Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by notatoad 2140 days ago
>It could spur a minimalist information driven trend.

it might if anybody would actually use it, but that seems unlikely if it doesn't have CSS or JS support. Chrome and Firefox are already really damn fast if you give them a simple site without much css or js. people just need to actually make sites like that.
2 comments
ReactiveJelly 2140 days ago
> people just need to actually make sites like that.

This is the problem I see with initiatives like Gopher and Gemini.

The people causing the problems with the web are not the people who will listen to these initiatives.

They are banks, advertisers, FAANG, everyone who is fine making money off the standard Chrome-IE-Edge crowd and barely even care about Firefox support.

Both Gemini support and a sane subset of HTTP / HTML require the same level of dedication that I could bring, but no commercial site will. Well, to be blunt, minimal HTTP / HTML is a lot easier. I can keep my same hyper backend, Firefox client, Nginx for TLS termination, curl and libcurl and pycurl, lots of tools that will only work on HTTP.

Plus, minimal HTTP 1.1 is not that hard to implement, so I think they're mostly attacking the wrong part of the stack while also cutting out useful performance features like QUIC or pipelining or caching.

link
tokamak-teapot 2140 days ago
I’ll use it. I don’t want CSS or JS. If I can do my own styling and have it consistent across many sites then the web will be much more accessible.
link
krapp 2140 days ago
>If I can do my own styling and have it consistent across many sites then the web will be much more accessible.

You want to write a custom stylesheet for every site you use?

link
Shared404 2140 days ago
No, they want to write one custom stylesheet, and then use that for every site they use.

I can understand this sentiment, and if there was a reliable way to implement it I would do it as well.

link
tokamak-teapot 2137 days ago
Back in the days of Netscape 4 (I think), this is what I did. I’m not sure if it was CSS or just some custom browser applied styling defaults, but I found it difficult to read pages in all different styles so I had the browser make them all the same.

There are ‘readability’ plugins and services for browsers that attempt to provide this service for current sites. These days it’s a bit more complicated than just overriding a few styles to make a page ‘standardised’.

The plugins / services work for maybe 99% of pages I look at. Unfortunately I don’t know how to view the whole web through such a lens, without having to activate for each page.

link