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The early Web had a quality that has been lost ever since: it was *simple*
Download #httpd , #netscape write some #html by hand and boom, the concept of a networked digital society is born.
It first started going pear shaped with #LAMP . The complexity of a full blown database was not justified for most use cases. As proven decades later by the popularity of #sqlite and #ssg approaches.
The final blow was when #bigtech got into the act. Immense complexity for the simplest things became a moat
@openrisk I agree, but what alternative do you suggest?
@regis besides trying to make some sense of historical patterns, my opinion is a good as anybody's 😅. My gut feeling is that the gate to a whole universe of amazing alternatives is in the direction of reimagining and reinventing the role of mobile devices. There have been intriguing attempts in this direction (e.g., once I had a #firefoxos phone) but the chokehold of the duopoly cartel is dramatic and does not allow experimentation. It is no accident: liberate mobile and you can change the world
@openrisk The web went pear shaped when CSS moved away from simple tweaks to the default colors and sizes to become the behemoth that it is. The superficial style over substance, with JavaScript to juice things further, and it’s been downhill ever since.
@openrisk This is why I bit the bullet and started on Kitten instead of just building a peer-to-peer social web app and some means of deploying it… if we want a different web, we’re going to have to simplify the stack (at least those parts that are feasible to).
Hi @openrisk,
as long as people do slides like https://mro.name/vhs, it's not lost.
I do my best. #permacomputing #web
The silver lining is that with the knowledge of now we can retrace the bifurcations that led us here, try to see what was the cause for each and whether a different path is possible.
In other words, given the wide distribution of mobiles, laptops, NAS servers, VPS etc. (thinking only of the hardware!) how would we refactor web technologies towards a more democratic web.
@openrisk SQLite is just as much a “full blown” database as MySQL is, and infinitely less suited for the kinds of access patters typical of websites. And claiming the LAMP stack somehow stops you from writing mostly static websites is, frankly, ludicrous. Please stop blaming advancing /technology/ for bad /management/ decisions.
The journey of #javascript is the poster child of out of control #complexity. What started as tiny client side code to introduce some interactivity has eaten html itself (virtual #dom) and then metastasized also on the server side. A gargantuan duplication of functionality between client and server that eventually backlashed into the #htmx and #livewire type approaches.
When you throw in the explosion of mobile clients (with architectures controlled by a duopoly) you get to the lunacy of today.
The main argument justifying all the complexity of the current Web is that it is required for "scaling" teams and operations. There is ofcourse *some* truth in that. We are (collectively) getting increasingly more ambitious about the things we want to do over the Web.
But what "scale" are we targeting? The tools, frameworks and mindsets currently dominating are those that serve the needs of an #adtech oligopoly. It is not the architecture to support a diversified, decentralized digital society.
@openrisk Isn't it fascinating that most browsers include a "reader mode" now? All of the fancy HTML, CSS and JS just to be disabled with a simple switch. The loop is closing.
