddit, I tend to skip over them because they're just not catching my eye in the way they would with an old forum. Maybe we need...
I kind of wish Tildes would emphasize usernames more, as just like Reddit, I tend to skip over them because they're just not catching my eye in the way they would with an old forum.
Maybe we need to bring back animated footers and profile pictures... (Ick)
I'm not down for anything which requires images or gifs on Tildes -- the little logo at the top being the only graphic is enough. I think a less icky solution would be to allow user notes. If I...
Maybe we need to bring back animated footers and profile pictures... (Ick)
I'm not down for anything which requires images or gifs on Tildes -- the little logo at the top being the only graphic is enough. I think a less icky solution would be to allow user notes. If I could tag say your profile with "dude who hates Chevys" that'd be fine for me to remember users and my experiences with them.
No, I'm just being facetious. I just want something that makes usernames stand out a little bit more for me, as my eyes just pass over them without even registering. I feel like on classic forums...
No, I'm just being facetious. I just want something that makes usernames stand out a little bit more for me, as my eyes just pass over them without even registering.
I feel like on classic forums they tended to stand out for me much more and I'm not sure why.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, this is pretty much the same as reddit but without user flairs or avatars as far as I can tell. I don't think anything is making you skip over them, you're...
I'm not sure what you mean by this, this is pretty much the same as reddit but without user flairs or avatars as far as I can tell.
I don't think anything is making you skip over them, you're choosing not to read them.
I never want avatars, and at least right now user flairs don't make much sense imo.
They are referring to the days of forums for each topic where the user name and such was off to the side and it out emphasis on you as an individual as it stick out. Prime would have unique...
They are referring to the days of forums for each topic where the user name and such was off to the side and it out emphasis on you as an individual as it stick out. Prime would have unique profile pictures and their location and footers with quotes or comments. It made people unique and recognizable so overtime you'd recognize and know a lot of the community.
With the reddit like responses you get a bit better communication strings but you lose a lot of the individually and community (not all) that you had with the more traditional forums.
I think those of us who lived through the 90s should document it in various forms conveying how really good web 1.0 was in many areas relative to today's web even though it wasn't perfect. Write...
I think those of us who lived through the 90s should document it in various forms conveying how really good web 1.0 was in many areas relative to today's web even though it wasn't perfect. Write more articles such as the OP or this one I've written, create more documentaries. Hopefully, this will motivate and inspire the gen-z to create more of that.
But sadly, I'm also seeing a dark and selfish side of gen-z, the capitalist side that only sees open source contributions as a way to plug their resume for big tech jobs, not the spirit or ideals of it. Let's just hope this side doesn't prevail and more of the other side prevails in the end.
I think that's driven by a need to survive - each generation seems to have a tougher time financially whilst the world around them gets technologically and scientifically more advanced, and those...
I think that's driven by a need to survive - each generation seems to have a tougher time financially whilst the world around them gets technologically and scientifically more advanced, and those with money get wealthier. A gen-z (or really any post-boomer generation) born into a family with a reasonable amount of money will do just fine but the rest largely struggle and are left fighting for scraps - it would take a hugely strong willed personality to not become selfish in that situation, and it would take a strong willed personality with charisma to bring everyone else along for that ride and break the cycle.
I just don't see that happening with the control over the media preventing such a charismatic individual from becoming known.
There are a lot of academics and other bloggers out there who are producing content as a kind of labour of love. A lot of them can be found by clicking around quite a bit on related websites or by...
There are a lot of academics and other bloggers out there who are producing content as a kind of labour of love. A lot of them can be found by clicking around quite a bit on related websites or by using Marginalia Search.
When I was young, my big sister started a BBS out of our house. It was a super fancy one with 2 networked 386's (one of which was built from spare parts of discarded PCs) and 2 dedicated phone...
When I was young, my big sister started a BBS out of our house. It was a super fancy one with 2 networked 386's (one of which was built from spare parts of discarded PCs) and 2 dedicated phone lines. That's right - we could have 2 users at the same time! We doubled the odds of getting past the busy signal versus other bulletin boards.
It was magical, and nothing has really matched the intimacy of those BBS forums since. She actually met the person who is now her spouse through it.
I loved the old text-based forums, but I'll also be the first to admit that centralizing everything is handy. I miss the BBS and IRC days, but I'm not sure I'd go back to it. Reddit at its prime was really something special once you found your place. It was basically like being logged into a hundred forums all at once.
And I think Tildes is on the right track to become a good place for good conversation where more effort can be placed into the content rather than the search for the content as opposed to searching a thousand websites for the correct forum.
The slow, careful rollout of Tildes is allowing us to nurture a community based on quality conversations, and I think that if it continues to be carefully managed that we can strike a balance between the quality of the old web and the usability of the modern web.
Gemini is an interesting experiment, but I have stopped using it. The problem for me with their approach is that it creates a separate, disjoint space next to the one we are on now. I don't want...
Gemini is an interesting experiment, but I have stopped using it. The problem for me with their approach is that it creates a separate, disjoint space next to the one we are on now. I don't want that. I want all the content, including the stuff on the regular web, but presented in a minimalistic way.
A long time ago I had the idea to build an experimental browser that would utilize the way websites are supposed to be built to construct such a better interface. Namely by separating HTML for semantic structure, CSS for presentation and Javascript for dynamic parts. The browser would ignore CSS and Javascript, parse the structural HTML and present the content in a general sober minimal interface.
This was doomed to fail, because hardly any website is built like that and you would not be able to surf the web with it. But sometimes I wished I had gone through with it, just to see what it would look like.
Maybe I should do it anyway. Maybe the limitations can turn into a quality filter. "If I can't view this website, it was probably rubbish anyway" Or something like that.
This is the reason why many interesting people went to Gemini, to find others that are tired with casual web. I also don't find Gemini as fantastic as some of my friends do, because, well... why...
Maybe the limitations can turn into a quality filter.
This is the reason why many interesting people went to Gemini, to find others that are tired with casual web.
I also don't find Gemini as fantastic as some of my friends do, because, well... why not just use text browser and browse interesting webpages? The point they make is as with Fediverse, people that have some particular mindset are using it and (to some extent) not everybody else. That makes it easier to find interesting stuff inside Gemini or Fediverse.
It resembles me a little bit tildes.net, because well, recently, besides RSS, it's been my Internet frontpage. It's so slow and interesting that I don't really need the rest of the Internet. Things I find interesting in the Internet I just post here and one Lemmy instance, that's all. Hence, I don't find space for Gemini.
Be the change you wish to see in the world. Porkbun offers cheap domain names and static website hosting all-in-one. Before Porkbun, Google Domains offered cheap domain names as well and it was...
I would love to see the "minimal web" or Web 1.0 brought back. Specifically, I would love to see a resurgence of niche websites and forums.
Be the change you wish to see in the world. Porkbun offers cheap domain names and static website hosting all-in-one. Before Porkbun, Google Domains offered cheap domain names as well and it was easy to hook up my blogspot blogs to those domains, and there was the added benefit of free email domains hooked up to Gmail. (Unfortunately, Google Domains got sold to Squarespace, that's why I migrated over to Porkbun.)
I made a portfolio website, then I bought a domain name for a game I was working on, then I made a static website for some of my personal activist causes, and then I snagged some domain for an app idea I have. It's fun!
I used the "motherfucking website" and its subsequent spinoff websites as a guide for styling my activist static website in a very simple manner.
I'm having a lot of fun and it's not too expensive. Like $12 per year for the domain names, and maybe $30 per year for the hosting of the Porkbun static website. The other websites route to blogs, so my hosting is free.
I really like Porkbun's prices and have bought 2 domain names through them. For hosting I'm using GitHub and Jekyll, which works pretty good for a free static site. Now that I have fiber I'm...
I really like Porkbun's prices and have bought 2 domain names through them. For hosting I'm using GitHub and Jekyll, which works pretty good for a free static site. Now that I have fiber I'm planning on hosting my site from my own internal server once I'm confident I can secure it well enough.
When I saw videos on cubas streetnet I was legit jealous. I legit think when capitalism completely kills the internet as we know it, some form of streetnet via locally distributed wireless mesh...
When I saw videos on cubas streetnet I was legit jealous. I legit think when capitalism completely kills the internet as we know it, some form of streetnet via locally distributed wireless mesh nodes and home-run webservers will crop up in the US, first in college towns, then nationwide. It'll take a while, but it's the true Internets best hope to keep it from the corpos.
I really should pursue the problem I have with my DNS and should start some forum on my domain. Not that it would matter or get actually used, but I just think if we want to have "the old web", we...
I really should pursue the problem I have with my DNS and should start some forum on my domain. Not that it would matter or get actually used, but I just think if we want to have "the old web", we have to make it real by ourselves.
Ooohhhh, I have a few things to say on this: There's this great search engine https://crowdview.ai/ (ignore the ".ai" thing, it's just a search engine) that's specifically for searching forums....
Ooohhhh, I have a few things to say on this:
There's this great search engine https://crowdview.ai/ (ignore the ".ai" thing, it's just a search engine) that's specifically for searching forums. Sadly it still includes reddit, but -site:reddit.com works a treat and it doesn't have blogspam by design.
We need Tildes tags for both "the minimal web" (and a good definition to go with the tag - if you're wondering why, that probably deserves it's own whole post TBH), and/or for whatever people call "digital minimalism" or "[minimalism (computing)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism_(computing\))" nowadays (fuck Cal Newport and his shitty book redefining the term). Or maybe we just need a proper list of tags, so that people don't invent their own one-off version of the tag (e.g. imagine "minimalism", "minimalist", "minimal", so it's impossible to reliably find the tagged posts)
"Make it easy for people to host their own sites" - I've been thinking that the lack of this is a major cause of centralization in general. Like, why isn't there an amazingly-intuitive router interface that lets you one-click set up a Minecraft server instead of having to dick around with port forwarding? It's not like "server hardware" is expensive; most people have an old phone/laptop lying around somewhere that could still function as a home server for a website or such. I think IPv6 will help (once it becomes ubiquitous), because it will make it trivial to obtain a static IP without paying $$$. One of the barriers to IPv6 is actually open-source software mostly having IPv4 instructions and not IPv6, making it harder to set up even for people who want IPv6.
Plus, making it easy to set up a server would open a whole new avenue of community contributions - instead of having a community Discord, people could have a community <alternative, idk, Zulip?> set up on someone's server (which is technically currently possible but a PITA to both set up and deploy for the uninitiated). Of course, some peoples' internet connection is shit so maybe have a thing where someone has a backup server? IDK.
In theorie you are right, in practice I do think you are glossing over software in general. Security is still important and exposing things to the web without proper configuration, security...
Make it easy for people to host their own sites" - I've been thinking that the lack of this is a major cause of centralization in general. Like, why isn't there an amazingly-intuitive router interface that lets you one-click set up a Minecraft server instead of having to dick around with port forwarding? It's not like "server hardware" is expensive; most people have an old phone/laptop lying around somewhere that could still function as a home server for a website or such
In theorie you are right, in practice I do think you are glossing over software in general. Security is still important and exposing things to the web without proper configuration, security updates and regular maintaining the entire is asking for trouble.
@wes in their comment hits the nail on the head with what sort of stuff you can expect when you have open forms. But it isn't limited to spam bots, or rather those spam bots very often run on all sorts of machines that were not properly patched and are no hosting malware as part of a bot net.
Port forwarding isn't the issue, in fact without the ability to block incoming traffic at the doorstep the internet would have collapsed a long time ago.
And that ignores just the simple reality that doing anything other than a simple static website is going to be complex to set up and maintain.
I think this is missing the point. The OP is saying, router software sucks ass and is three layers of unintuitive etc. Port forwarding is a pretty good security model, it's just non-standard...
Port forwarding isn't the issue, in fact without the ability to block incoming traffic at the doorstep the internet would have collapsed a long time ago.
I think this is missing the point. The OP is saying, router software sucks ass and is three layers of unintuitive etc. Port forwarding is a pretty good security model, it's just non-standard across ISPs and hard to work with.
But what if instead of exposing just the minimum necessary for setting up a server on other hardware, routers themselves provided a basic server configuration? Non-technical minded people manage to set up ex. Minecraft servers on other platforms all the time: once you have a server on the internet, the incantations needed to set up something can be fairly easily looked up without any broader knowledge.
So if everyone had a server they could access and use provided by their ISP, what would this do against centralization on the internet? Is that a low enough barrier to entry that someone could spin up an IRC server, or a Zulip instance, or a shared file server, or...
No, I got that part. I am just saying that this really isn't is what prevents people from widely hosting their own stuff on their own computers. No, as my entire security argument still stands...
I think this is missing the point. The OP is saying, router software sucks ass and is three layers of unintuitive etc. Port forwarding is a pretty good security model, it's just non-standard across ISPs and hard to work with.
No, I got that part. I am just saying that this really isn't is what prevents people from widely hosting their own stuff on their own computers.
So if everyone had a server they could access and use provided by their ISP, what would this do against centralization on the internet? Is that a low enough barrier to entry that someone could spin up an IRC server, or a Zulip instance, or a shared file server, or...
No, as my entire security argument still stands there for the most part. It also would be incredibly expensive for ISPs to provide. Which is the problem underlying most of it. Hosting anything on the internet is not free, you have to pay in one of two ways:
Not free in the form of a time and labor investment, as you need to spend a lot of time and effort in setting it up yourself and self host. The limitation again isn't ports, it is what you need to do in order to ensure your server doesn't end up being part of a botnet or being used for other malicious purposes.
Not free as in if you don't want to expose your home network, etc you need to pay for hosting elsewhere. Shared webhosting, which is fairly accessible but limited to html/php/mysql based solutions most often but is fairly cheap. A VPS which still is a server you need to manage yourself. Or, finally, something like pikapods which lets you spin up specific apps easily with little knowledge. The last option is incredibly accessible compared to anything else but also relatively expensive compared to the other two solutions.
The issue really isn't that there are no avenues to host your own things. It is that it simply isn't free and many people are not willing to put in either time or money.
Even more so if we limit the discussion to simply satic websites. There is no shortage of options to host a simple website.
Man thank you for that crowdview.ai recommendation. For the longest time I have always preferred forum posts for finding out answers to things I'm working on or researching but never thought to...
Man thank you for that crowdview.ai recommendation. For the longest time I have always preferred forum posts for finding out answers to things I'm working on or researching but never thought to look and see if there was a dedicated forum search engine.
I feel like the author isn't engaging with the primary obstacle to his idea, which is that intelligent, powerful commercial interests will work to subvert the project as soon as it starts to...
I feel like the author isn't engaging with the primary obstacle to his idea, which is that intelligent, powerful commercial interests will work to subvert the project as soon as it starts to become successful.
Safeguards should be added in the server software to prevent spamming (duh).
This is not a one-line "duh" concern you can implement in a weekend. This is the primary concern that will make or break your project. The only way this project will succeed is if a group of people are willing to spend substantial amounts of time fighting this battle every day, forever.
Prioritizing quality content over spam is the core challenge that every search engine deals with; all of your most important architectural decisions need to be in service to that goal. That's why I'm very skeptical that federation is a good addition to this project. Federation is basically opening a data port for spammers to pour spam directly into your index. If you're going to federate, you're going to have to be very choosy about who you accept connections from, to the point where there are probably simpler ways to share data with a small group of dedicated admins.
This is a cool project idea, but I think solving the problems that are crippling Google is going to require a more paranoid and defensive mindset than the author shows here. If we've learned anything from the cryptocurrency debacle, it should be not to underestimate the resources, perseverance, and technical cunning people are willing to throw at a get-rich-quick scheme.
One of the problems of The Minimal Web is that a site created using only HTML tags will look terrible on mobile browsers, and won't look great on desktop browsers. You need to include additional...
One of the problems of The Minimal Web is that a site created using only HTML tags will look terrible on mobile browsers, and won't look great on desktop browsers. You need to include additional CSS to make it work on mobile.
And as soon as you introduce CSS you introduce a world of possibilities. Instead of relying on sane choices made by W3C or browser makers we're now stuck with a billion and one weird choices made by every single person who makes a website. Of those people about 98% have zero knowledge of design, accessibility, usability etc so you get a load of websites that are hard to use for most people and which exclude a bunch of people.
Not sure where you got that idea from. Browsers apply default styling for HTML that work extremely well on whatever devices they’re being run on. No custom CSS is required for mobile support or...
Not sure where you got that idea from. Browsers apply default styling for HTML that work extremely well on whatever devices they’re being run on. No custom CSS is required for mobile support or “responsive” design.
I think people forget that the web, at its core, is highly accessible and responsive. It was specifically designed that way. It’s all the dumb things developers and designers do that make it not so in the first place. It’s simultaneously hilarious and frustrating watching them then go into conniptions trying to fix problems they created in to begin with.
Therein lies the rub, because it looks really bad on a widescreen monitor. The text lines are so long that it's not clear where it wraps. The font size is uncomfortable, at least to my eyes. It...
Exemplary
Here’s a classic example ... Looks great on mobile to me.
Therein lies the rub, because it looks really bad on a widescreen monitor. The text lines are so long that it's not clear where it wraps. The font size is uncomfortable, at least to my eyes. It uses a pure white background which is brighter than I find comfortable as well.
Compare that to bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com, which applies some CSS. Immediately I am able to follow the content without having to restore down my browser window to reduce the line lengths. The contrast is more comfortable, and the font-size is more accessible.
Browsers apply default styling for HTML that work extremely well on whatever devices they’re being run on.
I've built a lot of responsive web pages, and I promise you that the web is not responsive by default. Even simple layouts, like a sidebar and main body, require CSS to work correctly on all screen sizes. Tables are not responsive in the least, and all other forms of layout (position, floats, flex, grid) require CSS to work.
Just to put it in perspective, here's a handful of random responsiveness fixes I might make when working on a site:
Columns need to move to stacks correctly, and have the appropriate margins between elements. In some cases, the order needs to be adjusted.
Floated image in articles need to clear their float on mobile, and either stretch to 100% width or center with a margin
Font size must be readable on all devices, and pixel densities. Dynamic font sizes with constraints are often the best approach.
Galleries should reflow to avoid negative space, but also maintain a correct ratio on all images and not stretch them
Bullet points should scale from 1-3 columns depending on available space
Grid items should grow their height to match the largest cell
Inputs should stretch to container width on mobile
The print stylesheet should remove unnecessary elements, like sidebars and footers, without eliminating essential content
Touch targets need to be large enough for both precision (mice) and imprecision (fingers). Elements cannot be too close together on mobile.
Could you build a website without any of these features? Sure. But people like having images and forms that look right on their device, and layouts that allow things to be placed beside each other.
For a more familiar example, consider Tildes. The Tildes sidebar is always-visible on desktop, and hidden by default on mobile, to optimize screen space and utility. If not placed on the side with CSS, you would either need to scroll past it in the header on every page load to get to the content, or scroll all the way down to the footer to access it. Not ideal.
Sidenote: Yes I know you can make a purely HTML sidebar using frames, but that was a terrible experience, even in the early web.
Tildes also sets the depth of threads dynamically based on your screen size. Threads can grow many layers deep on desktop, but must begin to stack on mobile. This feature would be impossible without some clever CSS, so the site might look more like an interactive Microsoft Word document.
I know there's a lot of annoying web design trends out there. "Hero Images" I could certainly do without. But I suspect that for every annoying feature you find, there's a dozen more that make things just work for you without you realizing it.
I'm now about to click the Post Comment button, which has CSS to indicate hover and active states to give me visual feedback that the action was completed successfully. Wish me luck!
Personal take, but I would suggest that’s actually an issue with your browser’s built-in default styling. Yes I am aware this is ultimately just CSS. I think quite a few of the examples you cite...
Therein lies the rub, because it looks really bad on a widescreen monitor.
Personal take, but I would suggest that’s actually an issue with your browser’s built-in default styling. Yes I am aware this is ultimately just CSS.
I've built a lot of responsive web pages, and I promise you that the web is not responsive by default. Even simple layouts, like a sidebar and main body, require CSS to work correctly on all screen sizes. Tables are not responsive in the least, and all other forms of layout (position, floats, flex, grid) require CSS to work.
I think quite a few of the examples you cite actually demonstrate the point about over design. Fonts, for example. In many cases these as best left to the user agent and in particular the user’s preferred settings. Accessibility is a key angle there - people’s needs are diverse when it comes to typefaces and text sizing. Locking in site-specific styling with “constraints” has the nasty side effect of overriding user settings, rendering the site inaccessible to many. My workplace has recently installed HelperBird to help correct this - again having to fix what web developers broke in the first place.
Ultimately I’m not arguing for “No CSS!!!” The underlying point here is that a minimalist approach can be superior in many ways, and we should be trying to preserve and enhance the core behaviour of the web rather than constantly messing with its conventions.
I think that's a fine position, and I'm not arguing against minimalism. My own website is a mere 13KB (about half of the linked site above), so I appreciate the value in simplicity. I did want to...
The underlying point here is that a minimalist approach can be superior in many ways
I think that's a fine position, and I'm not arguing against minimalism. My own website is a mere 13KB (about half of the linked site above), so I appreciate the value in simplicity. I did want to address the claim that websites are responsive by default though, because that hasn't been my experience.
Personal take, but I would suggest that’s actually an issue with your browser’s built-in default styling.
The default stylesheet could be (and maybe should be) improved so that unstyled pages look and feel better on all platforms, but realistically that's unlikely to happen due to vendor's focus on backwards compatibility. There's plenty of things I'd love to "fix" on the web if we ever got a do-over (hello box model), but we just have to make do with what we have.
Regarding the comment on font constraints, I'd like to clarify that this is to specifically avoid scaling getting out of control. For example a font that applies a size of 1vw (1% view width) will look great most of the time, but will be way too tiny on mobile, and absolutely massive on 1440p displays. The constraints are there to set a minimum and maximum that keep the font being readable, even at the extreme ends.
This shouldn't have any harm on accessibility because those features, such as browser zoom, work by scaling the whole thing up. They don't set the font-size of the element directly. This sidesteps a lot of problems with rem units, and also allows media queries to still work. Browser in general are pretty smart about this, and perform a lot of niceties like requesting the correct image resolution based on the container size.
I don't, but I'll write it up! I'm okay with the box model in the sense that everything is a rectangle. What I mean is that the default calculation for size is based on the content box of...
I'd also be interested to hear your do-over shortlist, if you have it handy.
I don't, but I'll write it up!
I'm okay with the box model in the sense that everything is a rectangle. What I mean is that the default calculation for size is based on the content box of elements, and not the border box. The vast majority of CSS resets out there set the box-sizing: border-box on all elements to change this behaviour.
There's plenty else I'd change:
Position values are poorly named and unintuitive. Absolute elements being relative to their nearest-relative ancestor means they can only reference one element.
Absolute elements are completely removed from document flow, which makes them difficult to use safely outside of fixed-width designs. I'd like to be able to allow absolute offsets while still reserving their original space in the document. I'd probably decouple this into a separate declaration called "reserves-space".
Floats should have the ability to self-clear. We often only want to float one element, which necessitates a clearfix hack or clearing div to follow.
Controversial one, but divs should allow the ability to self-close.
Margin collapse is far too finicky. It's not a bad idea, but it's vertical only, and dynamically invoked. This feature should be opt-in and consistent.
Z-index stacking contexts are difficult to reason about. It seems to me that every branching node (ie. has two children) should generate its own stacking context, rather than the current rules which includes things like "elements that have an opacity set".
Everything about quirks mode. We don't deal with it much nowadays, but that was painful.
This is too big to throw into a list item, but frankly, the entire cascade model is a bad one. There's a reason that frameworks like BEM evolved to sidestep it completely. Most of the time, you are focused on a specific part of a page. A widget of some kind. The rules that affect it should not affect the rest of the page, and vice-versa, so having to keep all of that consideration in your head just adds mental burden.
There are situations where cascading makes sense, such as font-sizes or background-colors which shouldn't constantly reset. However I'd argue that most styles should not cascade down, like margins or borders. Browsers try to help out here by including default styles for most elements with varying specificities, but this leads to unintuitive behaviour and requires developers to learn all of the most common default styles to know when the cascade will continue, and when it will stop suddenly.
For example, I'm sure every webdev has tried setting a simple text color, then been annoyed when the link color isn't updated to match. If you're marking your links with other decorations like an underline, this is undesirable behaviour. Even worse, all those pseudo-link elements (hover, active, etc) have their own built-in styles that require updating too. The cascade suddenly and unexpectedly stopped.
I feel this is a bad model altogether. Instead of styles cascading down, we should lean on selectors to perform this work. eg. article * {color: black;} would opt-in to this cascading behaviour, rather than have it be automatic.
To those crying out in dismay about the supposed performance cost of the wildcard selector: it's not as bad as you've been led to believe. And if browsers functioned this way by design, it would be optimized in just the way that the cascade works now.
But we can't talk about the cascade without then talking about specificity. This is how the developer is supposed to address cascade concerns: by remembering a list of numerical values associated with different selectors to understand when and where they will take effect on the page.
Do I even need to explain why this is terrible? I've been doing this for 15 years and I still can't tell if you from memory if a parent selector (0:0:2) will override a chained class (0:2:0), or if an attribute selector (0:1:1) will override a pseudo element (0:1:1). I had to punch these into a selector calculator just to find their respective specificities.
How do most web devs deal with this? We ignore it. We pick specific classes and use that to anchor ourselves in the document. Sometimes we slap an !important in and hope nobody notices. Most of the time that you get into complex selectors, it's because the project has grown far too complicated, or because you're working in a context where you can't control the DOM, or you've built on multiple layers and need to keep reaching for higher specificities just to apply your changes.
This is why atomic frameworks are so popular right now. Every time somebody knocks Tailwinds for "ignoring how the web is designed", I say yeah, that's the point. It's a bad design, and these systems sidestep it completely. It sounds pretty nice to spend less time naming classes, and worry less about pesky things like the cascade and specificity.
But all is not lost. The current maintainers of CSS have come around to understand its pitfalls. They're introducing new tools to manage these problems, like @layer for setting declaration scopes, and offering no-specificity selectors like :where() in place of :is(). But it will take time to adapt libraries, frameworks, and themes over to these systems so we can finally stop worrying so much about the 30,000 lines of CSS behind us that might interfere with our widget, and just start writing code.
Neither of these are true, and as soon as the user zooms they have to scroll the page around, which defeats the purpose of using the viewport meta tag.
Looks the same in all your shitty browsers
The motherfucker's accessible to every asshole that visits your site
Neither of these are true, and as soon as the user zooms they have to scroll the page around, which defeats the purpose of using the viewport meta tag.
I haven't seen this mentioned, so here it goes. There is a curated search engine called Marginalia Search solving exactly the problem discussed in the article. It is quite similar to Wibby, but...
I haven't seen this mentioned, so here it goes. There is a curated search engine called Marginalia Search solving exactly the problem discussed in the article. It is quite similar to Wibby, but perhaps has more coverage since it indexes about 106,000,000 documents and has options to also include JS based sites.
There are ways to be minimal but also responsive and accessible. There's a balance to be had, and none of that balance has to involve the modern, bloated, commercially awful web. I am a fan of...
There are ways to be minimal but also responsive and accessible. There's a balance to be had, and none of that balance has to involve the modern, bloated, commercially awful web. I am a fan of web-minimalism, text-prioritized, highly-efficient sites, but I also think, given a respect for non-tech-savvy users, and the current state of browsers, that minimal sites can and should do the bare minimums to make themselves accessible and easily readable.
I get where this author is coming from but their site looks awful on modern screen resolutions.
I mean, heck, I use bearblog for my own site and its themes/etc are responsive by default. Yet bearblog's entire M.O. is to be minimal, fast, efficient, respectful, text-focused, etc. CSS is kept to a minimum, privacy and efficiency is respected, etc. It's not difficult to accomplish a baseline mixture of a minimal, yet accessible web
Assuming this is your personal article, which it may not be, i thought I'd offer a suggestion. Before I got through the first few sentences, I started to experience some difficulty staying focused...
Assuming this is your personal article, which it may not be, i thought I'd offer a suggestion. Before I got through the first few sentences, I started to experience some difficulty staying focused on the text. This may be just me, but I thought I might offer a friendly suggestion to increase readability. Using black text on a white background isn't necessarily bad, but having it so tight on the page without enough breaks or pauses can become difficult. Shifting toward a very dark gray text could help ease visual stress. But also, traditionally, using a serif font for tight body copy helps add enough differentiation to the letters that it can increase the ease of reading. Using a sans serif font for body copy is less common, but it can be done effectively by paying close attention to letter spacing and line height to offset the tendency of the letters to begin to blend into one uniform visual mass. This particular font looks like it has some room between each letter but then the spacing between each line feels tight. If you like this font, perhaps increase the line height by a fraction? Or if you like the spacing between the lines as is, and still prefer a sans serif body text, perhaps play around with a different font that keeps the individual letter spacing more tight? I could be wrong, but just figured I'd toss in my two cents for readability. And if this wasn't your own original article, then obviously I'm a just barking into the wind. Good luck!
A lot of hacker aesthetic websites use monospace fonts to harken back to the early computing days, but I agree, it is hard to read. The page itself though is built with modern CSS. I like the...
A lot of hacker aesthetic websites use monospace fonts to harken back to the early computing days, but I agree, it is hard to read.
The page itself though is built with modern CSS. I like the trick of using width: min(65ch, 95vw) for the body contents. Though could maybe bump it to 80 characters, to match earlier terminals.
Good point! Funny and true. I have a tendency to overthink what I write online in fear of the possible imagined repercussions. Neurotic ADHD? Effects of engaging in other toxic social networks?...
Good point! Funny and true. I have a tendency to overthink what I write online in fear of the possible imagined repercussions. Neurotic ADHD? Effects of engaging in other toxic social networks? And I wind up trying to be so thorough that my comments drag on. Worst is that I think I even end up sounding self-righteous which I'm basically the opposite irl.
I found it very readable and think most of your suggestions are wrong. :) But that's a related issue. Browsers should've doubled down on making user CSS easy to use instead of just quietly...
I found it very readable and think most of your suggestions are wrong. :)
But that's a related issue. Browsers should've doubled down on making user CSS easy to use instead of just quietly forgetting it existed. Instead, we went down the path of the author deciding what font you should read their text in, and allowing website CSS to become so complex that this is barely feasible now.
It is easy, it's just overridden. For example, in Chrome: chrome://settings/fonts?search=fonts. The page only needs to specify font type (and do it responsibly), and it's done. Unless you mean...
It is easy, it's just overridden. For example, in Chrome: chrome://settings/fonts?search=fonts. The page only needs to specify font type (and do it responsibly), and it's done.
Unless you mean disable the override. Then yeah...
That covers fonts, assuming the page specified its defaults responsibly (I admire your optimism). I dream of a world where we don't get all excited every time a site adds dark mode, because people...
That covers fonts, assuming the page specified its defaults responsibly (I admire your optimism).
I dream of a world where we don't get all excited every time a site adds dark mode, because people who want dark mode on things can just go set their foreground and background colors and all pages respect them automatically.
I read this article back when it was published, and I feel the same way now as I did then.
I feel absolute hopelessness.
I would love to see the "minimal web" or Web 1.0 brought back. Specifically, I would love to see a resurgence of niche websites and forums. But I just don't see it happening. Most people are just not interested enough. Even those of us who are interested don't seem to have the energy or the motivation to push for it. And on the other side, you have the large corporations pushing, really hard, for exactly the opposite of that.
I suspect the World Wide Web will continue to move toward becoming a platform for advertising and other commerce activity, and will become ever more hostile to those of us who yearn for the simplicity of text based communities and a distinct lack of consumerism.
I do feel we are seeing the collapse of the web, especially accelerated by LLMs. The web will become a place filled with AI generated articles and AI generated comments replying to them. Each sneaking in mentions of some product or service. Already many ads you see are AI generated and landing pages for businesses are filled with AI text. It’s completely useless, meaningless content.
That said, there is hope, just far away from mainstream web. There’s been a resurgence of the “small web”. People are building personal sites on neocities, chatting on BBSs on Pubnix servers or posting long, thoughtful text articles on Gopher/Gemini protocols. There’s a higher barrier of entry to participation, but much like the invite system on Tildes, that barrier protects the communities from rampant corporate greed.
If you've run an email server, forum, or small blog, you'll be familiar with how much spam there is on the web. An unprotected form can generate hundreds of messages in a single day. The spammers have an extreme amount of resources available to them, and are constantly evolving new tricks to make the web a worse place.
And yet... most people don't have to deal with that. We use filters, captchas, and human curation to clean it up, so most of what people see online is real content by other humans. Sure we occasionally click onto a search result that rips content from reddit or StackOverflow, but 99% of the time, we get the source material.
I expect LLMs and AI to offer new opportunities for spammers, but I don't think it's going to be the dystopia you're envisioning. AI will provide new tools for spamming, but also for catching spammers. New mechanisms will be introduced as needed, like SPF and DKIM for email, and the cat and mouse game will continue.
I don't think the wasteland of AI generated content shows itself in StackOverflow comments or other behind-a-captcha discussion forums. Where I see it most is on self-hosted sites that clutter Google results with content that looks superficially relevant, but surfaces no original insight or work.
Google any home improvement task, for example, and you'll get dozens of pages of listacles regurgitating each other's questionable advice, but few truly original pieces made by someone who has actually done the work.
Search for the best commuter motorcycles, and get treated to a horde of sites that seems to have just crawled spec sheets and other lists.
That's why people suffix their searches with forums they trust: stack overflow, reddit, advrider, etc.
Yeah, it's all becoming one big ad toy.
Colorful moving noisy stuff to capture monke's attention, then make it angry, busy, and easily parted with its money.
This site kinda emphasizes how I'd like a modern minimal web to look like.
I definitely wouldn't want to got back to 90s-2000s web design, but this site is both nice looking and lightweight, it loads about 30x faster than new reddit would on a phone using data.
New reddit would eat so much data so quickly that I had to make sure to always use old reddit, not just because it was better overall, but it used so much less data as well.
Since the Reddit API stuff, I have been going on Reddit from the browser for a few subreddits I still need (time spent there is down by like 95%!), and Reddit SUCKS in a web browser on mobile. It takes forever to load and then when it does load, sometimes you start reading the post and the comments fail to load so the whole webpage gets replaced by a "failed to load" message. Everything I needed had loaded, why would you do that!
It's better with old.reddit.com. Just be ready to zoom in and out a lot.
Lol, I use old reddit even on my phone. The clunkiness is far outweighed by something lighter-weight which just works and has full functionality.
I'm in complete agreement. I don't want to go back to iframes and, god forbid, flash elements everywhere - it's very much the type of websites and the smaller but very intimate communities that I yearn for. Tildes absolutely ticks that box for me in terms of having a general community, and I really have come to love this site in it's current form.
What I really miss is making a connection with people online. I used to frequent forums and get to know usernames. I would see a name and know what to expect from them before even reading a post. I miss having forum friends - and not the modern concept of social media friends, but people I'd made a connection with and enjoyed catching up with. I am at least seeing some of the former part here as I start to recognise regular users.
I kind of wish Tildes would emphasize usernames more, as just like Reddit, I tend to skip over them because they're just not catching my eye in the way they would with an old forum.
Maybe we need to bring back animated footers and profile pictures... (Ick)
I'm not down for anything which requires images or gifs on Tildes -- the little logo at the top being the only graphic is enough. I think a less icky solution would be to allow user notes. If I could tag say your profile with "dude who hates Chevys" that'd be fine for me to remember users and my experiences with them.
No, I'm just being facetious. I just want something that makes usernames stand out a little bit more for me, as my eyes just pass over them without even registering.
I feel like on classic forums they tended to stand out for me much more and I'm not sure why.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, this is pretty much the same as reddit but without user flairs or avatars as far as I can tell.
I don't think anything is making you skip over them, you're choosing not to read them.
I never want avatars, and at least right now user flairs don't make much sense imo.
They are referring to the days of forums for each topic where the user name and such was off to the side and it out emphasis on you as an individual as it stick out. Prime would have unique profile pictures and their location and footers with quotes or comments. It made people unique and recognizable so overtime you'd recognize and know a lot of the community.
With the reddit like responses you get a bit better communication strings but you lose a lot of the individually and community (not all) that you had with the more traditional forums.
I think those of us who lived through the 90s should document it in various forms conveying how really good web 1.0 was in many areas relative to today's web even though it wasn't perfect. Write more articles such as the OP or this one I've written, create more documentaries. Hopefully, this will motivate and inspire the gen-z to create more of that.
But sadly, I'm also seeing a dark and selfish side of gen-z, the capitalist side that only sees open source contributions as a way to plug their resume for big tech jobs, not the spirit or ideals of it. Let's just hope this side doesn't prevail and more of the other side prevails in the end.
I think that's driven by a need to survive - each generation seems to have a tougher time financially whilst the world around them gets technologically and scientifically more advanced, and those with money get wealthier. A gen-z (or really any post-boomer generation) born into a family with a reasonable amount of money will do just fine but the rest largely struggle and are left fighting for scraps - it would take a hugely strong willed personality to not become selfish in that situation, and it would take a strong willed personality with charisma to bring everyone else along for that ride and break the cycle.
I just don't see that happening with the control over the media preventing such a charismatic individual from becoming known.
There are a lot of academics and other bloggers out there who are producing content as a kind of labour of love. A lot of them can be found by clicking around quite a bit on related websites or by using Marginalia Search.
When I was young, my big sister started a BBS out of our house. It was a super fancy one with 2 networked 386's (one of which was built from spare parts of discarded PCs) and 2 dedicated phone lines. That's right - we could have 2 users at the same time! We doubled the odds of getting past the busy signal versus other bulletin boards.
It was magical, and nothing has really matched the intimacy of those BBS forums since. She actually met the person who is now her spouse through it.
I loved the old text-based forums, but I'll also be the first to admit that centralizing everything is handy. I miss the BBS and IRC days, but I'm not sure I'd go back to it. Reddit at its prime was really something special once you found your place. It was basically like being logged into a hundred forums all at once.
And I think Tildes is on the right track to become a good place for good conversation where more effort can be placed into the content rather than the search for the content as opposed to searching a thousand websites for the correct forum.
The slow, careful rollout of Tildes is allowing us to nurture a community based on quality conversations, and I think that if it continues to be carefully managed that we can strike a balance between the quality of the old web and the usability of the modern web.
Check out Gemini protocol. It has early web 1.0 vibe.
Gemini is an interesting experiment, but I have stopped using it. The problem for me with their approach is that it creates a separate, disjoint space next to the one we are on now. I don't want that. I want all the content, including the stuff on the regular web, but presented in a minimalistic way.
A long time ago I had the idea to build an experimental browser that would utilize the way websites are supposed to be built to construct such a better interface. Namely by separating HTML for semantic structure, CSS for presentation and Javascript for dynamic parts. The browser would ignore CSS and Javascript, parse the structural HTML and present the content in a general sober minimal interface.
This was doomed to fail, because hardly any website is built like that and you would not be able to surf the web with it. But sometimes I wished I had gone through with it, just to see what it would look like.
Maybe I should do it anyway. Maybe the limitations can turn into a quality filter. "If I can't view this website, it was probably rubbish anyway" Or something like that.
Firefox's "Reader View" does something like that. I find myself clicking into Reader View a lot, these days.
This is the reason why many interesting people went to Gemini, to find others that are tired with casual web.
I also don't find Gemini as fantastic as some of my friends do, because, well... why not just use text browser and browse interesting webpages? The point they make is as with Fediverse, people that have some particular mindset are using it and (to some extent) not everybody else. That makes it easier to find interesting stuff inside Gemini or Fediverse.
It resembles me a little bit tildes.net, because well, recently, besides RSS, it's been my Internet frontpage. It's so slow and interesting that I don't really need the rest of the Internet. Things I find interesting in the Internet I just post here and one Lemmy instance, that's all. Hence, I don't find space for Gemini.
Be the change you wish to see in the world. Porkbun offers cheap domain names and static website hosting all-in-one. Before Porkbun, Google Domains offered cheap domain names as well and it was easy to hook up my blogspot blogs to those domains, and there was the added benefit of free email domains hooked up to Gmail. (Unfortunately, Google Domains got sold to Squarespace, that's why I migrated over to Porkbun.)
I made a portfolio website, then I bought a domain name for a game I was working on, then I made a static website for some of my personal activist causes, and then I snagged some domain for an app idea I have. It's fun!
I used the "motherfucking website" and its subsequent spinoff websites as a guide for styling my activist static website in a very simple manner.
I'm having a lot of fun and it's not too expensive. Like $12 per year for the domain names, and maybe $30 per year for the hosting of the Porkbun static website. The other websites route to blogs, so my hosting is free.
I really like Porkbun's prices and have bought 2 domain names through them. For hosting I'm using GitHub and Jekyll, which works pretty good for a free static site. Now that I have fiber I'm planning on hosting my site from my own internal server once I'm confident I can secure it well enough.
When I saw videos on cubas streetnet I was legit jealous. I legit think when capitalism completely kills the internet as we know it, some form of streetnet via locally distributed wireless mesh nodes and home-run webservers will crop up in the US, first in college towns, then nationwide. It'll take a while, but it's the true Internets best hope to keep it from the corpos.
I really should pursue the problem I have with my DNS and should start some forum on my domain. Not that it would matter or get actually used, but I just think if we want to have "the old web", we have to make it real by ourselves.
Ooohhhh, I have a few things to say on this:
There's this great search engine https://crowdview.ai/ (ignore the ".ai" thing, it's just a search engine) that's specifically for searching forums. Sadly it still includes reddit, but
-site:reddit.comworks a treat and it doesn't have blogspam by design.We need Tildes tags for both "the minimal web" (and a good definition to go with the tag - if you're wondering why, that probably deserves it's own whole post TBH), and/or for whatever people call "digital minimalism" or "[minimalism (computing)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism_(computing\))" nowadays (fuck Cal Newport and his shitty book redefining the term). Or maybe we just need a proper list of tags, so that people don't invent their own one-off version of the tag (e.g. imagine "minimalism", "minimalist", "minimal", so it's impossible to reliably find the tagged posts)
"Make it easy for people to host their own sites" - I've been thinking that the lack of this is a major cause of centralization in general. Like, why isn't there an amazingly-intuitive router interface that lets you one-click set up a Minecraft server instead of having to dick around with port forwarding? It's not like "server hardware" is expensive; most people have an old phone/laptop lying around somewhere that could still function as a home server for a website or such. I think IPv6 will help (once it becomes ubiquitous), because it will make it trivial to obtain a static IP without paying $$$. One of the barriers to IPv6 is actually open-source software mostly having IPv4 instructions and not IPv6, making it harder to set up even for people who want IPv6.
Plus, making it easy to set up a server would open a whole new avenue of community contributions - instead of having a community Discord, people could have a community <alternative, idk, Zulip?> set up on someone's server (which is technically currently possible but a PITA to both set up and deploy for the uninitiated). Of course, some peoples' internet connection is shit so maybe have a thing where someone has a backup server? IDK.
In theorie you are right, in practice I do think you are glossing over software in general. Security is still important and exposing things to the web without proper configuration, security updates and regular maintaining the entire is asking for trouble.
@wes in their comment hits the nail on the head with what sort of stuff you can expect when you have open forms. But it isn't limited to spam bots, or rather those spam bots very often run on all sorts of machines that were not properly patched and are no hosting malware as part of a bot net.
Port forwarding isn't the issue, in fact without the ability to block incoming traffic at the doorstep the internet would have collapsed a long time ago.
And that ignores just the simple reality that doing anything other than a simple static website is going to be complex to set up and maintain.
I think this is missing the point. The OP is saying, router software sucks ass and is three layers of unintuitive etc. Port forwarding is a pretty good security model, it's just non-standard across ISPs and hard to work with.
But what if instead of exposing just the minimum necessary for setting up a server on other hardware, routers themselves provided a basic server configuration? Non-technical minded people manage to set up ex. Minecraft servers on other platforms all the time: once you have a server on the internet, the incantations needed to set up something can be fairly easily looked up without any broader knowledge.
So if everyone had a server they could access and use provided by their ISP, what would this do against centralization on the internet? Is that a low enough barrier to entry that someone could spin up an IRC server, or a Zulip instance, or a shared file server, or...
No, I got that part. I am just saying that this really isn't is what prevents people from widely hosting their own stuff on their own computers.
No, as my entire security argument still stands there for the most part. It also would be incredibly expensive for ISPs to provide. Which is the problem underlying most of it. Hosting anything on the internet is not free, you have to pay in one of two ways:
The issue really isn't that there are no avenues to host your own things. It is that it simply isn't free and many people are not willing to put in either time or money.
Even more so if we limit the discussion to simply satic websites. There is no shortage of options to host a simple website.
Man thank you for that crowdview.ai recommendation. For the longest time I have always preferred forum posts for finding out answers to things I'm working on or researching but never thought to look and see if there was a dedicated forum search engine.
I feel like the author isn't engaging with the primary obstacle to his idea, which is that intelligent, powerful commercial interests will work to subvert the project as soon as it starts to become successful.
This is not a one-line "duh" concern you can implement in a weekend. This is the primary concern that will make or break your project. The only way this project will succeed is if a group of people are willing to spend substantial amounts of time fighting this battle every day, forever.
Prioritizing quality content over spam is the core challenge that every search engine deals with; all of your most important architectural decisions need to be in service to that goal. That's why I'm very skeptical that federation is a good addition to this project. Federation is basically opening a data port for spammers to pour spam directly into your index. If you're going to federate, you're going to have to be very choosy about who you accept connections from, to the point where there are probably simpler ways to share data with a small group of dedicated admins.
This is a cool project idea, but I think solving the problems that are crippling Google is going to require a more paranoid and defensive mindset than the author shows here. If we've learned anything from the cryptocurrency debacle, it should be not to underestimate the resources, perseverance, and technical cunning people are willing to throw at a get-rich-quick scheme.
One of the problems of The Minimal Web is that a site created using only HTML tags will look terrible on mobile browsers, and won't look great on desktop browsers. You need to include additional CSS to make it work on mobile.
And as soon as you introduce CSS you introduce a world of possibilities. Instead of relying on sane choices made by W3C or browser makers we're now stuck with a billion and one weird choices made by every single person who makes a website. Of those people about 98% have zero knowledge of design, accessibility, usability etc so you get a load of websites that are hard to use for most people and which exclude a bunch of people.
Not sure where you got that idea from. Browsers apply default styling for HTML that work extremely well on whatever devices they’re being run on. No custom CSS is required for mobile support or “responsive” design.
Here’s a classic example (language warning)
Looks great on mobile to me.
I think people forget that the web, at its core, is highly accessible and responsive. It was specifically designed that way. It’s all the dumb things developers and designers do that make it not so in the first place. It’s simultaneously hilarious and frustrating watching them then go into conniptions trying to fix problems they created in to begin with.
Therein lies the rub, because it looks really bad on a widescreen monitor. The text lines are so long that it's not clear where it wraps. The font size is uncomfortable, at least to my eyes. It uses a pure white background which is brighter than I find comfortable as well.
Compare that to bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com, which applies some CSS. Immediately I am able to follow the content without having to restore down my browser window to reduce the line lengths. The contrast is more comfortable, and the font-size is more accessible.
I've built a lot of responsive web pages, and I promise you that the web is not responsive by default. Even simple layouts, like a sidebar and main body, require CSS to work correctly on all screen sizes. Tables are not responsive in the least, and all other forms of layout (position, floats, flex, grid) require CSS to work.
Just to put it in perspective, here's a handful of random responsiveness fixes I might make when working on a site:
Could you build a website without any of these features? Sure. But people like having images and forms that look right on their device, and layouts that allow things to be placed beside each other.
For a more familiar example, consider Tildes. The Tildes sidebar is always-visible on desktop, and hidden by default on mobile, to optimize screen space and utility. If not placed on the side with CSS, you would either need to scroll past it in the header on every page load to get to the content, or scroll all the way down to the footer to access it. Not ideal.
Sidenote: Yes I know you can make a purely HTML sidebar using frames, but that was a terrible experience, even in the early web.
Tildes also sets the depth of threads dynamically based on your screen size. Threads can grow many layers deep on desktop, but must begin to stack on mobile. This feature would be impossible without some clever CSS, so the site might look more like an interactive Microsoft Word document.
I know there's a lot of annoying web design trends out there. "Hero Images" I could certainly do without. But I suspect that for every annoying feature you find, there's a dozen more that make things just work for you without you realizing it.
I'm now about to click the Post Comment button, which has CSS to indicate hover and active states to give me visual feedback that the action was completed successfully. Wish me luck!
Personal take, but I would suggest that’s actually an issue with your browser’s built-in default styling. Yes I am aware this is ultimately just CSS.
I think quite a few of the examples you cite actually demonstrate the point about over design. Fonts, for example. In many cases these as best left to the user agent and in particular the user’s preferred settings. Accessibility is a key angle there - people’s needs are diverse when it comes to typefaces and text sizing. Locking in site-specific styling with “constraints” has the nasty side effect of overriding user settings, rendering the site inaccessible to many. My workplace has recently installed HelperBird to help correct this - again having to fix what web developers broke in the first place.
Ultimately I’m not arguing for “No CSS!!!” The underlying point here is that a minimalist approach can be superior in many ways, and we should be trying to preserve and enhance the core behaviour of the web rather than constantly messing with its conventions.
I think that's a fine position, and I'm not arguing against minimalism. My own website is a mere 13KB (about half of the linked site above), so I appreciate the value in simplicity. I did want to address the claim that websites are responsive by default though, because that hasn't been my experience.
The default stylesheet could be (and maybe should be) improved so that unstyled pages look and feel better on all platforms, but realistically that's unlikely to happen due to vendor's focus on backwards compatibility. There's plenty of things I'd love to "fix" on the web if we ever got a do-over (hello box model), but we just have to make do with what we have.
Regarding the comment on font constraints, I'd like to clarify that this is to specifically avoid scaling getting out of control. For example a font that applies a size of
1vw(1% view width) will look great most of the time, but will be way too tiny on mobile, and absolutely massive on 1440p displays. The constraints are there to set a minimum and maximum that keep the font being readable, even at the extreme ends.This shouldn't have any harm on accessibility because those features, such as browser zoom, work by scaling the whole thing up. They don't set the font-size of the element directly. This sidesteps a lot of problems with rem units, and also allows media queries to still work. Browser in general are pretty smart about this, and perform a lot of niceties like requesting the correct image resolution based on the container size.
Could you elaborate? I somewhat like the box model.
I'd also be interested to hear your do-over shortlist, if you have it handy.
I don't, but I'll write it up!
I'm okay with the box model in the sense that everything is a rectangle. What I mean is that the default calculation for size is based on the content box of elements, and not the border box. The vast majority of CSS resets out there set the
box-sizing: border-boxon all elements to change this behaviour.There's plenty else I'd change:
This is too big to throw into a list item, but frankly, the entire cascade model is a bad one. There's a reason that frameworks like BEM evolved to sidestep it completely. Most of the time, you are focused on a specific part of a page. A widget of some kind. The rules that affect it should not affect the rest of the page, and vice-versa, so having to keep all of that consideration in your head just adds mental burden.
There are situations where cascading makes sense, such as font-sizes or background-colors which shouldn't constantly reset. However I'd argue that most styles should not cascade down, like margins or borders. Browsers try to help out here by including default styles for most elements with varying specificities, but this leads to unintuitive behaviour and requires developers to learn all of the most common default styles to know when the cascade will continue, and when it will stop suddenly.
For example, I'm sure every webdev has tried setting a simple text color, then been annoyed when the link color isn't updated to match. If you're marking your links with other decorations like an underline, this is undesirable behaviour. Even worse, all those pseudo-link elements (hover, active, etc) have their own built-in styles that require updating too. The cascade suddenly and unexpectedly stopped.
I feel this is a bad model altogether. Instead of styles cascading down, we should lean on selectors to perform this work. eg.
article * {color: black;}would opt-in to this cascading behaviour, rather than have it be automatic.To those crying out in dismay about the supposed performance cost of the wildcard selector: it's not as bad as you've been led to believe. And if browsers functioned this way by design, it would be optimized in just the way that the cascade works now.
But we can't talk about the cascade without then talking about specificity. This is how the developer is supposed to address cascade concerns: by remembering a list of numerical values associated with different selectors to understand when and where they will take effect on the page.
Do I even need to explain why this is terrible? I've been doing this for 15 years and I still can't tell if you from memory if a parent selector (
0:0:2) will override a chained class (0:2:0), or if an attribute selector (0:1:1) will override a pseudo element (0:1:1). I had to punch these into a selector calculator just to find their respective specificities.How do most web devs deal with this? We ignore it. We pick specific classes and use that to anchor ourselves in the document. Sometimes we slap an
!importantin and hope nobody notices. Most of the time that you get into complex selectors, it's because the project has grown far too complicated, or because you're working in a context where you can't control the DOM, or you've built on multiple layers and need to keep reaching for higher specificities just to apply your changes.This is why atomic frameworks are so popular right now. Every time somebody knocks Tailwinds for "ignoring how the web is designed", I say yeah, that's the point. It's a bad design, and these systems sidestep it completely. It sounds pretty nice to spend less time naming classes, and worry less about pesky things like the cascade and specificity.
But all is not lost. The current maintainers of CSS have come around to understand its pitfalls. They're introducing new tools to manage these problems, like
@layerfor setting declaration scopes, and offering no-specificity selectors like:where()in place of:is(). But it will take time to adapt libraries, frameworks, and themes over to these systems so we can finally stop worrying so much about the 30,000 lines of CSS behind us that might interfere with our widget, and just start writing code.e: Typo
Drop 3kb and you can join the 10kb club!
Dude this post needs a trigger warning. /s
Very much agree though. For anything not pure text it's a lot of work to look good on multiple platforms.
All those are your choice. You set the preferred typeface on your browser.
Neither of these are true, and as soon as the user zooms they have to scroll the page around, which defeats the purpose of using the viewport meta tag.
I haven't seen this mentioned, so here it goes. There is a curated search engine called Marginalia Search solving exactly the problem discussed in the article. It is quite similar to Wibby, but perhaps has more coverage since it indexes about 106,000,000 documents and has options to also include JS based sites.
There are ways to be minimal but also responsive and accessible. There's a balance to be had, and none of that balance has to involve the modern, bloated, commercially awful web. I am a fan of web-minimalism, text-prioritized, highly-efficient sites, but I also think, given a respect for non-tech-savvy users, and the current state of browsers, that minimal sites can and should do the bare minimums to make themselves accessible and easily readable.
I get where this author is coming from but their site looks awful on modern screen resolutions.
I mean, heck, I use bearblog for my own site and its themes/etc are responsive by default. Yet bearblog's entire M.O. is to be minimal, fast, efficient, respectful, text-focused, etc. CSS is kept to a minimum, privacy and efficiency is respected, etc. It's not difficult to accomplish a baseline mixture of a minimal, yet accessible web
Looks like this is something right up my alley. Will read it later and modify my comment.
Anyone wants to pursue the minimal web? More power to you!
Assuming this is your personal article, which it may not be, i thought I'd offer a suggestion. Before I got through the first few sentences, I started to experience some difficulty staying focused on the text. This may be just me, but I thought I might offer a friendly suggestion to increase readability. Using black text on a white background isn't necessarily bad, but having it so tight on the page without enough breaks or pauses can become difficult. Shifting toward a very dark gray text could help ease visual stress. But also, traditionally, using a serif font for tight body copy helps add enough differentiation to the letters that it can increase the ease of reading. Using a sans serif font for body copy is less common, but it can be done effectively by paying close attention to letter spacing and line height to offset the tendency of the letters to begin to blend into one uniform visual mass. This particular font looks like it has some room between each letter but then the spacing between each line feels tight. If you like this font, perhaps increase the line height by a fraction? Or if you like the spacing between the lines as is, and still prefer a sans serif body text, perhaps play around with a different font that keeps the individual letter spacing more tight? I could be wrong, but just figured I'd toss in my two cents for readability. And if this wasn't your own original article, then obviously I'm a just barking into the wind. Good luck!
A lot of hacker aesthetic websites use monospace fonts to harken back to the early computing days, but I agree, it is hard to read.
The page itself though is built with modern CSS. I like the trick of using
width: min(65ch, 95vw)for the body contents. Though could maybe bump it to 80 characters, to match earlier terminals.I hope this isn't petty - but ironically I found your comment hard to read for this reason!
Good point! Funny and true. I have a tendency to overthink what I write online in fear of the possible imagined repercussions. Neurotic ADHD? Effects of engaging in other toxic social networks? And I wind up trying to be so thorough that my comments drag on. Worst is that I think I even end up sounding self-righteous which I'm basically the opposite irl.
I found it very readable and think most of your suggestions are wrong. :)
But that's a related issue. Browsers should've doubled down on making user CSS easy to use instead of just quietly forgetting it existed. Instead, we went down the path of the author deciding what font you should read their text in, and allowing website CSS to become so complex that this is barely feasible now.
But CSS is the easy language to work with!
It is easy, it's just overridden. For example, in Chrome: chrome://settings/fonts?search=fonts. The page only needs to specify font type (and do it responsibly), and it's done.
Unless you mean disable the override. Then yeah...
That covers fonts, assuming the page specified its defaults responsibly (I admire your optimism).
I dream of a world where we don't get all excited every time a site adds dark mode, because people who want dark mode on things can just go set their foreground and background colors and all pages respect them automatically.
There's actually a lot of frustration hiding behind my "responsibly".
But I couldn't agree more. I don't think I'd mind web pages being just Markdown.