Comment by alcover 21 hours ago
I wish for this new year we reboot the Web with a super light standard and accompanying ecosystem with
- A small and efficient JS subset, HTML, CSS
- A family of very simple browsers that do just that
- A new Web that adheres to the above
> that means being compatible with websites that normal people use
No, new adhering websites would emerge and word of mouth would do the rest : normal people would see this fast nerd-web and want rid of their bloated day-to-day monster of a web life.
One can still hope..
I have to disagree, AMP showed that even Google had an internal conflict with the results of WHATWG.. It's naturally quite hard to reach agreements on a subset when many parties will prefer to go backwards to everything but there situations like the first iPhone, ebooks, TV browsing, etc, where normal people buy simpler things and groups that use the simpler subset achieve more in total than those stuck in the complex only format.
(There are even a lot of developers who would inherently drop any feature usage as soon as you can get 10% of users to bring down their stats on caniuse.com to bellow ~90%.)
Lots of comments talking about how existing browsers can already do this, but the big benefit that current browsers can't give you is the sheer level of speed and efficiency that a highly restricted "lite web" browser could achieve, especially if the restrictions are made with efficiency in mind.
The embedded use case is obvious, but it'd also be excellent for things like documentation — with such a browser you could probably have a dozen+ doc pages open with resource usage below that of a single regular browser tab. Perfect for things that you have sitting open for long periods of time.
Better not. It already exists former QuickJS and QuickJS-NG, and parsing JS is a no light task by any means. Even Edbrowse https://github.com/cmb/edbrowse can grind down to a halt an n270 netbook becaus of some sites with JS (both with qjs and qjs-ng). So Dillo would be no better.
Also, legacy machines couldn't run it as fast as they could.
There could be a way: This HTML-lite spec would be subset of current standard so that if you open this HTML lite page in normal browser it would still work. but HTML-lite browser would only open HTML-lite sites, apart from tech itch it could be used in someplace where not full browser is needed, especially if you are control content generation. - TV screens UI - some game engines embed chrome embed thing ( steam store page kind) - some electron apps / lighter cross platform engine - less sucky QML - i think weechat or sth has own xml bashed app froamework thing (so could be useful to people wanting to build everything app app platform - much richer markdown format ?
WML/WAP got a bad rap I think, largely because of the way it was developed and imposed/introduced.
But it was not insane, and it represented a clarity of thought that then went missing for decades. Several things that were in WML are quite reminiscent of interactions designed in web components today.
And also bring back progressive enhancement.
Do it, man. Call it "MicroWeb" or whatever. Write an agent, make it "viewable with regular browsers". I think this could be cool.
I would actually merge html and js in a single language and bring the layout part of css too (something like having grid and flexbox be elements themselves instead of display styles, more typst kind of showed this is possible in a nice way) and keep css only for the styling part.
Or maybe just make it all a single lispy language
Not likely to happen. There is geminiprotocol with gemtext though for those of us that are fine with that level of simplicity.
Work towards an eventual feature freeze and final standardisation of the web would be fantastic though, and a huge benefit to pretty much everyone other than maybe the Chrome developers.
In the earlier days of the web, there were a lot more plugins you'd install to get around on most websites: not just Flash, but things like PDF viewers, Real Video, etc. You'd regularly have to install new codecs, etc. To say nothing of the days when there were some sites you'd have to use a different browser for. A movement towards more of a standards-driven web (in the sense of de facto, not academic, standards) is what made most of this possible.
I think there needs to be a split between the web browser as a document renderer and link follower, and the web browser as a portable target for GUI applications. But frankly my biggest gripe is that you need HTML, JS, and CSS. Three distinct languages that are extremely dissimilar in syntax and semantics that you need all three of (or some bastard cross compiler for your JSX to convert from one format to them). Just make a decent scripting language and interface for the browser and you don't need that nonsense.
I understand this has been tried before (flash, silverlight, etc). They weren't bad ideas, they were killed because of companies that were threatened by the browser as a standard target for applications.
I think this is the ideal direction mainly because a lot of the webs current tech problems stem from websites that don't need app-level features using them. I was in web dev at the advent of SPA-style navigation and understand why everyone switched to it, but at the same time I feel like it's the source of many if not most bugs an performance issues that frustrate the average user.
You can already create websites to these standards. Then truncate large parts of webkit and create a new browser. Or base it on Servo.
I mean, you can do all that now, so that's not the problem. The problem would be convincing millions of people to switch, when 99.99999% of them couldn't care less.
My idea is to use Markdown over HTTP(S). It's relatively easy to implement Markdown renderer, compared to HTML renderer. It's possible to browse that kind of website with HTML browser with very simple wrapper either on client or server side, so it's backwards compatible. It's rich enough for a lot of websites with actually useful content.
Now I know that Markdown generally can include HTML tags, so probably it should be somewhat restricted.
It could allow to implement second web in a compatible way with simple browsers.
I believe this is the way we might get out of this mess.
With a markdown over HTTP browser I could already almost browse Github through the READMEs and probably other websites.
Markdown is really a loved and now quite popular format. It is sad gemini created a separate closed format instead of just adopting it.
A few too many 9s there I think. You're estimating that only 1 person in every 10 million could care less. So less than 50 such people in the USA for example
And if you find you need more features than that - just build an app, don't make the web browser into some overly bloated app!
But most "apps" are just webviews running overcomplicated websites in them, many of which are using all the crazy features that the GP post wants to strip out.
And, I don't have to run a binary to try your product. The web has a lot of flaws, but it's a good way to deliver properly sandboxed applications with low hassle on the part of the user. I've built my fair share of native vs web apps, and I vastly prefer working on web apps. As a user, I vastly prefer web apps for most things. Not all things, but most. No, I don't want to install your crappy app on my computer and risk you doing something irresponsible. I'll keep you sandboxed in a browser tab that I can easily "uninstall" by closing.
Well worth it. Even the very best web apps struggle to be as good as a decent native app, let alone mediocre web apps. The native operating system blows the web out of the water as an app platform.
The portability of the Web is imperfect, but it's not even in the same galaxy as the portability of native app platforms; there's just no comparison.
This would never happen because there's zero incentive to do this.
Browsers are complex because they solve a complex problem: running arbitrary applications in a secure manner across a wide range of platforms. So any "simple" browser you can come up with just won't work in the real world (yes, that means being compatible with websites that normal people use).