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No JS, No CSS, No HTML: online "clubs" celebrate plainer websites

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  • we got static site generators tho

    That's almost worse. I don't want to install 5000 NPM packages to generate 2 basic-ass pages.

  • I do wonder if we're going to see some websites popping up that kind of hit the reset button on social media and go back to smaller communities of folks with something in common.

    I kind of miss the days of actually having online conversations with folks you know are real people (not bots), that aren't trying to be an influencer, or get famous, or some how many money off your interactions.

    I think it'll happen, but I don't think it's happening yet.

    The unease is already there ("the internet used to be a place"/"why isn't the internet fun any more?" sentiments and #OldWeb #SlowWeb hashtags), but I don't think people are ready to do anything about it.

    I'm only one guy, with a small internet following, but I recently had a go at launching a small "Gaymers" webring (well, a simplified version of one). I promoted it on my socials, I laid out why I think it's a good idea, I paid to "Blaze" it on Tumblr – I even emailed some like-minded creators directly.

    I rewrote the webpage multiple times, to try to make it more persuasive and more concise. I added a contact form in case people felt uncomfortable emailing me. I loosened the rules to allow commercial websites, as long as they were still independent. I worked hard on the widget and incorporated feedback (made it respect prefers-reduced-motion and made a static version for sites where animation would feel out of place).

    I got some good feedback; lots of people said it was interesting, and a good idea. But literally no one joined or expressed any interest in joining. 🤷♂

    I'm going to have one more go at promoting it next time I've got money to spare, but I'll most likely end up quietly deleting it along with any evidence it existed, because a webring of one is fucking embarrassing. 💀

    I guess if you build it, they will not necessarily come lmao

  • 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 love this.

    I thought I was being "bare-bones" when I remade my website with PHP & XML (no framework or database).
    What would they think about a python app that delivers plaintext or html? Is that still kosher for the no-js gang? Or does it have to be static files?

  • JavaScript, AJAX, and modern web frameworks have pushed us away from displaying information in a pure and clean way. We need to go back to a better time!

    Looks at no-HTML websites

    Shit, we've gone back too far!

    CSS on the other hand is quite essential to separate layout from content. Which is a good thing, so I can't really think of a reason for a "no-CSS" rule. Specifically if you can use inline styles as well but in a way more messy way.

  • Anyone using basic HTML elements from the first HTML spec would still be supported in 99+% of cases today. HTML has added lots, and removed very, very, very little.

    Frames still break on some sites. center is still being joked about. Once in a while you still see plaintext on some very old sites.

    And as a dev of over 20 years, I can say for a fact that deprecations will occur. And its all code cruft for modern browsers to navigate. Its easier to let them die. And in 10+ years the txt docs will still work. Mostly. Maybe. 😄 Unicode emojis make it even more confusing to the conversion.

    If they are useful, people will still use them. We can have both. Modern Browsers that are closer to full scale OSes AND tiny little txt sites that give users info on the given topic.

  • I do wonder if we're going to see some websites popping up that kind of hit the reset button on social media and go back to smaller communities of folks with something in common.

    I kind of miss the days of actually having online conversations with folks you know are real people (not bots), that aren't trying to be an influencer, or get famous, or some how many money off your interactions.

    Is there any way to go back to running these things on an old Dell in the corner of a bedroom next to a fire extinguisher?

    That's when we have truly won

  • I think it'll happen, but I don't think it's happening yet.

    The unease is already there ("the internet used to be a place"/"why isn't the internet fun any more?" sentiments and #OldWeb #SlowWeb hashtags), but I don't think people are ready to do anything about it.

    I'm only one guy, with a small internet following, but I recently had a go at launching a small "Gaymers" webring (well, a simplified version of one). I promoted it on my socials, I laid out why I think it's a good idea, I paid to "Blaze" it on Tumblr – I even emailed some like-minded creators directly.

    I rewrote the webpage multiple times, to try to make it more persuasive and more concise. I added a contact form in case people felt uncomfortable emailing me. I loosened the rules to allow commercial websites, as long as they were still independent. I worked hard on the widget and incorporated feedback (made it respect prefers-reduced-motion and made a static version for sites where animation would feel out of place).

    I got some good feedback; lots of people said it was interesting, and a good idea. But literally no one joined or expressed any interest in joining. 🤷♂

    I'm going to have one more go at promoting it next time I've got money to spare, but I'll most likely end up quietly deleting it along with any evidence it existed, because a webring of one is fucking embarrassing. 💀

    I guess if you build it, they will not necessarily come lmao

    i love the idea of hosting sites as part of a ring, but i don’t love the idea of having to add my full name and address in the about section, which i’d be legally required to do… i think that’s part of the issue for some people at least.

  • I think it'll happen, but I don't think it's happening yet.

    The unease is already there ("the internet used to be a place"/"why isn't the internet fun any more?" sentiments and #OldWeb #SlowWeb hashtags), but I don't think people are ready to do anything about it.

    I'm only one guy, with a small internet following, but I recently had a go at launching a small "Gaymers" webring (well, a simplified version of one). I promoted it on my socials, I laid out why I think it's a good idea, I paid to "Blaze" it on Tumblr – I even emailed some like-minded creators directly.

    I rewrote the webpage multiple times, to try to make it more persuasive and more concise. I added a contact form in case people felt uncomfortable emailing me. I loosened the rules to allow commercial websites, as long as they were still independent. I worked hard on the widget and incorporated feedback (made it respect prefers-reduced-motion and made a static version for sites where animation would feel out of place).

    I got some good feedback; lots of people said it was interesting, and a good idea. But literally no one joined or expressed any interest in joining. 🤷♂

    I'm going to have one more go at promoting it next time I've got money to spare, but I'll most likely end up quietly deleting it along with any evidence it existed, because a webring of one is fucking embarrassing. 💀

    I guess if you build it, they will not necessarily come lmao

    You may have more luck with neocities and their sites. Lots of webrings around there and a lot of people having fun.

  • we got static site generators tho

    Plus markdown is kinda loosy goosy when it comes to the "standard". Sites like Github and wikipedia have slightly different specs. And each site has a different scheme to hook into it.

    Its much easier to set up static site generators or hook into something that can translate. But maybe that will change.

    I personally would like other languages in the browser. Native python the browser would be nice for example.

  • I love this.

    I thought I was being "bare-bones" when I remade my website with PHP & XML (no framework or database).
    What would they think about a python app that delivers plaintext or html? Is that still kosher for the no-js gang? Or does it have to be static files?

    Dunno. Give it a shot and see how it goes!

    Personally I would just set nginx + translator that would push the site into different formats if I wanted it long term. Just dump the resultant files, set up a website.cool/xxx.txt and push it out there.

  • i love the idea of hosting sites as part of a ring, but i don’t love the idea of having to add my full name and address in the about section, which i’d be legally required to do… i think that’s part of the issue for some people at least.

    Where are you seeing that? I only see email address.

  • 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.

    no http club, who is joining?

  • Looks good on Lynx.

    !links2@lemmy.sdf.org

  • Dunno. Give it a shot and see how it goes!

    Personally I would just set nginx + translator that would push the site into different formats if I wanted it long term. Just dump the resultant files, set up a website.cool/xxx.txt and push it out there.

    I see they have a SFW requirement. And while my site is currently SFW, I won't guarantee that it will remain so.

    Still, it's at least making me consider cutting out all the zurb-foundation stuff, since that's the only JS I have, and the site is simple enough that it doesn't really need it.

  • 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.

    Gemini capsule

  • 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.

    Gemini protocol is fab btw. Come join the tildeverse

  • CSS on the other hand is quite essential to separate layout from content. Which is a good thing, so I can't really think of a reason for a "no-CSS" rule. Specifically if you can use inline styles as well but in a way more messy way.

    CSS is useful but also the devil.

  • 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 always loved text stuff. The old rogue games were awesome.

  • CSS is useful but also the devil.

    CSS is mostly evil when you have to center elements in the page.

  • CSS is mostly evil when you have to center elements in the page.

    text-align: center

    or

    margin: auto

    or

    grid

    or

    flexbox

    It's really not that hard now.

  • Say Hello to the World's Largest Hard Drive, a Massive 36TB Seagate

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    spacecadet@feddit.nlS
    Write speeds on SMR drives start to stagnate after mere gigabytes written, not after terabytes. As soon as the CMR cache is full, you're fucked, and it stagnates to utterly unusable speeds as it's desperately trying to balance writing out blocks to the persistent area of the disk and accepting new incoming writes. I have 25 year old consumer level IDE drives that perform better than an SMR drive in this thrashing state. Also, I often use hard drives as a temporary holding area for stuff that I'm transferring around for one reason or another and that absolutely sucks if an operation that normally takes an hour or two is suddenly becoming a multi-day endeavour tying up my computing resources. I was burned once when Seagate submarined SMR drives into the Barracuda line, and I got a drive that was absolutely unfit for purpose. Never again.
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    isnt merz kinda right wing, but not AFD-CRAZY.
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    Let's add solar!.... People never ask questions at night when they're sleeping. Sounds pretty ideal to me.
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    Sounds like some deliberately obscure concentrations of power. The fear bit is really problematic though as scared people are not ideal decision makers.
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    Niemand hat geantwortet
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    Corporations don't care about people. This bank doesn't care about you. Banks care for no one but themselves.
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    Is that "goodbye" in Russian? Why?
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    (Premise - suppose I accept that there is such a definable thing as capitalism) I'm not sure why you feel the need to state this in a discussion that already assumes it as a necessary precondition of, but, uh, you do you. People blaming capitalism for everything then build a country that imports grain, while before them and after them it’s among the largest exporters on the planet (if we combine Russia and Ukraine for the “after” metric, no pun intended). ...what? What does this have to do with literally anything, much less my comment about innovation/competition? Even setting aside the wild-assed assumptions you're making about me criticizing capitalism means I 'blame [it] for everything', this tirade you've launched into, presumably about Ukraine and the USSR, has no bearing on anything even tangentially related to this conversation. People praising capitalism create conditions in which there’s no reason to praise it. Like, it’s competitive - they kill competitiveness with patents, IP, very complex legal systems. It’s self-regulating and self-optimizing - they make regulations and do bailouts preventing sick companies from dying, make laws after their interests, then reactively make regulations to make conditions with them existing bearable, which have a side effect of killing smaller companies. Please allow me to reiterate: ...what? Capitalists didn't build literally any of those things, governments did, and capitalists have been trying to escape, subvert, or dismantle those systems at every turn, so this... vain, confusing attempt to pin a medal on capitalism's chest for restraining itself is not only wrong, it fails to understand basic facts about history. It's the opposite of self-regulating because it actively seeks to dismantle regulations (environmental, labor, wage, etc), and the only thing it optimizes for is the wealth of oligarchs, and maybe if they're lucky, there will be a few crumbs left over for their simps. That’s the problem, both “socialist” and “capitalist” ideal systems ignore ape power dynamics. I'm going to go ahead an assume that 'the problem' has more to do with assuming that complex interacting systems can be simplified to 'ape (or any other animal's) power dynamics' than with failing to let the richest people just do whatever they want. Such systems should be designed on top of the fact that jungle law is always allowed So we should just be cool with everybody being poor so Jeff Bezos or whoever can upgrade his megayacht to a gigayacht or whatever? Let me say this in the politest way I know how: LOL no. Also, do you remember when I said this? ‘Won’t someone please think of the billionaires’ is wearing kinda thin You know, right before you went on this very long-winded, surreal, barely-coherent ramble? Did you imagine I would be convinced by literally any of it when all it amounts to is one giant, extraneous, tedious equivalent of 'Won't someone please think of the billionaires?' Simp harder and I bet maybe you can get a crumb or two yourself.