2019-07-11 The breaking of the web
Today I was looking for some info on the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN). It’s a great resource for us all. They asked me to partake in a survey on the frustrations of web developers. I couldn’t answer this one question because the survey site broke: I was supposed to drag some items around to sort them, but it didn’t work. I could not skip the question, and I could not report the problem.
*Thats the very problem!* 🙄
*The problem with the web* is that is so great, so grand – we need a huge monster of a browser to use it as some people would like us to use it. Since other people are simultaneously attacking, distracting, abusing and confusing us, we need an array of defences at the same time.
- Privacy Badger
- uBlock Origin
- uMatrix
- HTTPS Everywhere
- HTTPS by default
- Decentraleyes
More attack surface, more moving parts, more parties to trust. That’s why we need a simpler web: we want smaller tools, too!
People suggested Pi-Hole. A good alternative to an adblocker. But still only an adblocker. The browser remains just as bloated.
And yes, I like text-browsers like lynx, w3m, or eww inside Emacs. But these don’t work on my mobile devices, they don’t look as good on a graphical display. I like bold and italics and underline and font families and font sizes. Just look at this site! 😅
I also contributed to two gopher clients, wrote a web based gopher client, wrote a simple text server, wrote a gopher server for my wiki, and more. It’s not perfect but it’s an important alternative we can point at and say:
“Look at it! It doesn’t need much and we could have an experience that wasn’t as distracting, as ad-filled, as tracking-encumbered, as malware infested as the current web.”
A very small subset of HTML should be enough. Basically: Markdown plus maybe another ten or twenty things? It doesn’t need much more than that!
#Web #Gopher
Comments
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“A very small subset of HTML should be enough” You know who else thinks so? Google. They call it AMP 😉
– Andreas Gohr 2019-07-11 21:38 UTC
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That is not the main problem with AMP. 😀
– Alex Schroeder 2019-07-11 22:21 UTC
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The problem is that it’s a different subset for everyone.
– deshipu 2019-07-11 22:39 UTC
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Well, part of the simplification is of course the loss of features that a subset of people pushed to be included, for sure.
– Alex Schroeder 2019-07-12 09:09 UTC
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If I were to try a text-browser on my laptop (with some version of Windows), what would you recommend?
– Ynas Midgard 2019-07-22 11:42 UTC
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Lynx. 😀
– Alex Schroeder 2019-07-22 14:17 UTC
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Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web. “We’re quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop it.” – Parimal Satyal (2917)
Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
Rediscovering the Small Web. “Most websites today are built like commercial products by professionals and marketers, optimised to draw the largest audience, generate engagement and ’convert’. But there is also a smaller, less-visible web designed by regular people to simply to share their interests and hobbies with the world. A web that is unpolished, often quirky but often also fun, creative and interesting.” – Parimal Satyal (2020)
Interesting reads on the same topic.
– Alex Schroeder 2020-05-29 07:52 UTC
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An origin story: “Being somewhat of an old-school programmer who started by writing BASIC on a C64 in the 80s, modern web software seems like a towering garbage heap of ill-conceived abstractions, layered on top of another until no one even remembers code needs to run on actual hardware.” – @jk
For example, for moku pona, I wondered whether I could simply do the web request myself. It’s simple:
Right? Sadly I was getting back chunked data! Ah, right. I had forgotten about that. So, send HTTP/1.0? But what about virtual hosting? Can I send another header telling the server I don’t want the chunked encoding? And already I was angry and resolved to use a library to act as user agent. @jk
– 2020-11-23 19:24 UTC
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On android, I can’t access http:// sites both in chrome and firefox. In my case, the http server is secure because it is located on my private network. Google removed access to http site because it is unsecure in general. – Surfing the web in 2022
Also about old devices not being updated with root certificates, making them unable to access some sites. Ugh!
– Alex 2022-07-04 16:19 UTC