> On 21/10/26 04:48, Sagar Acharya wrote:
>
>> That's a bit more primitive. It can go a bit more vibrant wrt fonts, colors,
>> break points for mobile, tablet which would still be minimal in my view. I'm
>> approaching such simplicity from the other complex end which most people
>> prefer, unfortunately.
>>
>
> These are the web pages of some of the giants of computing:
>
> https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/
> https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/
> https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/
> http://www.wall.org/~larry/
> https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/torvalds/
> https://stallman.org/
>
> Notice anything they have in common?
>
> Modern web is a perversion of what it once was - a simple environment to
> represent hypertext. Years of cruft and overengineering have lead to a bloated
> mess we have today. Things like Gemini
>
> https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
>
> have risen recently precisely to address this problem.
>
I don't think protocol is the problem. I think complexity of html, css, javascript is. I read DOM and I found it to be just a bit too complex.
> Suckless movement is not about conformism, about "going with the flow" of what
> "most people prefer". On the contrary, it is about shaking up the core values of
> mainstream computing.
>
> Take dmenu as an example. Its most well known use is to launch programs from the
> script dmenu_run. Its counterpart in the traditional GUI would be eye candy
> icons or shortcut buttons on some panel. When first confronted with such
> concept, "most people" will find it "primitive" and even outlandish. However, if
> some thought is given to understanding why it is made that way, one inevitably
> starts to see the genius of the concept and why it is much better than clicking
> an icon or a button with a mouse.
>
> Surf is a necessary evil to be able to access the modern web. For new websites
> however, anyone who finds value in the suckless principles should actively work
> on reverting the web to a sane state it was in some 20+ years ago.
>
> I suggest starting by making websites one creates viewable and readable in:
>
> - NetSurf
> - links
>
People like what they feel. Majority of people out there aren't coders. Majority of coders just code to earn and would gladly just accept what their company pushes to them. These people just like convenience. As much as we'd like them to accept a bit of pain for minimalist and simple code, I don't think they'd go beyond a certain point.
I'm using dwm, st, dmenu, surf since quite some time. However, I don't think we should ever expect a majority to shift towards window managers. They will use desktop environments. Most people would never even know in their lifetimes what processes are and won't appreciate the beauty of having less than 20 processes running with 150MB of RAM on a lean OS.
I myself am a dev at Hyperbola OS which I think is the purest today. I use above suckless softwares. Recently, I bought PinePhone and tried out sxmo which I'm sure y'all must be excited about. I use mobian with phosh (gnome DE fork for pinephone) which is still pretty difficult to use relative to Android. I use Pixelfed and am off Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook. I host my website on OSHW Olimex Lime2 with just Free software. But sadly, this purity ain't working folks. There are not a lot of people whom I've been able to bring on my side. It's too difficult for them! I ask them to chat with me on Telegram and out of ego, they don't!
I don't comply with everything but the direction is to incentivize most people towards simplicity. 20 years ago, sites were ugly. Today sites are beautiful, but as you said too complex. Some fools even import html and css with javascript! :D . Choosing js free sites, creating js free sites as alternatives for js sites, without compromising much with looks, UX and animation is what must be done in my view. I think CSS is harmless. JS has some very bad fingerprinting characteristics.
Somethings work different to the way we want them to work. And the sad reality is, majority people are never gonna accept simplicity as a trade off for convenience. I think keeping convenience the same while making things simple is the way forward. I love suckless but this is where I differ a bit.
Thanking you
Sagar Acharya
https://designman.org
Received on Tue Oct 26 2021 - 20:32:50 CEST