The revived No JS Club celebrates websites that don’t use Javascript, the powerful but sometimes overused code that’s been bloating the web and crashing tabs since 1995. The No CSS Club goes a step further and forbids even a scrap of styling beyond the browser defaults. And there is even the No HTML Club, where you’re not even allowed to use HTML. Plain text websites!

The modern web is the pure incarnation of evil. When Satan has a 1v1 with his manager, he confers with the modern web. If Satan is Sauron, then the modern web is Melkor [1]. Every horror that you can imagine is because of the modern web. Modern web is not an existential risk (X-risk), but is an astronomic suffering risk (S-risk) [2]. It is the duty of each and every man, woman, and child to revolt against it. If you’re not working on returning civilization to ooga-booga, you’re a bad person.

A compromise with the clubs is called for. A hypertext brutalism that uses the raw materials of the web to functional, honest ends while allowing web technologies to support clarity, legibility and accessibility. Compare this notion to the web brutalism of recent times, which started off in similar vein but soon became a self-subverting aesthetic: sites using 2.4MB frameworks to add text-shadow: 40px 40px 0px hotpink to 400kb Helvetica webfonts that were already on your computer.

I also like the idea of implementing “hypotext” as an inversion of hypertext. This would somehow avoid the failure modes of extending the structure of text by failing in other ways that are more fun. But I’m in two minds about whether that would be just a toy (e.g. references banished to metadata, i.e. footnotes are the hypertext) or something more conceptual that uses references to collapse the structure of text rather than extend it (e.g. links are includes and going near them spaghettifies your brain). The term is already in use in a structuralist sense, which is to say there are 2 million words of French I have to read first if I want to get away with any of this.

Republished Under Creative Commons Terms. Boing Boing Original Article.

      • Agent641@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        12 hours ago

        We can go further. We could take away your fancy "URL"s and just use IP addresses for navigation.

        Heck, we could do away with TCP/IP altogether and network over serial. It’s a perfectly functional protocol with several baud rates to choose from. I like ol’ reliable 9600, but I sometimes dabble in 115200 when I’m feeling adventurous.

        • raldone01@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          8 hours ago

          Back in school my friends all flashed their mcus with 4-8MB images over serial with 115200 baud. I set up ota updates over wifi. They were all fascinated by my speedy flashes. However when I offered to help them set it up, not one was interested because their setup was working as is and slow flashing is not a “bad” thing since it gave them an excuse to do other things.

          We are talking minutes vs seconds here.

          The teachers were surprised by my quick progress and iterations. When I told them my “trick” the gave me bonus points but also were not interested in learning how to do ota which was very easy. A simple 20 minute first time setup would have saved sooo much time during the year.