Comment by TeMPOraL
6 years ago
I'll be the first (EDIT: third) of six.
> If all that stuff works for everyone, why did we invent new stuff? Just because? Or perhaps it wasn't really as amazing as well all remember.
To better track people and push ads. It's really mostly just it. Modern web has very little to do with providing value to the end-user; any utility that's provided is mostly a side effect, and/or a vector to lure people into situations where they can be monetized.
Text browsers aren't holding the web down, they're anchoring it in the port of productivity, even as the winds of commerce desperately try to blow it onto the open seas of exploitation.
Come on, you can't be serious about this.
Creating sophisticated web pages is massively easier than 10 or 20 years ago. Yes, HTML of plain simple text-only pages is still pretty much the same, but most users actually prefer visually fancier content with pictures and colors.
Yes, companies presenting themselvses online profit of more capabilities. And yes, presenting ads is probably easier too. But if you think those changes were just made because of monetary greed, you could say the same about almost any technological advancement, like color photography, or electric cars, because all of these had a commercial side to them too.
I am serious. Yes, it's true it's easier than ever to create sophisticated websites. But it's also true that almost all this sophistication delivers negative value to users - it distracts them, slows them down, and forces them to keep buying faster hardware. It doesn't have to be like this - but it currently is. It's not even just a problem of explicit business incentives - the technical side of the industry has been compromised. The "best practices" in web development and user experience all deoptimize end-user ergonomy and productivity.
The mistake you are making is that you are trying to answer the question of what the average user wants by looking at what you want. Developers are not representative of users.
38 replies →
> The "best practices" in web development and user experience all deoptimize end-user ergonomy and productivity.
What are you seeing that leads you to think this? The ads and engagement drivers (autoplaying videos of other content on the site) on sites that need eyeballs to keep the lights on, or the articles showing how to download the minimum usable assets so you don't waste the user's bandwidth, battery, and disk space[1]? The latter is what I tend to see when I'm looking at pages describing "best practice".
1: https://alistapart.com/article/request-with-intent-caching-s...
1 reply →
This sounds like the kind of argument that would have said that the algorithm for rounded rectangles in the Mac OS toolbox was superfluous fluff.
The world is bigger and more interesting than screens and screens of uninterrupted plaintext.
2 replies →
> most users actually prefer visually fancier content with pictures and colors.
You're aware that pure HTML and CSS alone can produce visually fancy content with pictures and colors, right? It honestly seems like a lot of web developers are starting to forget this, but it's true, I swear. My personal web site (https://coyotetracks.org/) is minimalist by design, but it has accent colors, custom fonts, Retina-ready images, and that silly little fade in and out when you hover over links, all without any JavaScript whatsoever. Also: turns out it works pretty well on Lynx!
I think JS gets a bit of a bad rap these days and am willing to leap to its defense even though I don't like it much as a language, but a huge chunk of the reason it has a bad rap is because people do bad things with it, by which I mean either malicious things or just unnecessary things. An awful lot of modern web sites could run just fine with far, far fewer scripts than they're deploying.
(And, yes, I can even do web analytics without JavaScript, because there are these things called "server logs" I can analyze with utilities like GoAccess.)
Your site is nice and fast
Sure, new technologies have changed things for the better. Sophisticated web pages should be created when sophisticated web pages are necessary.
Sophisticated web pages are not necessary to disseminate text-only context. 90's HTML is perfectly capable of doing that.
I have no problem with loading 30MB of JS libraries into the browser for an application that actually does something. I have a problem with loading 30MB of shit to read 10kB worth of news.
It's actually because we programmers like to recreate things, because there's this itch and wonder about how stuff works. Http hasn't changed that much.
Html did. It was hyper text, and rendering was done for document flow.
Then we could script a bit, and soon after we wanted "webapplications". Now, we lost probably 15 years trying to fit in an application-ui and lifecycle model in a document-flow model.
Html, or rather xml, or rather trees, are a good way to represent a user interface. Unfortunately back then, the only languages available were C++ and Java for any proper work oh yeah, and visual basic!).
Javascript, php, and perl were a godsend in terms of productivity. Just like the 80s home computers and basic. It just worked. Type and run. This is also why bad badsoftware gets popular btw..
Coming back to the post.. Lynx renders HTML how it was intended: as a document.
There's little value in me doing this, but I always have to push back against this idea. This is the hill I'll die on.
Most application UIs are not complicated. Most applications are just interactive documents. There is nothing special about 90% of the apps I use on my native computer that means they couldn't be rendered as HTML. The document model is fine for applications. Preferable, even.
Heck, a reasonable portion of the native applications on my computer have optional pure-terminal interfaces. If your application can work in a terminal, it can work with HTML -- and embracing a document model for your application UI would be a better user experience than whatever the heck pixel-perfect framework that everyone is chasing nowadays. That's true on the web, and it's true on native.
The problem with the web is not that HTML is incapable of being used as an application platform; it's not that we're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It's that both web and native developers overestimate the interface requirements of their applications, and bring in unnecessary cruft to achieve pixel-perfect layouts that are worse for end-users.
We have a square peg, and a square hole, but we like to go to conferences and pretend that our peg is actually some convoluted, recursive star shape.
2 replies →
>Creating sophisticated web pages is massively easier than 10 or 20 years ago.
And still average people aren't taking advantage of this and creating their own websites because despite it being massively easier, the way the web is now has pushed it still beyond the average person's reach. If these 'sophisticated' stacks and technologies weren't the norm and instead the web was more focused on being s place where.the average person can easily put up their own fancy looking simple webpage maybe we wouldn't be so dominated by these massive companies that have become the gatekeepers by providing limited platforms for people to do what did used to be a relatively easy thing even back in the day.
There's a reason these companies fund and push these technology stacks, it gives them huge control over the internet and in the end, they don't really do anything fundamentally different than what good old fashioned HTML and CSS can do. Hell especially the HTML of today.
A lot of todays websites are evil. Just today, I couldn't even mark and copy just simple plain-looking text.
Holding ALT while highlighting in the browser will often allow you to select text that is otherwise overly JavaScript-ed.
>most users actually prefer visually fancier content with pictures and colors
Are you sure this is the case? Because I think it may be a shiny object trap, where on first view a visually fancy site is great and appealing but in the long run a simple, fast-loading site is preferable.
is it now ? my parents whom were 100% tech illiterate were able to put up a moderately complex website with frontpage in 1996 without touching a single line of code and with a 100% custom look. Would they be able to do the same today with current tech stacks ? Not so sure...
I think he was serious, and I agree with him — and I believe that most users don’t want the majority of what JavaScript-laden pages offer over clean HTML-only pages.
The crux of the problem is that the page in this doesn't need to be sophisticated. It lists result links from top to bottom. Things afforded by JavaScript that may enhance the interface like autoloading the next page of results can be made progressively. In particular, "visually fancier" content doesn't necessarily happen at the expense of accessibility with limited browsers. That's the point of CSS.
That is really the fault of "modern web", that web pages are more "sophisticated" than they really need to be to present the information they contain in a visually pleasing and usable manner. There are so many round-about approaches to the problem that people don't concern themselves with the most straight forward one. I can't say that it's somehow massively easier to create a simple list of links with some excerpt in a way that it doesn't work on a 15 year old browser than it is to create one that doesn't. You really have to go out of your way to break something as simple and fundamental as linking.
> Creating sophisticated web pages is massively easier than 10 or 20 years ago.
Well if talking progress, we can also compare, say, energy efficiency of information transmission, or the number of well maintained Web clients. That doesn't look so good, does it? The question is what problem are we solving, or, in your words, what is "sophistication"? According to some measures we did achieve impressive things. But a lot of us experience heartache, because we think we didn't do all that well.
To say that text browsers are "anchoring" the web to those text only standards would imply that developers are making design decisions based on testing and feedback from text only browsers.
There is no way that the percentage of developers doing that isn't vanishingly small. Like 0.1% or less. I always chuckle when 1 person chimes in on a show hn post to complain that the site doesn't work well in lynx... Ya, I'll get right on that, top priority!
You can make that choice. On the other hand, if you decide on not making the situation right on that, you'll alienate not only accessibility-focused users, but also a very loud minority - some of whom are influential across tech (or tech-adjacent) communities.
Amen; fourth here... don't need js cycles for html query
From another comment digging into the issue.[0]
> Regarding 'L', Lynx sometimes "hides" links if the anchor is around a div. Maybe it is just that simple. IIRC, <a href=...><div>...</div></a> will trigger a similar behaviour.
I'm generally against unnecessary web complexity, but I don't understand how anyone can paint Lynx a hero for randomly ignoring anchor tags.
I embrace progressive enhancement where possible, all of my blogs/sites will load and function without Javascript. I'm not going to serve alternative HTML in a scenario like this. There has to be a give and take towards Lynx supporting objectively valid pure HTML content.
It wouldn't violate any of Lynx's pure-text principles to parse modern HTML correctly.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21636159
>Modern web has very little to do with providing value to the end-user
I disagree strongly with this. The web has moved a lot in the direction of developer experience (ES6, modules) and new capabilities (WebSockets, WebRTC, WebAudio, SVG, canvas...). Yes, most of this happened because it's a side-effect of big surveillance capitalism companies wanting make that sweet sweet digital pollen to be even sweeter, but that doesn't make it any less sweet just because it was made in bad faith.
The capabilities are there. The dev experience is there (somewhat; JS ecosystem is a mess, but I guess that's just a side effect of moving very fast). But the capabilities are not used for end-user benefit. Not much, anyway. Yes, I benefit from Netflix, I benefit from Google products (not as much as I would if they didn't keep on worsening the UX every few months) - and such functionality requires some of the new capabilities. But 99% of other sites I visit don't use these capabilities for anything good. A pizza ordering site shouldn't need a React frontend. An e-commerce store shouldn't use WebSockets. Every other site out there should not ask me to enable notifications. But they all do. I blame a mix of CV-driven development, designers showing off, "data-driven" bandwagon, and surveillance capitalism.
I agree with you on all points - I think we're just speaking past each other. I'm speaking about the platform, and you're speaking about applications. The applications written for the web today are exactly as you say; the browser platform itself, however, is quite extraordinary and I remain deeply impressed with it.
1 reply →
I think a pizza ordering site is a good SPA example, but progressive enhancement still applies. React probably makes its design simpler. Elm would, even more so. But it’d be nice to access it with Lynx.
4 replies →