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.
I guess all that’s left is to form a no-utf club.
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.
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.
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.
They’re just following the example laid out by the venture capital model, really.
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.
JavaScript, the powerful but sometimes overused code
now there’s an understatement.
Oh neat! I’m working on a forum that doesn’t use any javascript
phpBBB??
I’ll say one thing for the No CSS philosophy - at least it eliminates light-colored text on a light-colored background using the thinnest possible font, which is probably the stupidest stylistic trend since the web began.
In the future there will be media queries for how old the reader is.
Will teenagers with shitty vision be able to get away with lying about their age or will there be verification?
Get this bs outta here. I write on paper! No one knows my thoughts or feelings!!
What devilry is this? Written word? Real cultures use oral history to store knowledge!
Passing information between two simultaneously existing entities? Get outta here! All cultures use the Jung collective unconscious to store knowledge!
WORDS??? The cheek of it!
Thoughts in a contiguous sequence??!!? What utter bloat! Why even have a past or future when a pure consciousness need only experience the horizon of an infinite present.
Ⰰ⭕☣╛⊄ⴓ⬤⡥◻ⶠ≣ℙ⡥≾⚽⡳ⴖ≋ℒ⊴⎟⼑⋪‡⛘⩎??!!? ⓿▆╟❵! ▧⟺⛴∎Ⳗ⭥♟↠⤢⮪ⱎ⧏ⲇ⿁⌔⋓!!
Just out of curiosity what percentage of people here are using Voyager as their Lemmy client?
Spoiler
Voyager wouldn’t work without JavaScript… shhh don’t tell anyone
Ththat’s different… you take it back!!
There are so many people here that hate cloud based services. And the same people also hate JavaScript. Like you realize if your app was just static JavaScript files, you could literally just download the entire site to your computer and run it? Why is JavaScript the enemy?
JavaScript isn’t the enemy. The enshitification of technology is the enemy.
What we need is a subset of modern web, without any bloat, especially JS frameworks.
A lot of websites can be static HTML + CSS.
Maybe a little JS, as a treat?
It’s fun for hiding little easter eggs.
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
And Offpunk.
Some of these are extreme, but what you’re talking about is the https://512kb.club/, just keep it small, but no limits on what you can use.
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.
Then use a site generator like Hugo or Jekyll to stamp out new versions of your site with matching header/footer/etc.
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.
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.
A Content-Security-Policy with script-src ‘none’ should already allow for that . no js can be loaded like that
I rather have these people embrace gopher
Let’s not. It’s a terrible protocol with amateur design errors.
“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.
Yeah it’s not exactly going to be WCAG AAA either.
Might as well do
no digital cluband we exchange information through mail and pigeons.There’s an rfc for that
Too much information.
Back to smoke signals.Wait. You know what? Back to monke!
It was a mistake to leave the oceans in the first place.
in my next life, i’m gonna be an insect critter hopping in the grassy meadows i guess
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.
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.
I loved frames 🥹
I hated frames, but I do have a tiny bit of nostalgia for them because I started web design in the early '00s when they were all the craze for handmade blogs and portfolio sites :D
And the iframes took up like 1/4 of the screen (with miniscule faint text!) while the rest of the page were large brush swoops and other graphical elements 🥹
And the tiny navigation buttons without any text that you had to figure out from the hovered URL.
Ah I it was all so fucking unusable, but pretty xD
Pfff, that’s nothing. My club doesn’t even have a website.
I can get behind no JS club, I can’t get behind no CSS club.
CSS is 🆒
A subset of css is cool, but man does it go too far.
Sure, but you can’t be tracked via css so it’s okay in my book. Have fun with your whacky css sites.
you can’t be tracked via css
whacky css sites.
No HTML should rather do all-Commonmark instead, imo. Background color and text width & stuff should not be your (the creators) business but my (the users) business only. But some basic styling is nice.
it’s a shame commonmark stalled and then markdown variants proliferated again because of that :/
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.
