Maybe my favorite bit from the article is:Midas wrote: ↑Sun Jul 26, 2020 9:56 pm Quick note with an example of a radical Links use case:
https://dataswamp.org/~lich/musings/links-browser.html
What has me split right down the middle is that this page is a rewrite of everything we wanted the web to be when I started out as a web developer. I remember quite clearly that IBM for about 6 months or so had what I think was an 800x600 box that was their homepage and there was nothing outside of that box apart from a copyright notice. That was everything wrong with web development at the time. We wanted to add color, layout, and structural control. We wanted more intelligent pages and interaction. We wanted more and better images. We still even had a Gopher server that was regarded as ancient. And here this guy is making an argument that all that basically driving in reverse.Many browsers today are gigantic resource hogs, which are basically VMs for various web applications.
It reminds me of the Douglass Adams quote: "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
But in so many ways I agree -- websites requiring as much data, processor cycles, and and time as they do is absurd. Flash was the target of most frustrations for so long and now it's (basically) gone and we're still in much the same position. Maybe we should have been talking about capping websites and connections somehow to force them to stop being so awful.
All that said, I can't really get onboard with his comment about images, since SO often my software efforts are exponentially better when explained by even a bad screenshot:
Good post.Images (in the modern web) are uninformative, but are simply advertisements of content. They are made to take over your attention and again, make the experience less uniform.