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.

  • the_wiz@feddit.org
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    15 hours ago

    Just to mention it:

    gopher://sdf.org

    There is no better place for plain and real content

  • lmr0x61@lemmy.ml
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    19 hours ago

    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.

    • RagingRobot@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      React is probably overkill for most simple sites. You could still use JavaScript for some cool stuff without needing all the libraries and frameworks

    • x0x7@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      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.

      • lmr0x61@lemmy.ml
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        2 hours ago

        That’s fair, actually: my project had 2 packages in my node_modules (not my package.json, total dependencies!) in vanilla JS, now it has well over 100. Unreal.

      • mad_lentil@lemmy.ca
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        17 hours ago

        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.

  • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.world
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    23 hours ago

    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.

    • GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml
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      14 hours ago

      I remember the wonderful feeling when Discord had a redesign in like 2017 or 2018 where they undid that awful gray-on-white design trend and made the text actually have contrast. These days the annoying trendy design thing is articles/blogs with extremely narrow width.

      no i do not want to read paragraphs
      that are this wide. this is making it
      way more annoying to read. please
      stop doing this.
      

      at least Firefox has Reader Mode.

      • bluesheep@lemm.ee
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        4 hours ago

        I’m annoyed by that too, and I think the reason is so they can cram more ads in it. I had to turn of my adblock for a second and forgot to turn it back on while going to a news site and I swear to God 2/3rd of the page was ads. Turned it back on and those spaces were empty making only 1/3rd of the page used. Still way better tho I’m never turning it off again.

      • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.world
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        18 hours ago

        Will teenagers with shitty vision be able to get away with lying about their age or will there be verification?

  • the_q@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    Get this bs outta here. I write on paper! No one knows my thoughts or feelings!!

      • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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        23 hours ago

        Passing information between two simultaneously existing entities? Get outta here! All cultures use the Jung collective unconscious to store knowledge!

          • mad_lentil@lemmy.ca
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            17 hours ago

            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.

            • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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              17 hours ago

              Ⰰ⭕☣╛⊄ⴓ⬤⡥◻ⶠ≣ℙ⡥≾⚽⡳↍ⴖ≋ℒ⊴⎟⼑⋪‡⛘⩎??!!? ⓿⑍▆╟❵! ▧⟺⛴∎Ⳗ⭥♟↠⤢⮪ⱎ⧏ⲇ⃲⿁⌔⋓!!

  • AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml
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    19 hours ago

    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.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      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.

      Nothing can be that advanced and zstd is good enough.

      The idea is cool. With pure p2p exchange being a fallback, and something like trackers in bittorrent being the main center to yield nodes per space (suppose, there’s more than one such archive you’d want to replicate) and per partition (if it’s too big, then maybe it would make sense, but then some of what I wrote further should be reconsidered).

      The problem of torrents and other stuff is that people only store what’s interesting to them.

      If you have to store one humongous archive, and be able to efficiently search it, and avoid losing pieces - then, I think, you need partitioned roughly equal distribution of it over nodes.

      The space of keys (suppose it’s hashes of blocks of the whole) is partitioned by prefix so that a node would store equal amount of blocks of every prefix. And first of all the values closest to the node’s identifier (a bit like in Kademlia) should be stored of those under that space. OK, I’m thinking the first sentence of this paragraph might even be unneeded.

      The data itself should probably be in some supercool format where you don’t need to have it all to decompress only the small part you need, just the beginning with the dictionary and some interval.

      There should also be, as a separate functionality of this system, search by keywords inside intervals, so that search would yield intervals where a certain keyword is encountered. With nodes indexing continuous intervals they can decompress and responding to search requests by those keywords. Ideally a single block should be possible to decompress having the dictionary. I suppose I should do my reading on compression algorithms and formats.

      Probably search function could also involve returning Google-like context. Depending on the space needed.

      Would also need some way to reward contribution, that is, to pay a node owner for storing and serving blocks.

  • Matriks404@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    What we need is a subset of modern web, without any bloat, especially JS frameworks.

    A lot of websites can be static HTML + CSS.

    • Vinstaal0@feddit.nl
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      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.

      • AbsentBird@lemm.ee
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        1 day ago

        Then use a site generator like Hugo or Jekyll to stamp out new versions of your site with matching header/footer/etc.

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    1 day ago

    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

      • moseschrute@lemmy.ml
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        17 hours ago

        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.

  • Rose@slrpnk.net
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    2 days ago

    “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.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      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.

        • kazerniel@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          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 it was all so fucking unusable, but pretty xD

  • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    JavaScript, AJAX, and modern web frameworks have pushed us away from displaying information in a pure and clean way. We need to go back to a better time!

    Looks at no-HTML websites

    Shit, we’ve gone back too far!

    • B-TR3E@feddit.org
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      2 days ago

      CSS on the other hand is quite essential to separate layout from content. Which is a good thing, so I can’t really think of a reason for a “no-CSS” rule. Specifically if you can use inline styles as well but in a way more messy way.

      • sik0fewl@lemmy.ca
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        1 day ago

        I know that’s what CSS is supposed to do, but I’m not sure many people use it that way.

      • howrar@lemmy.ca
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        1 day ago

        I think the idea is that you keep the layout as simple as possible such that you don’t need any code for it, css or otherwise.

        • B-TR3E@feddit.org
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          1 day ago

          Oh, come on. You really want some at least readable output. Things like image borders, consistently positioned images/diagrams, line breaks and page borders. Some whitespace and indentations, too. You just can’t read a couple of pages full of unformatted raw text without massive eye fatigue. I’m all for dumping JS and excessive frameworks, I’d prefer well-formed XHTML over any of that clients-side scripted crap, but totally rejecting CSS is pointless zealotry.

          • frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            1 day ago

            Some people haven’t lived through the time when HTML layout was done through nested tables, and it shows.

          • zloubida@sh.itjust.works
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            23 hours ago

            In a perfect world, these would be decided not server-side, but client-side by choices made by the browser users.

            But our world is not perfect.

            • B-TR3E@feddit.org
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              1 day ago

              Yes , I can read books. I even read one or two of the 1200 around me. Those with the fuckpics and some of the funnier ones, like “Phänomenologie des Geistes” by Hegel. I wouldn’t have if they had been layouted using browser standards.

                • B-TR3E@feddit.org
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                  22 hours ago

                  That’s not even convincing pedantery. Nobody would assune that a browser’s standard style might be an RFC, IETF- or in any way official standard,

            • B-TR3E@feddit.org
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              I don’t think. You can’t prove I do! Leave me alone. You’re one of them! I knew it all the time.

      • jaybone@lemmy.zip
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        2 days ago

        Separating layout from content is good. CSS is a really bad way to do it.