this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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Inspect any major website, you'll see boilerplate of
<div><div><div><div>and unreadable pile of JavaScript programs your browser need to run to build the website. Sites should be done in a way that is still readable after you disable one element (for example disable CSS function, scripts or HTML specific tag).Internet is modular, based on stacked protocols. Want to fit Tor between TCP and HTTP? No problem. Web is also like that, build of semi-independent formats, in theory. But in practice devs are using frameworks that assume Chrome, Firefox and Safari are and would ever be the only things existing. Now if you want to develop new browser you not only need to display HTML and add other things later. You need to get all specifications of all standards working right away or sites would spectacularly break.
It's a bit of a shame that HTML went from describing documents to describing UIs. I do miss the days of simple websites, although I'm not old enough to remember the old old internet.
What's the alternative? Or an alternative I guess I should say. I agree though, I wish folks would use HTML for all documents. Like why the hell am I downloading a PDF of a thing I'm never printing? (PDFs are still acceptable for printing though.)
I don't think there's anything wrong with using HTML/XML-ish format for describing a UI (although having a standardized presentation format that all "viewers/browsers" follow exactly the same way would be nice), I'm just sad that websites have become described as UIs rather than as well-structured documents.
PDF is a way to make sure everyone can read the document in the same way (like font type, spaces, special characters...) while HTML can cause multiple issues if you don't do it properly. And for documentation I would prefer some Markdown as I can edit it with a fancy IDE or feel lazy and do it with terminal editor or plain text editor.
But that sounds like a problem with developers and languages or frameworks they are using. WWW is all good.
EDIT: I mean, I don't like YouTube frontend, so I use Invidious, there are always apps better made, just depends on the developers, if they want to track users with monitoring + ads, the web app will generate a spaghetti code with many frameworks, tracking, requests, etc.
Yes, the issue is with web developers not following standards. However, because all of them fail to do this, the problem ends up being with the browser that doesn't support everyone's non-standard developments.
I just want my text in the centre of the page (not with rows stretched across a widescreen monitor) and for things to not jump about as they load. Figure out where things should go, then display it.
Web standards? You talk funny, funny man
https://xkcd.com/927/