No JS, No CSS, No HTML: online "clubs" celebrate plainer websites
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The revived No JS Club celebrates websites that don't use Javascript, the powerful but sometimes overused code that's been bloating the web and crashing tabs since 1995. The No CSS Club goes a step further and forbids even a scrap of styling beyond the browser defaults. And there is even the No HTML Club, where you're not even allowed to use HTML. Plain text websites!
The modern web is the pure incarnation of evil. When Satan has a 1v1 with his manager, he confers with the modern web. If Satan is Sauron, then the modern web is Melkor [1]. Every horror that you can imagine is because of the modern web. Modern web is not an existential risk (X-risk), but is an astronomic suffering risk (S-risk) [2]. It is the duty of each and every man, woman, and child to revolt against it. If you're not working on returning civilization to ooga-booga, you're a bad person.
A compromise with the clubs is called for. A hypertext brutalism that uses the raw materials of the web to functional, honest ends while allowing web technologies to support clarity, legibility and accessibility. Compare this notion to the web brutalism of recent times, which started off in similar vein but soon became a self-subverting aesthetic: sites using 2.4MB frameworks to add text-shadow: 40px 40px 0px hotpink to 400kb Helvetica webfonts that were already on your computer.
I also like the idea of implementing "hypotext" as an inversion of hypertext. This would somehow avoid the failure modes of extending the structure of text by failing in other ways that are more fun. But I'm in two minds about whether that would be just a toy (e.g. references banished to metadata, i.e. footnotes are the hypertext) or something more conceptual that uses references to collapse the structure of text rather than extend it (e.g. links are includes and going near them spaghettifies your brain). The term is already in use in a structuralist sense, which is to say there are 2 million words of French I have to read first if I want to get away with any of this.
Republished Under Creative Commons Terms.
Boing Boing Original Article.Just to mention it:
gopher://sdf.org
There is no better place for plain and real content
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I host my own website, and I decided to rewrite the JS portions in React, in order to learn the framework. Boy was it a learning experience: To do the same thing required 2-4 times the amount of code—and that’s just in the scripts, let alone the all the bloat from the packages and the bundler.
I know this is a bit more radical than cutting out frameworks, but working with the JS ecosystem was such a pain, largely because there’s you need to piece together different software to make a stack work, which may or may not go together well. And since your stack is likely unique, good luck getting help on your problems. It made me miss Rust (albeit most languages do)—in Rust, you have Cargo for everything, and it’s beautiful. Rust has its own difficulties, but they actually feel surmountable compared to the dependency hell of JS.
React is probably overkill for most simple sites. You could still use JavaScript for some cool stuff without needing all the libraries and frameworks
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I'll say one thing for the No CSS philosophy - at least it eliminates light-colored text on a light-colored background using the thinnest possible font, which is probably the stupidest stylistic trend since the web began.
I remember the wonderful feeling when Discord had a redesign in like 2017 or 2018 where they undid that awful gray-on-white design trend and made the text actually have contrast. These days the annoying trendy design thing is articles/blogs with extremely narrow width.
no i do not want to read paragraphs that are this wide. this is making it way more annoying to read. please stop doing this.at least Firefox has Reader Mode.
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That is just stupid. How about a slighly more complex markdown.
What I really want is a P2P archive of all the relevant news articles of the last decades in markdown like in firefox "reader view". And some super advanced LLM powered text compression so you can easily store a copy of 20% of them on your PC to share P2P.
Much of the information on the internet could vanish within months if we face some global economic crisis.
And some super advanced LLM powered text compression so you can easily store a copy of 20% of them on your PC to share P2P.
Nothing can be that advanced and zstd is good enough.
The idea is cool. With pure p2p exchange being a fallback, and something like trackers in bittorrent being the main center to yield nodes per space (suppose, there's more than one such archive you'd want to replicate) and per partition (if it's too big, then maybe it would make sense, but then some of what I wrote further should be reconsidered).
The problem of torrents and other stuff is that people only store what's interesting to them.
If you have to store one humongous archive, and be able to efficiently search it, and avoid losing pieces - then, I think, you need partitioned roughly equal distribution of it over nodes.
The space of keys (suppose it's hashes of blocks of the whole) is partitioned by prefix so that a node would store equal amount of blocks of every prefix. And first of all the values closest to the node's identifier (a bit like in Kademlia) should be stored of those under that space. OK, I'm thinking the first sentence of this paragraph might even be unneeded.
The data itself should probably be in some supercool format where you don't need to have it all to decompress only the small part you need, just the beginning with the dictionary and some interval.
There should also be, as a separate functionality of this system, search by keywords inside intervals, so that search would yield intervals where a certain keyword is encountered. With nodes indexing continuous intervals they can decompress and responding to search requests by those keywords. Ideally a single block should be possible to decompress having the dictionary. I suppose I should do my reading on compression algorithms and formats.
Probably search function could also involve returning Google-like context. Depending on the space needed.
Would also need some way to reward contribution, that is, to pay a node owner for storing and serving blocks.
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What devilry is this? Written word?
Real cultures use oral history to store knowledge!Or hieroglyphs, to stay on the sane side.
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If you want to know copy and paste this link into your browser: text.only
That reminds me of lynx
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I did using Gemini (the protocol, not Google's thing) and Gopher.
Didn't know about Gemini (the protocol, not Google’s thing)
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Alright man, I didn't mean for it to hit so hard. I'm just trying to help. I assumed you were English-speaking because they are honestly the ones to most often make that kind of mistake.
Sorry if I offended you.Anyway, I edited my first comment there, before you replied last. So the correct thing is there now.
(It should be "than".)Love ya.
Nah it's fine. Just got brutally dumped so I was too sensitive
but still, thanks for apologizing
Love ya 2
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It was a mistake to leave the oceans in the first place.
Carcinization calls. Return to crab.
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phpBBB??
No, it's my own that I'm building from Scratch. It's C#/Asp.Net Razor Pages. Plain CSS on the frontend, no javascript
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I remember the wonderful feeling when Discord had a redesign in like 2017 or 2018 where they undid that awful gray-on-white design trend and made the text actually have contrast. These days the annoying trendy design thing is articles/blogs with extremely narrow width.
no i do not want to read paragraphs that are this wide. this is making it way more annoying to read. please stop doing this.at least Firefox has Reader Mode.
I'm annoyed by that too, and I think the reason is so they can cram more ads in it. I had to turn of my adblock for a second and forgot to turn it back on while going to a news site and I swear to God 2/3rd of the page was ads. Turned it back on and those spaces were empty making only 1/3rd of the page used. Still way better tho I'm never turning it off again.
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I rather have these people embrace gopher
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The dependency hell of JS is caused by React. It's an ironic turn because node gained popularity in part because it was one of the first to have a coupled package manager with a massive public contribution model, full of a billion packages that follow the unix philosophy of "everything should do only one thing, and do it well" Dependency hell would disappear if people stopped popularizing competing swiss army knives. It's made worse by people trying to mash these swiss army knives together just to improve portfolio.
We've gotten to the point where you aren't considered a real professional unless you start even the smallest projects with maximum technical debt.
It should never be impressive that you used a tool. If the tool made programming it easier then it's not a mental feat. If the tool made programming it harder, then people should think you are kind of slow for using a tool that made development harder. This is why brag culture over what tools are used makes no sense. Just use tools that make life easier. If it doesn't make life easier, stop using it.
That’s fair, actually: my project had 2 packages in my
node_modules(not mypackage.json, total dependencies!) in vanilla JS, now it has well over 100. Unreal. -
I'm annoyed by that too, and I think the reason is so they can cram more ads in it. I had to turn of my adblock for a second and forgot to turn it back on while going to a news site and I swear to God 2/3rd of the page was ads. Turned it back on and those spaces were empty making only 1/3rd of the page used. Still way better tho I'm never turning it off again.
No kidding on the ads. I shared this experience not long ago.
And the tragic thing is there was another news site that I did the same thing with afterwards, and it was literally 2.5x worse than what I documented with The Nation.
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The revived No JS Club celebrates websites that don't use Javascript, the powerful but sometimes overused code that's been bloating the web and crashing tabs since 1995. The No CSS Club goes a step further and forbids even a scrap of styling beyond the browser defaults. And there is even the No HTML Club, where you're not even allowed to use HTML. Plain text websites!
The modern web is the pure incarnation of evil. When Satan has a 1v1 with his manager, he confers with the modern web. If Satan is Sauron, then the modern web is Melkor [1]. Every horror that you can imagine is because of the modern web. Modern web is not an existential risk (X-risk), but is an astronomic suffering risk (S-risk) [2]. It is the duty of each and every man, woman, and child to revolt against it. If you're not working on returning civilization to ooga-booga, you're a bad person.
A compromise with the clubs is called for. A hypertext brutalism that uses the raw materials of the web to functional, honest ends while allowing web technologies to support clarity, legibility and accessibility. Compare this notion to the web brutalism of recent times, which started off in similar vein but soon became a self-subverting aesthetic: sites using 2.4MB frameworks to add text-shadow: 40px 40px 0px hotpink to 400kb Helvetica webfonts that were already on your computer.
I also like the idea of implementing "hypotext" as an inversion of hypertext. This would somehow avoid the failure modes of extending the structure of text by failing in other ways that are more fun. But I'm in two minds about whether that would be just a toy (e.g. references banished to metadata, i.e. footnotes are the hypertext) or something more conceptual that uses references to collapse the structure of text rather than extend it (e.g. links are includes and going near them spaghettifies your brain). The term is already in use in a structuralist sense, which is to say there are 2 million words of French I have to read first if I want to get away with any of this.
Republished Under Creative Commons Terms.
Boing Boing Original Article.I fucking hate JavaScript
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Looks like the geocities websites of my youth.
If you liked Geocities, you'll probably like Neocities
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Nah it's fine. Just got brutally dumped so I was too sensitive
but still, thanks for apologizing
Love ya 2
Aw, dang. That's not fun. It doesn't help now, but time will heal. Take care, friend.
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I recently made www.timedial.org, using mainly HTML 3.2. I tried HTML 2.0, but the lack of tables, fonts and even text alignment was a bit too much.
Sorry, but it looks awful
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Those websites are amazing, thank you.
I checked the source to find the song only to realized I already had it in my playlist
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I hated frames, but I do have a tiny bit of nostalgia for them because I started web design in the early '00s when they were all the craze for handmade blogs and portfolio sites
And the iframes took up like 1/4 of the screen (with miniscule faint text!) while the rest of the page were large brush swoops and other graphical elements 🥹
And the tiny navigation buttons without any text that you had to figure out from the hovered URL.
Ah it was all so fucking unusable, but pretty xD
Haha! Forgot about navigation being a puzzle. Funsies.
