No JS, No CSS, No HTML: online "clubs" celebrate plainer websites
No JS, No CSS, No HTML: online "clubs" celebrate plainer websites
The revived No JS Club celebrates websites that don't use Javascript, the powerful but sometimes overused code that's been bloating the web and crashing tabs since 1995. The No CSS Club goes a step further and forbids even a scrap of styling beyond the browser defaults. And there is even the No HTML Club, where you're not even allowed to use HTML. Plain text websites!
The modern web is the pure incarnation of evil. When Satan has a 1v1 with his manager, he confers with the modern web. If Satan is Sauron, then the modern web is Melkor [1]. Every horror that you can imagine is because of the modern web. Modern web is not an existential risk (X-risk), but is an astronomic suffering risk (S-risk) [2]. It is the duty of each and every man, woman, and child to revolt against it. If you're not working on returning civilization to ooga-booga, you're a bad person.
A compromise with the clubs is called for. A hypertext brutalism that uses the raw materials of the web to functional, honest ends while allowing web technologies to support clarity, legibility and accessibility. Compare this notion to the web brutalism of recent times, which started off in similar vein but soon became a self-subverting aesthetic: sites using 2.4MB frameworks to add text-shadow: 40px 40px 0px hotpink to 400kb Helvetica webfonts that were already on your computer.
I also like the idea of implementing "hypotext" as an inversion of hypertext. This would somehow avoid the failure modes of extending the structure of text by failing in other ways that are more fun. But I'm in two minds about whether that would be just a toy (e.g. references banished to metadata, i.e. footnotes are the hypertext) or something more conceptual that uses references to collapse the structure of text rather than extend it (e.g. links are includes and going near them spaghettifies your brain). The term is already in use in a structuralist sense, which is to say there are 2 million words of French I have to read first if I want to get away with any of this.
Republished Under Creative Commons Terms. Boing Boing Original Article.
Just to mention it:
gopher://sdf.org
There is no better place for plain and real content
counterpoint: https://bestestmotherfucking.website/
I guess all that's left is to form a no-utf club.
That is just stupid. How about a slighly more complex markdown.
What I really want is a P2P archive of all the relevant news articles of the last decades in markdown like in firefox "reader view". 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.
Much of the information on the internet could vanish within months if we face some global economic crisis.
I host my own website, and I decided to rewrite the JS portions in React, in order to learn the framework. Boy was it a learning experience: To do the same thing required 2-4 times the amount of code—and that’s just in the scripts, let alone the all the bloat from the packages and the bundler.
I know this is a bit more radical than cutting out frameworks, but working with the JS ecosystem was such a pain, largely because there’s you need to piece together different software to make a stack work, which may or may not go together well. And since your stack is likely unique, good luck getting help on your problems. It made me miss Rust (albeit most languages do)—in Rust, you have Cargo for everything, and it’s beautiful. Rust has its own difficulties, but they actually feel surmountable compared to the dependency hell of JS.
JavaScript, the powerful but sometimes overused code
now there's an understatement.
"No HTML club" is kinda going too far on the Web. If you go there you might as well start a No HTTP Club and serve stuff over Gopher and FTP.
But we definitely need an HTML 2.0 Club.
Pfff, that's nothing. My club doesn't even have a website.
Maybe we could have
No-JSandNo-Client-Storage(which would include cookies) headers added to HTTP. Browsers could potentially display an icon showing this to users on the address bar.Theoretically, browsers could even stop from the JS engine from being started for the site in the first place. Though I wouldn't be surprised if the engine is too tied into the code of modern browsers for that to work.
Just earlier I was reading about this website hosted on solar power and the extremes they went through to get the website to be simple so very little data is transmitted to save precious watts.
The website https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/
I do wonder if we're going to see some websites popping up that kind of hit the reset button on social media and go back to smaller communities of folks with something in common.
I kind of miss the days of actually having online conversations with folks you know are real people (not bots), that aren't trying to be an influencer, or get famous, or some how many money off your interactions.
This fucken rules
love this
Gemini protocol is fab btw. Come join the tildeverse
BBSes are back!
I always loved text stuff. The old rogue games were awesome.
Maybe it's something sightly outside no js/ccs/html but I am curious if there are any super minimal social media sites.
I want to do something locally within my town and it would be nice to host something simple and tiny with my raspberry pi as the server.
I'm assuming bulletin boards are quite minimal in comparison to other types of social media but I've never been a fan of how they handle previous replies with those boxed quotes.
I've also been nostalgic for irc lately. Everything on the internet these days has become overwhelming. Over the past 1.5 years I've been turning to simplicity and it's a craving I that's hard to ignore.