Did anyone build a search engine including only websites without any JavaScript ? (Not a proxy that strips JS — rendering the site unuseable — sites that don’t contain any as is).
I think from a “marketing” point of view it would make sense to have a recommended official “small web browser”.
Could be NetSurf which launches instantly on 20 year old computers with but handles enough CSS for sites to look ok as long as they don’t use JavaScript.
So an amateur web designer would just check if his site works in NetSurf and call it a day.
One could imagine even a fork of NetSurf with this only intent. Just rename it as SmolWeb browser + add an option to show just all the crap that was ignored. With a percentage of data used for actual content. “Site is 76% crap”.
Then you can imagine an opt-in search engine where owner enables indexation by having some smallweb tag in the code and submitting link to a form so the crawler can get a look and eventually refuse / abort at the first JavaScript tag.
Depuis quelques années, une partie de la communauté internet se tourne vers des solutions plus simples et moins gourmandes en ressources, en réaction à ce que beaucoup considèrent comme l’« #emmerdification » progressive du web. Le protocole #Gemini a émergé comme une réponse prometteuse à ce besoin, mais après l’enthousiasme initial, une certaine désillusion semble s’installer [...]
i am fascinated by this typeface history. as it turns out, Gerald Giampa was the owner of the LTC Spire typeface when it was licensed for use in the GeoWorks operating environment.
i had no idea that he was canadian, and moved his foundry to Prince Edward Island before it was destroyed in a tidal wave. P22 bought his font faces, and designed this absolutely gorgeous traditional web site called The Giampa Tour. it disappeared from the web over 10 years ago, and this is probably the first time it has been seen in a decade. it's full of incredibly nerdy typeface history, including some fantastic rants on how shitty Adobe was to deal with, even back in the late 1980s. 😆
this is what the world wide web was made for, and i'm so glad WBM managed to preserve a working copy, as P22 has been out of business for many years - and its website gone with it.
i've rebuilt the entire site using the WBM's snapshot for public viewing here, where it will remain as an online museum and tribute to Gerald Giampa's incredible work:
This Should be *a huge conversation in the #Fediverse - really.
@jupiter_rowland certainly paraphrases much of the sentiment here in the Fediverse where many conversations are taking place, albeit briefly, and then dismissed, but why? Are people too busy to care? Are people too apathetic to take seriously anything that begins with the letters, masto...? Do those 5 letters really invoke such categorical dismissiveness that cuts into topics that would otherwise likely gain immediate traction were it not for mention of that corporate monolithic silo brand?
Probably; likely; perhaps - take your pick. There is indeed a general apathy amongst especially long term Fedizens and also Lemmy users who are refugees from Reddit, but it's okay to dismiss masto as the neo-corporate EEE platform conceivably threatening the UX for millions of Fedizens. And like it or not, there does need to be a viable shitposting platform, which is exactly what masto is, inhabited in very large ways by people who, as Jupiter raises the question, "are incapable of actually engaging in textual conversation. There's something to that.
Well, #A11Y is a very real concern, perhaps for the FEPs, considering there are projects that are very close in architecture to completely ignoring anything that isn't part of the W3's official specification, and that's okay.
It is, however, a misnomer that one must insert alt-text into media on the masto platform, at least at this juncture. Forcing the hand of refugees from the deprecated, #Privacy_Mining, monolithic silos is yet another complication that those poor souls need to be gently nudged into accepting - but even more importantly, ... "Why".
Some popular Android clients will complain if you try to post media without also including alt-text, some have no facilities at all for doing so. This is an adoption phenomenon, slowly being rolled out, as awareness increases (awareness of the WHY - not the HowTO) with respect to the reasons it is an important design consideration.
Do people actually get unceremoniously banned for not including alt-text for attached media on masto? Yes, On some instances they do, as if it will have any affect at all on the wider Fediverse - I have heard on several occasions that this does indeed happen - there aren't many things that piss people off more than having something that is important to them getting yanked out from underneath them in rug-pull fashion than that of an #instabanhammer, and yet childish, juvenile moderators and admins on several masto instances are truly guilty of such dystopian tyranny and abuse of privilege.
Those types of adversarial, clickish masto instances are much of the reason Fediverse gets a bad rap in some silo social networking circles, and it isn't a fair characterization, but the offensive behavior persists. More than an impetus for the deployment of #smolweb, single-user instances, it is indeed primarily a masto phenomenon.
Not a pretty thing, but masto always has been a caustic cauldron of cacophony of enmity and active vitriol, and that's just one more reason to expedite the outreach programs popping up all over the place to entice the good folks to ditch it in favor of many other good social networking platforms mentioned by Jupiter in his cw-LONG article (I wish he wouldn't bother catering to those mastoblasters with that sentiment, they should at least be smart enough to see that it's more substantive than their shitposting personas are capable of parsing).
Well I'll admit that I stayed up a little bit later than I intended but I managed to hammer it out. Some thoughts on the #indieweb#smolweb#personalsites movement (whatever you want to call it) and, incidentally, the first update to my personal website in 6 months.
I don't know if the world needed another one of these think-pieces but for me, at least, it's a sort of statement of intent. At the very least I hope to put some more effort into my personal site.