 What would it take to make text-only, low-bandwidth websites/web apps fashionable again? If connectivity is poor: enjoy a more vintage experience. For safety/accessibility or for those with satellite phones it also seems important for emergencies. (You’d think the “mobile friendly” web pages would have been about this. But, ‘mobile friendly’ design seems more about taking away features & reveling, like a greed-driven fiend hot with amoral avarice, since your targets might not have adblock.) 41 comments
@futurebird there's a math professor whose personal webpage has the look and feel of a 90s webpage, and it explicitly says so! @futurebird many years ago my hopes were up as early smartphones lacked performance so mobile sites were far more lightweight. Only took a few years for those hopes to be dashed.  @futurebird it'll only be a indy thing. marketing, advertising, and management types seem unable to understand no-one wants auto playing background video. but indyweb is a thing (see https://indieweb.org/) and the ai generated content doom spiral will push more people there @futurebird I guess "mobile friendly" doesn't mean "mobile economical", even if that's sort of implied... @futurebird In a better world, it would be a matter of simple courtesy to offer a text-only version of ALL websites. @futurebird Oh this (and how we ethically hack SEO/bring back webrings for Black organisations) is a fave design challenge of mine. There is a lot of cool stuff to be done with CSS and typography, as both art and text. @mensrea @futurebird Yes indeed! The OP was a good reminder to get it on paper/paper because it's a genuine need *and* goodness knows we need to be shifting some paradigms in this LLM-powered hellscape... @FINOkoye i can't even get the "stakeholders" at work to understand that building with an accessibility first thinking makes a better experience for everyone @futurebird @FINOkoye @futurebird and for the sake of completeness  @futurebird P.S., if you go to my website https://johnconway.art, and press escape, you get a text-only command-line version of my website, that will generate text versions of my artwork give the right command. (It's easily the silliest thing I’ve ever programmed, I bet no one has ever used it.) @john We have emergency paleo art covered! (sincerely comforted by this)1 (I think a memory of this feature of your site helped get this idea in my head.) @futurebird Would be, if it were server based, but it's not, it's just a javascript layover of the interface - it's loading the images and then running them through the text filter on your device. So it's worst of all worlds! @futurebird mobile friendly, provided your mobile can do all the processing we refuse to put on our servers  @futurebird You'd need to slow down the web connections of the people making the sites. I know some places used to deliberately throttle the internet speeds of developers once a week or so, but that's probably not enough. @eyrea no, you need to slow down the connections of middle and upper management. maybe put them on dial up @futurebird @futurebird it would have to look nice and people would have to want to read what you put in it, neocities exists and is fairly popular @futurebird@sauropods.win pardon the language, but always makes me think of this:  @futurebird I would LOVE to do this. I am an illustrator, but I think it would be a great challenge for me to effectively alt-text everything more descriptively on my site. A lot of it is already there, but there's definitely work to be done. I can imagine building a text only version of each page... I will give it some thought.  @futurebird I regularly use the lite version of CNN. It would be great if other news organizations did the same. https://lite.cnn.com/  @futurebird I've seen multiple projects/blogs/manifestos now that are ranting against the nearly enforced ubiquity of single page applications (SPA) that are super-javascript heavy, with an emphasis towards getting back to semantic markup and CSS. It's not 1990s (I mean I love me some HTML 1.0 but I'm pretty alone in that) but it's much lower bandwidth. Also very easy to do drafting in Markdown, which once you get used to it (and that doesn't take long) is totally addictive. @futurebird But again, my ideal web aesthetic is more retro than even the Geocities nostalgic want. I'm skeptical of background images!!!  @MichaelTBacon I wouldn't count myself as one of those ranting against single page apps nor dynamic websites in general, but I do host both a personal and a project website that are static. The former is a blog and the latter is documentation mainly, so they are text-heavy. Static pages are better suited for both, and significantly less work to maintain. It's a logical choice. I used to make a living building dynamic websites, so it's nice to be able to use my outdated skills. 😁 Yeah the anti-SPA folks aren't totalizing about it, there are some pages for which SPAs are absolutely the right choice. But there's been a push over the last decade-plus to make everything everywhere a React or similar SPA, and it's led to a very sluggish web overall. SPA where they're good, static/CSS-driven pages where they're not, is the goal here. @futurebird Well.... the start for me would be to shoot bootstrap into deep space. Not the sun; I would be afraid that it would suck too much energy out of it and make it useless, like it does everything else! @futurebird A newspaper in my country is still running a mobile website from the era of 2G networks and flip phones. It works better (!) than the mobile app on bad connections (save for the fact that the app caches some articles). @futurebird what would it take? Maybe the popularization of long distance space travel. In the mean time, http://frogfind.com/ is a handy resource.  @futurebird I think simple websites flows naturally from zero brain one click self-hosting. In January I fired up a Writefreely instance that I run on an old PC in my basement. While it turned out to be remarkably simple, (and way easier than 15 yrs ago), I had the linux chops. Sites like Neocities are bringing the simple html-only-written-in-Notepad sites back, but there needs to be one click self-host boxes for $40 at Bestbuy; connect to wifi, upload some html, boom, your own webserver.  @futurebird because text is often a bad medium many sites would have to go beyond it. If the web was only about one set of communication it would make sense but its not meaning the upper demands create a reality for the whole of the internet  Abolish capitalism, pretty much. As long as there's a profit motive at play, all other concerns take a back seat.  @futurebird Some news sites that are mostly text only: @futurebird [1] Press Ctrl-Alt-R or click the little icon at the right-hand side of the address bar to switch to Reader View. |
Gregory's Server
@futurebird Given the choice between anything and noises with moving coloured shapes, users will choose the latter every time.