As I see it, modern web consists of several distinct things, that are
only loosely coupled together, mostly by being accessible via the same
technology:
* Social networks. I personally still fail to see any value in these
tools, so can't suggest anything here.
* Content delivery (newspapers and blogs) venues, which are basically
fancy versions of newsgroups / mailing lists. I believe that this
particular class of the web use cases is the easiest to replace simply
by providing mailing list backend in combination with some sane
lightweight markup language, preferably like ReStructured Text.
* Portable GUI software that has no dependencies, installation and local
storage needs. This class of web uses is the most problematic, and I
am not aware of any possible replacements. Thankfully, many services
have APIs, which may be used to build more or less suckless clients.
FWIW the real problem with making web suck less is that if tech behind
web would not suck this much, users would be able to easily decouple
interesting parts of the content, omitting ads and other things that
actually allow publishers to pay their bills, making web economically
viable. Another, lesser problem is that content providers are really
keen on differentiating themselves, and thus use CSS/JS quirks much more
then is really needed to address issues with aesthetics, usability,
accessibility and other aspects. Ultimately, this need of being
different will always provide incentive for making web more complex, and
thus ultimately suck more.
P.S.: Lately more and more sites tell me that my version of Chrome is
not supported, which is probably related to surf being stuck with
webkit1. Likely things will only become worse over time, so I'd
probably have to switch back to Lynx soon. While it sucks, it does so
much less then most GUI alternatives.
--
Dmitrij D. Czarkoff
Received on Fri Oct 31 2014 - 21:38:43 CET