And links.

!links2@lemmy.sdf.org

we got static site generators tho

I think everyone can agree the no-html club is insane. Why not just a reduced version, so you can actually do stuff like links?

That would be nice.

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

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

Check out the gemini protocol: https://geminiprotocol.net/

It kinda fills that niche of the "old web".

I know some some communities using WhatsApp. Too difficult to get in. I miss the old days of irc and small php forums.

bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com

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.

position: absolute;
left: 50%;
transform: translateX(-50%);

Butterflies.

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’d be down with the no-html crowd if they made one exception to allow anchor tags. A web without links sounds not so usable.

Pretty much have. If it’s not https, I stay away.

Gopher it 😂

I did using Gemini (the protocol, not Google’s thing) and Gopher.

This is genuinely inspiring to me, may be my new ADHD hobby for the next couple of weeks.

Plug for my astro plugin which dithers images and achieves the same look and feel as the linked website: www.npmjs.com/package/…/astro-image-dithering

Looks like the geocities websites of my youth.

it also matters because the complexity of websites is a burden to end-user devices. especially on weak smartphones, as i’m using rn, the power usage of heavy websites sucks a lot, as it considerably slows down the device overall.

Unfortunately it's hard for the rest of us to tell if you actually think you want a video to save you from having to read 18 sentences or if you're just taking the piss lol

Character, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, character, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, character, ENTER.

Just like your grandpappy used to do.

A subset of css is cool, but man does it go too far.

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.

Might as well do no digital club and we exchange information through mail and pigeons.

HTML 2.0 doesn’t have tables, and tables are not so bad, even org-mode has tables.

Since HTML 4.01 was a thing when I first saw a website:

Being able to have buttons is good. Buttons with pictures too.

And, unlike some people, I liked the idea of framesets. A simple enough websites could have an IRC-like chat frame to the left and the main navigable area to the right.

And the unholy amount of specific tags is the other side of the coin for not yet using JS and CSS for everything.

I think an “RHTML” standard as a continuation and maybe simplification of HTML 4.01 (no JS, no CSS, do dynamic things in applets, without Netscape plugins do applets with some new kind of plugins running in a specialized sandboxed VM with JIT) could be useful. Other than this there’s no need in any change at all. It’s perfect. It has all the necessary things for hypertext.

Yeah it’s not exactly going to be WCAG AAA either.

Copy and paste the url

import Axios from 'axios'
import OldFS from 'fs'
import { PromiseChain } from '@feather-ink/ts-utils'

const fs = OldFS.promises

const image = process.argv[2]
const destination = `http://${process.argv[3]}/vfs/ota`
const now = process.argv[4] === 'now'
const once = process.argv[4] === 'once'

async function triggerUpdate(): Promise<void> {
  console.log('Uploading new binary')
  const file = await fs.readFile(image)

  await Axios({
    method: 'POST',
    url: destination,
    headers: {
      'Content-Type': 'application/octet-stream',
      'Content-Length': file.byteLength
    },
    data: file
  })
  console.log('Finished uploading')
}

(async () => {
  const updateChain = new PromiseChain()
  console.

If you want to know copy and paste this link into your browser: text.only

i guess Commonmark is the same thing as Markdown?

in that case, this is why i love the fediverse (especially lemmy) so much: comments and posts are simple markdown.

it comes quite close to the principle of distributing content in the way of markdown articles.

it’s a shame commonmark stalled and then markdown variants proliferated again because of that :/

A lot of websites can be static HTML + CSS.

Yeah they can, I can understand you might want to use something like php to not need to edit the footers and headers every page if you ever change them, but still.

I also like how some websites like Amazon.com refuse to add a payment platform which is more than a credit card checkout. Especially because their EU sites do have payment platforms with more options to pay. So then you have an over complicated site already with a lot of bloat and some amount of your consumers can’t even pay.

Some of these are extreme, but what you’re talking about is the 512kb.club, just keep it small, but no limits on what you can use.

The subset exists. What you’re referring to is an agreement or convention.

We have that, it’s called Gemini and is accessible with Lagrange

Maybe a little JS, as a treat?

It’s fun for hiding little easter eggs.

You are using raw character values? Weak. True website surfers use telepathy to communicate websites to their brains directly.

ASCII?! Useless, modern witchcraft! Devils work! Give me CCITT-1 or give me death!

(ó﹏ò｡) oh no my internet cred

Ththat’s different… you take it back!!

What devilry is this? Written word? Real cultures use oral history to store knowledge!

Let’s not. It’s a terrible protocol with amateur design errors.

Gopher is cool, but none of my friends will install a gopher browser.

A Content-Security-Policy with script-src ‘none’ should already allow for that . no js can be loaded like that

Theoretically, browsers could even stop from the JS engine from being started for the site in the first place.

The NoScript extension is basically this. Most of the client side stuff is off by default and you can enable it per-domain. It breaks a whole lot of websites, but often in ways where the main content of a website is still readable. Over time, you can build up a list of “allow by default” domains and most of the web you care about works. Though, you may have to spend a moment or two sorting out permissions when you visit a new site.

In the future there will be media queries for how old the reader is.

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.

phpBBB??

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.

React is probably overkill for most simple sites. You could still use JavaScript for some cool stuff without needing all the libraries and frameworks

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.

That is made by someone who had a Geocities website, or went 1000% in on MySpace back in the day.

Those websites are amazing, thank you.

I checked the source to find the song only to realized I already had it in my playlist 😂