I have yet to see a suggestion to "reinvent" the web that expands on publisher or end-user capabilities, rather than taking them away. The end user doesn't want Geminispace, they don't hate that web publishers get to control layout and design, or that sites can be more complex than even the early web allowed. They don't want to write their own clients or stylesheets, they don't want the web to only be strictly static documents, with "apps" quarantined elsewhere. They don't want a different markup language. They don't want to destroy social media and force services not to use algorithmic feeds or discovery because it's "mind control." They don't want to kill all advertising and commerce on the web in the belief that content creators should be forced to work for love instead of money.
I mean if modern tech people had their way, the web would have never been anything but a bare data API on a blockchain, and no one without at least a bachelors' degree in CS or engineering would even know about it. And oh yeah, you'd need a license to publish anything.
> I mean if modern tech people had their way, the web would have never been anything but a bare data API on a blockchain, and no one without at least a bachelors' degree in CS or engineering would even know about it. And oh yeah, you'd need a license to publish anything.
They're looking for a technical solution to a social problem. They miss the Web as a space for people only like themselves. Having to share the web with normies who don't create out of _love_ or don't spend hours researching a small change like they want everyone to means folks different from them end up inhabiting the web. It's thinly veiled gatekeeping, a desire to make the web a space where only folks like them would inhabit.
No its not. I just want to read text based content without downloading google analytics + 20 other trackers, 5 java script libraries, 7 frameworks of some kind and 20 ads. It's inefficient. It drives obsolescence of hardware long before it is unusable (second only to gaming, but at least gaming has a user driven motivation, not abuse by tech megacorps).
Assigning a gatekeeping motivation to it is a nice strawman, but luckily not based in reality
> I just want to read text based content without downloading google analytics + 20 other trackers, 5 java script libraries, 7 frameworks of some kind and 20 ads. It's inefficient.
I agree. I have JavaScripts disabled, but it may still try to download CSS, pictures, and other stuff, and might try to hide the document, etc.
Then don't? If you want to recreate Gemini on the web, just use curl to download assets and consume them that way. This doesn't seem to be about you or the GP specifically consuming the Web this way, this seems like people who want to create a _network_ of other people who consume the Web this way, which is essentially the same as gatekeeping.
Not sure if either or both of you are lumping the article author in as “modern tech people.”
From the article:
> I think this combination would bring speed back, in a huge way. You could get a page on the screen in a fraction of the time of the web. The memory consumption could be tiny. It would be incredibly accessible, by default. You could make great-looking default stylesheets and share alternative user stylesheets. With dramatically limited scope, you could port it to all kinds of devices.
> And, maybe most importantly, what would website editing tools look like? They could be way simpler.
And:
> There are a lot of other ways to look at and solve this problem. I think it is a problem, for everyone except Google. The idea of a web browser being something we can comprehend, of a web page being something that more people can make, feels exciting to me.
On the other hand one should see, how the masses of normies, uneducated about how even a single web page works, keep consuming the wrong stuff, creating huge incentive for companies to ruin the web we have/had for the for the people, who value consent and freedom. Normies just keep consuming and enjoying away their own freedom and the freedom of others, by giving power in terms of money to the wrong people. We have seen it again and again with companies like FB, Netflix, Google and so on, which create a dystopia of not being in control, what is done with your data and spying on us everywhere we go on the Internet. The normies, who consume without worrying are empowering them.
So yes, it is some gate keeping, but maybe that gate keeping is justified, in order to protect our freedom.
> They don't want to kill all advertising and commerce on the web in the belief that content creators should be forced to work for love instead of money.
In the heyday of the web, people weren't doing anything for money and it created good content. Where is the good content now? A billion useless "Best $product to buy in $current_year" articles with 20 affiliate links to drown the web in SEO spam. Commercialization is a race to the bottom. Good art and literature was created by people who had an urge to create and not by people who had bills to pay.
> They don't want to kill all advertising and commerce on the web in the belief that content creators should be forced to work for love instead of money.
> The end user doesn't want Geminispace, they don't hate that web publishers get to control layout and design, or that sites can be more complex than even the early web allowed. They don't want to write their own clients or stylesheets, they don't want the web to only be strictly static documents, with "apps" quarantined elsewhere.
I do not agree. Many users do want it. The problem is that web browsers are not written for advanced users.
(Furthermore, there are other protocols for other things, such as IRC, NNTP, etc.)
> They don't want a different markup language.
The actual problem is that even if you use a different markup language, you cannot easily serve it and allow end user customizations to decide how to display it (possibly using a more efficient implementation than the HTML-based one), and you will be forced to serve HTML instead, making it more difficult to write an implementation that does support the other formats.
You could use <link rel="alternate"> to link to the source document, or you could have my idea of the "Interpreter" header, which also allows to polyfill picture/audio/video formats in addition to document formats.
>I do not agree. Many users do want it. The problem is that web browsers are not written for advanced users.
How many are 'many?' I'm not aware of anyone not a programmer or web developer who even cares about any of those things. Perhaps I should have been more precise and said "the average end user." I mean, even most people on HN who talk about Geminispace just complain about how restrictive it is. It's a niche within a niche within a niche.
And I think you're just proving my point here - all of these are problems that only a subset of tech people even have.
> And I think you're just proving my point here - all of these are problems that only a subset of tech people even have.
Yes, but can't you have many possible computer programs, that different users may prefer? Shouldn't you be able to make multiple kinds, whether a lot of users want it or only a few users? Unfortunately, the existing complexity and mess of WWW makes it difficult.
I mean if modern tech people had their way, the web would have never been anything but a bare data API on a blockchain, and no one without at least a bachelors' degree in CS or engineering would even know about it. And oh yeah, you'd need a license to publish anything.