I think AI won’t save us here, our base is broken. The internet is kind of shattered, most of the pages on the wild have broken and even wrong links. Divs doings the work of buttons, the semantics are totally lost. This, at least for me, feels like a good view point on what we can fix first, and with luck have a better internet.
All feedback is welcome.
This is the issue with using dynamic frameworks. Dynamically generated websites driven by JS by people who design for the GUI first rather than the actual source generated to be rendered. Form over function. Its a lack of focus on the architecture of the web and more on what we feel it shpuld be despite what it doesnt want to be.
The tech bros, or how I like to call the Theos online have a very misguided view, they have a specific interest, and a specific point. Usually to sell something.
From the last almost 15 years in the work I can say that maybe 10% of the products would ever need the JS framework of the day, mostly could be just a static page with some island of interactivity and some over the wire server render.
Things that we learned in 2000s with Ruby on Rails, and yet we reinvented the wheel.
So, it’s just sad to see the that current stat is yet broken, the tooling isn’t there, and worse, with AI we will have even more on this bad average.
Checks out
Bring back Chad Vader
pages links divs
Sounds like the world wide web is broken. The Internet works fine still.
Bring back IRC
Jokes aside, XMPP could be something usefull for us in this day and age.
Fair point. But very little nitt-picky, right?
No? It’s an entire ecosystem people just pretend isn’t there. The Internet is a lot more than just websites
You are so angry, do you want a hug?
No idea where you’re reading anger in that plain statement.
yes because its clear by context this is about the web.
the semantics are totally lost
If you are talking semantic on the linguistic view… Yeah a lot of people can read, but can’t understand the other. If you are talking about html, you are also correct… You know what… You are just correct…
Dammit, this reply is already contracting myself!
Japanese websites are really crap. Websites without a modern UI framework are pretty miserable. I hate phone numbers that try open an app I almost never want to click and see a phone call pop up.
What people who yearn for a better web always seem to miss is a vision for the future. So often its going back to the past with simple sites, no JavaScript, HTML+CSS, websites that do one thing, full privacy at the cost of terrible UX. Fuck that use modern tech build websites that allow you to do things real time. Dont just leave a phone number, give me a way to easily submit a booking. Use recommendation engines to serve interesting content. Connect users across protocols. Use the GPU. The possibilities for websites these days is crazy but few really go for it. Only do massive tech companies try and go above a traditional we site but they do it with the intention to create walled gardens instead of build out a web garden.
Despite my complaints I mostly use the sites I complain about. But its why I like the fediverse so much. It breaks the trend of going back to irc and text sites and has a modern web vision.
Reading the other comments from you I notice this:
Japanese websites are really crap.
This is also racist.
The thing is, a lot of websites don’t need to be interactive, or only need to present interactivity to a minority of visitors. Consider Wikipedia, for example. Only a small percentage of people visiting the site are interested in editing anything. The rest shouldn’t be burdened with massive quantities of extra downloads for a feature they don’t need, want, or use.
Furthermore, you don’t need a “modern web framework” to have an interactive site, and most of them seem to be pretty bloated.
The level of technology a site displays should be appropriate to what the site is trying to do. If your site is about services that you need an appointment for, then yes, there should be a booking setup on the site. If you’re running a store, you should have a shopping cart. Add as much of an interactive layer as is necessary to do these things, and do them well, but no more than that.
Most of us just want pages to render quickly, stop tracking us unnecessarily, and stop choking our connections and stealing our electricity for stuff that isn’t useful to us (or to anyone except depraved corporations).
Most of the interesting parts of the web are not static and you do need some scripting language to have an interactive site. Most users are on complex web apps its why people open their browsers everyday. The internet should be more than a wiki and blogs it needs complex applications and any future web proposal should be leveraging what we can do to solve problems we face not saying “just make simpler things like wiki and blogs”. Bloat is a non issue, people naturally optimize their websites to provide a good experience. Even the heaviest fattest frameworks still load nearly instantly. Bring in 50 ad providers and it still loads in a second.
Not sure if I can agree with that.
I would say that most of the internet is static by definition, even my blog is a static page with some CDN to make it faster. Most of the news pages are static, most of blogs should be static, most of the e-commerce should be static (the product page is static, not the purchase itself),
You may live in a place where internet is fast, but the majority of the world still breaths in 3G, with unstable connections and a miserable experience, so a 10mb page (I’m looking to you stupid Discord), could be a 1mb page, if wasn’t the bloat.
Most news isnt static. Its an app and its a link embedded in an app. Blogs are not popular or relevant so idk why we are even talking about them. Substack has most of the market and its not a static site.
Ecommerce could not be static without major regressions to usablity.
I do live in a place with fast internet but we are talking about future and I think its stupid to build a future web for people who have slow internet when all the trends point to increasing internet speeds and connection around the world. I’m sure Africa doesnt want to finally get online and see everything be a static site.
You can run discord off a mobile data connection, when Africa builds out their Internet infra they will prefer services like discord over low bandwidth stripped down barebones services.
the future web doesnt need to care about a 1mb page or a 10mb page. It only matters what you can do. Static site can do very little. You can’t have Lemmy as static site and Lemmy is an example of what I think future web could be. Open, interconnected, full of features and QoL. Lemmy gives you the things reddit tries to sell you.
Most news isnt static. Its an app and its a link embedded in an app. Blogs are not popular or relevant so idk why we are even talking about them. Substack has most of the market and its not a static site.
What? Do you have any data to support that? Because I do, “blog”, or any “news” page have way more traffic that you think about it, ask Cloudflare. And they are (the good ones) mostly static. So review you own concepts. Because you are wrong.
Ecommerce could not be static without major regressions to usablity.
Ask Amazon, most of their pages are static. They have island of interactivity, but the page for the product is static. So I think you have no idea what you are talking about.
I do live in a place with fast internet but we are talking about future and I think its stupid to build a future web for people who have slow internet when all the trends point to increasing internet speeds and connection around the world. I’m sure Africa doesnt want to finally get online and see everything be a static site.
You can run discord off a mobile data connection, when Africa builds out their Internet infra they will prefer services like discord over low bandwidth stripped down barebones services.
Man this is racist.
I can’t even talk on this topic, and I’m disgusted by your view. You have no idea what you are talking about.
the future web doesnt need to care about a 1mb page or a 10mb page. It only matters what you can do. Static site can do very little. You can’t have Lemmy as static site and Lemmy is an example of what I think future web could be. Open, interconnected, full of features and QoL. Lemmy gives you the things reddit tries to sell you.
Again you are wrong. And from the level of arguments provided, there is very little we can discuss.
Ps.: The world don’t care about the future, just check the price of RAM and we can talk about performance and use less and do more.
I’ll heavily disagree with you.
All the modern web, using the modern frameworks, for the modern browser, that requires modern hardware, for a modern person… I hove you got the gist just by this phrase.
We can use less and still be usefull. Most of the web is static. The bakery don’t need to render a unique page for you just because you are from the same country. The same way that the news feed don’t need to regenerate the page every request, it can keep the old news there, until a new post arives, so clean the cache and hit a new one.
Notice that I’m not talking about pages like a mail application, figma or discord. I’m talking about the majority of the web, most are static, won’t need this.
Maybe would be a cool thing for ya to look on the small web moviment, it’s a pretty interesting idea, and can show that static pages can be cool, even knowing that they aren’t the “common place”.
I seen the small web movement. Those sites are not good. Not only is there nothing to do except read posts but functionally they are bad UX to navigate.
Most of the static sites dont even need to be websites. The baker does not need a website. Good website or bad website makes little to no difference. Its fine if they want to have a single static page with some info and a contact email im not saying they need anything good. But if every site was like that the internet would be worse than it is today.
You are so wrong in this assumption. You barely touched the tip of the iceberg behind the small web movement.
Most of the static sites dont even need to be websites.
Are you suggesting that we shouldn’t have a page? That my blog isn’t important enough to exist?
The baker does not need a website.
What is the baker want’s to have a footprint online, maybe adding his working schedule? Maybe adding some historical information about the bakery? Or even information for requesting a special bakery? Isn’t this important?
Good website or bad website makes little to no difference. Its fine if they want to have a single static page with some info and a contact email im not saying they need anything good. But if every site was like that the internet would be worse than it is today.
Not sure if I follow this, but prefer the things stays the way they are. With pages using 10mb of frameworks without any need, with pages that loads a “loader” to load the page? Because this is the reason why the internet is ugly and broken.
If this is the case, I not only disagree with you, but I think you should experience the web, look for local pages and see how good or bad they can be.
not a web dev. If I did want to make some minimal fast loading pages that don’t look awful, is there a decent framework out there that will do the styling? A bit of html is fine but learning CSS is just not on my to do list.
Saying you want to make a web page without learning css is like saying you want to play basketball without shooting hoops. Learn CSS.
If we’re talking just text content with not really any interactive elements (beyond a navigation menu), then look into “static site generators”.
They allow you to write your blog posts or whatever in Markdown. You can pick out a theme. And then they’ll generate HTML+CSS+JS, which you can push onto a web server.
Depends on how much do you want to tradeoff on this.
The “easiest” way will always incur in some extra files, or unused shite. When I started, Bootstrap were the only acceptable thing, yesterday were Tailwind, and soon will be “what the AI spits on your face”…
So, a custom styling will always be “best options”, but this depends on your level of understanding on the web, and if CSS isn’t on your bucket list, leave for the ones that have this on the bucket list.
(Sorry for not having a silver bullet for this)
HTMX is pretty good. It gives you markup that extends HTML for things like async loading, and incorporates some features that you’d otherwise have to do using Javascript or CSS.
My “to go” tool of the day is Alpine.js, fills a similar void, but the focus is on the client side, the botton idea is the same.
Not sure what you mean with loading pages, but maybe you should look into classless CSS for a minimal look. One of my favorites is Water.css when I just want to have something other than the browser default HTML styling, but there are many more.
naaaaaaaaaaah
