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by eadmund 779 days ago
It offends me that I must use Firefox or one of the WebKit forks instead of w3m, eww, links, elinks or my own program which parses HTML.

It offends me that in order to read a document I also have to grant the author of that document execution privileges on my machine.

It offends me when a page’s images are all blurry, low-resolution images (which would be redownloaded by the Javascript I have disabled).

The World Wide Web is a web of documents. It offends me that is has instead become a consortium of walled gardens.
2 comments
SahAssar 779 days ago
> The World Wide Web is a web of documents.

Sure, and if you want to define it as such you are free to only include documents in that definition. The rest of us will keep using the same protocols for accessing other things too and have another definition of www.

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eadmund 779 days ago
I don’t particularly mind apps running atop the web platform. What I do mind is when what could and should be documents are apps instead.
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Linkd 779 days ago
It appears you're stuck in 99'?
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eadmund 779 days ago
1999 was pretty great! I was running Linux, with a nice huge full-colour display running XFree86. Back then it was Mozilla, not Firefox. I had Emacs. TCP/IP and Ethernet had won. MP3s were common. Streaming existed, albeit the options were pretty poor. I had a CD player in my computer and a DVD player in the den. OTOH, CPU, RAM and hard drives were a lot smaller, slower and more expensive.

Here in 2024, I am running Linux, with a nice huge full-colour display running XOrg (because Wayland is still not ready for primetime). I’m using Firefox. I have Emacs. TCP/IP and Ethernet are still around, although if I want spotty performance there’s always WiFi. FLAC and Ogg Vorbis have mostly replaced MP3s. I can easily watch high-resolution video, which is a definite improvement. Streaming, too, has gotten a lot better. I have a CD/DVD RW drive in my computer. CPU, RAM and storage are a lot larger, faster and cheaper.

It’s not really that different, other than the spyware infesting the web. That pretty much didn’t exist in 1999.

I wouldn’t mind going back to 1999. The software I used had a lot less bloat!

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