2019-10-02 - Unfinished rant on world wide web
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In my short time residing on gopher, i've noticed a fun and common
characteristic of most gopher users; they all seem to dislike the
current state of the modern www. Obviously that's probably the
reason why they hang out on Gopher in the first place. And that's
also why i am here. I don't like the modern web, and i quite enjoy
to read the 'rants' on how the current www is a terrible place.
They make me chuckle :)
So i started to write down some things as well. But i got bored
halfway through, as i slowly started realizing all these things are
already said better and more funny by others. Ah well... Here it is
anyway...
TLDR: Modern web sucks and gopher is cool.
Bloat
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The current web is bloated beyond reasonable dimensions. And more
bloat is added year after year. Where the total filesize of a
simple single web page could be counted in a handful of kilobytes
ten years ago, currently even the simplest web pages easily load
multiple megabytes of javascript frameworks, tracking scripts, huge
css stacks and obscenely large pictures or videos. And that would
be ok if such pages would provide awesome content and or
functionality. But we all know many, many examples of pages which
do not provide any of that; You know... these fancy landing pages
of hip companies, done in hamburger-style, with at best two
paragraphs of text, and the rest is filled with fancy vector
graphics, huge photo's and to top it off, a 300mb background video
showing some happy handsome people doing things - while being
totally irrelevant to the whole bloody page - which starts
autoplaying when you open the page.
And while i am wondering, why this bloody video even starts loading
and playing automatically - I did disable javascript didn't i? -
until i remember that thanks to HTML5, the page doesn't even need
javascript to load this stupid crap. It's all built-in, yo.
(And poof, there goes my data plan for the month...)
Not anymore content oriented
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As outlined above, the modern www is hardly content oriented
anymore. It's all about presentation. Every bloody page needs to
have their own fancy little design pushed through the troats of the
visitor, so that the whole page conforms to the branding guidelines
of the company page you're visiting. While i think of it; Maybe
this is an additional reason why html and www was favoured over
simple text-based browsing in the past, and why html slowly
transformed towards the state it's in today; Commercial parties
need to push their own branding-style onto the platform they're on.
So that means the platform needs to support custom logo's, colours
and branding-styles; html does that. Gopher doesn't. So that'd
probably be a reason why commercial parties would never be drawn to
gopher. And thats a good thing. Leave 'em on the www.
Javascript is stupid
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When i still had a graphical browser in the past (i now only use
lynx), i browsed the web with javascript disabled. The remarkable
thing is that disabling javascript, breaks half of the modern web.
It is truly amazing.
In the past, web designers had some notion about accessibility,
screen readers and blind people. Currently it seems like everybody
not browsing in 'the standard way' can go fuck themselves according
to the website's developers. So if you're not browsing in chrome or
edge or whatever with javascript, css, cookies and images enabled,
you're on your own.
The stupidity of javascript becomes apparent when you find sites
with all basic functionality hidden behind javascipt. You know;
drop-down menus depending entirely on javascript. Or fancy
css-styled div's that function as buttons to open a page which call
javascript to do that. (Basically reimplementing anchor href
functionality in bloody javascript and css)
However, if you encounter such pages, you're still lucky. I've
found quite a few pages that would just simply refuse to show
anything at all with javascript disabled. You'd see just simply a
white page of emptiness... And these were not pages of amateurs or
hobbyist, but of stock-listed companies...
It's weird that javascript is assumed to be running on the client,
and it is also weird that less and less pages now have fallback
mechanisms when it is not running. In an ideal world developers
would design pages bottom up. So start creating a fully functional
page based on standard html features. Then later add optional bells
and whistles with javascript. If JS is disabled the page is still
functional.
Honestly, if you're a developer that makes an html page that NEEDS
javascript to show a drop-down, a button, or simply the page
itself, you're an idiot.
Tracking every move
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Every bloody thing is tracked. Even with cookies disabled there are
plenty ways to fingerprint users. Do you want cookies, yes or YES?
Browsers suck
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As browsers are the gateway to this modern web, they seem to add
more bullshit functions every day. Javascript is enabled by
default, and assumed to be enabled by the majority of the world.
Fallbacks are nonexisting.
Stupid other intrusive functionalities are added with every browser
iteration, resulting in modern browsers having camera, microphone,
clip-board, hard-drive, usb, wallet and whatever access...
Honestly. I use a browser as a client, to request a certain page
from a remote server. This is the relation my browser should have
with the internet; To fetch something from a server, to me, the
client.
I do not want my browser to read any of the local shit happening on
my computer and send it towards the server. I mean, if i wanted to
serve stuff to the world, i would.. you know start a server...I am
a client, let me do client stuff. I will let your server know what
i want through my request.
gopher://therandymon.com/0/Tech/2017-12-02-this-isnt-fun-anymore.txt
gopher://gopher.myunix.dk/0/Phlog/reverting_to_previous_glory.txt
gopher://orion.ka10.de/0/blog/03_webcrowd.txt
gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/%7enp89/glog/20190502-fix_the_web.txt
gopher://gopher.prismdragon.net/0/phlog/2019-01-17_web_gopher.txt