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by getynge
906 days ago
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I want to pick up small projects and such too. I’ve recently been on my own kick of finding smaller websites and using rss and whatnot. So much of the modern internet is goofy walled gardens built with tech meant to break down walls, I’m glad the core of the web is still very much alive and I’m hopeful about new life being breathed into it. |
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Corporations have always strived to gain maximum control of the web. AOL desperately tried to fight off its users from going onto the web and keep them in the content made and held exclusively by AOL. They wanted their users to look up by AOL keyword rather than (gasp) a URL that led out their garden.
The only real weapon corporations can deploy against the open web is ironically spam/ad protection/control, which is ironic because the very purpose of corporate walled gardens is access and control of the content so they can inject ads on those pages
The core of this is while the base web protocols and linking provide a key enabling technology, it doesn't provide the necessary content creation and sharing tools needed by non-programmers. Basic HTML used to be something an IQ-100 person could do in a couple of hours.
The war on the <blink> tag is representative of the loss of end user HTML ability. Web developers had instinctive hatred of it, and at some point (was it the XHTML boondoggle) blink was proudly deprecated to the strange joy of so many web people.
But blink was a fun thing a noob HTML document creator (not a developer, just some schmoe making a document, which is what HTML is: just a document by design) could do with simple effort and gave them immediate impact.
Now, HTML is a mess of Javascript and even more arcane CSS. No basic HTML document author could possibly look at the source of any website and glean any useful one-off techniques.
The HTML standard exists to serve HTML web developers and the corporations that employs them. Otherwise we would have had:
- default settings for a basic HTML page that aren't eye-bleeding ugly
- tags that do actually interesting things that don't require javascript
- better interaction tags than links, for sharing things.
Really, the core web and web browsers should have a robust web page authoring tool for end users. Kind of like 4GL tools and the like from the age around when the web was born, which another story today was complaining about the loss of. I WANT my grandma making a blink-tag-laden geocities monstrosity of cat and grandchild photos. Some teenager making emoji walls of hearts.
But that ship has sailed. The web is firmly controlled by developers, and by extension corporations, and by extension, governments.