[mattlondon]

I think Gemini has missed a trick being being deliberately too simple - e.g. no inline images, no tables, no forms, no basic formatting etc.

I know these were deliberately left out for "simplicity" reasons, but then they have a fairly unsimple mechanism for user login/auth that totally undermines their claim for making clients little more than slightly-augmented-terminals, which for me is a smoking gun for these things being missing purely on an ideological basis only and an attempt at controlling how people use it. That's fine, it's their thing and they can do what they want with it.

There is a growing trend of people simply choosing to use XHTML Basic (1). This is a "stripped down" version of HTML originally intended for early phones, PDAs, set top boxes etc - it has the critical missing features of Gemini, but forgoes some of the more "advanced" features of the modern web people have issues with. I'd highly recommend people simply target that instead.

1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML_Basic

[krapp]

It looks like this still supports the script tag, which seems to be the biggest "modern web" feature people want to abandon.

[giantrobot]

So don't include one. JavaScript isn't fucking mandatory.

[krapp]

The kind of people who tend to want a separate, simpler alternative web are almost universally also the kind of people who are so allergic to javascript that they don't even want it to be an option, on the remote chance they might encounter it in the wild. They're drawn by a combination of nostalgia and spite to manifest an alternate universe where scripting on the web never even happened. Otherwise, sure, they could just write simple HTML and no javascript on the web we have now.

I personally would like to retry a version of the script tag (possibly more like the object tag) with native support for WASM that would make it easy to run scripts in any language... which is closer to the original vision before Javascript "won," and possible without requiring browsers to support the languages. Also maybe things like an <include> tag for HTML, and other things that fell by the wayside of early HTML. I'd like to see something like HolyC, with native support for text, hypertext, drawing and code.

But 99.9% of people seem to just want a web that's basically whitepapers with links, maybe images.

[factormeta]

wouldn't it just be better to start a new html5 without JS trend? It can the defector standard for document based web! A lot of modern CSS options to build nav menus now days[1]:

Form submit etc to send network traffics are all available, JS is only needed when you wanna do something cute like network call (AJAX) or change dom elements without refreshing the page. And come up with kluge such as allowing js to change the route with in the domain.

Footnotes: 1.https://1stwebdesigner.com/pure-css-navigation-menus/

[cxr]

You'd have to ditch a bunch of CSS, too. JS always gets mentioned, but it's hardly the biggest problem I tend to have when landing on random pages. I'd guess 60+% of the time it's one of:

1. very poor choice of text size and/or color

2. imposing stupid width/min-width

3. sticky headers