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.

  • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1342·
    2 months ago

    JavaScript, AJAX, and modern web frameworks have pushed us away from displaying information in a pure and clean way. We need to go back to a better time!

    Looks at no-HTML websites

    Shit, we’ve gone back too far!

  • Absaroka@lemmy.worldEnglish
    38·
    2 months ago

    I do wonder if we’re going to see some websites popping up that kind of hit the reset button on social media and go back to smaller communities of folks with something in common.

    I kind of miss the days of actually having online conversations with folks you know are real people (not bots), that aren’t trying to be an influencer, or get famous, or some how many money off your interactions.

    • meejle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      2 months ago

      I think it’ll happen, but I don’t think it’s happening yet.

      The unease is already there (“the internet used to be a place”/“why isn’t the internet fun any more?” sentiments and #OldWeb #SlowWeb hashtags), but I don’t think people are ready to do anything about it.

      I’m only one guy, with a small internet following, but I recently had a go at launching a small “Gaymers” webring (well, a simplified version of one). I promoted it on my socials, I laid out why I think it’s a good idea, I paid to “Blaze” it on Tumblr – I even emailed some like-minded creators directly.

      I rewrote the webpage multiple times, to try to make it more persuasive and more concise. I added a contact form in case people felt uncomfortable emailing me. I loosened the rules to allow commercial websites, as long as they were still independent. I worked hard on the widget and incorporated feedback (made it respect prefers-reduced-motion and made a static version for sites where animation would feel out of place).

      I got some good feedback; lots of people said it was interesting, and a good idea. But literally no one joined or expressed any interest in joining. 🤷‍♂️

      I’m going to have one more go at promoting it next time I’ve got money to spare, but I’ll most likely end up quietly deleting it along with any evidence it existed, because a webring of one is fucking embarrassing. 💀

      I guess if you build it, they will not necessarily come lmao

      • MagicShel@lemmy.zipEnglish
        4·
        2 months ago

        I’ve been thinking about something like this but I’m not gay or really much of a gamer any more, so… different webrings I guess.

    • Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      Is there any way to go back to running these things on an old Dell in the corner of a bedroom next to a fire extinguisher?

      That’s when we have truly won

  • Matriks404@lemmy.worldEnglish
    23·
    2 months ago

    What we need is a subset of modern web, without any bloat, especially JS frameworks.

    A lot of websites can be static HTML + CSS.

  • the_q@lemmy.zipEnglish
    18·
    2 months ago

    Get this bs outta here. I write on paper! No one knows my thoughts or feelings!!

    • stormeuh@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      2 months ago

      What devilry is this? Written word? Real cultures use oral history to store knowledge!

      • jsomae@lemmy.mlEnglish
        5·
        2 months ago

        Passing information between two simultaneously existing entities? Get outta here! All cultures use the Jung collective unconscious to store knowledge!

          • mad_lentil@lemmy.caEnglish
            2·
            2 months ago

            Thoughts in a contiguous sequence??!!? What utter bloat! Why even have a past or future when a pure consciousness need only experience the horizon of an infinite present.

            • jsomae@lemmy.mlEnglish
              3·
              2 months ago

              Ⰰ⭕☣╛⊄ⴓ⬤⡥◻ⶠ≣ℙ⡥≾⚽⡳↍ⴖ≋ℒ⊴⎟⼑⋪‡⛘⩎??!!? ⓿⑍▆╟❵! ▧⟺⛴∎Ⳗ⭥♟↠⤢⮪ⱎ⧏ⲇ⃲⿁⌔⋓!!

    • tehBishop@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      Those websites are amazing, thank you.

      I checked the source to find the song only to realized I already had it in my playlist 😂

  • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    2 months ago

    I’ll say one thing for the No CSS philosophy - at least it eliminates light-colored text on a light-colored background using the thinnest possible font, which is probably the stupidest stylistic trend since the web began.

    • GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      I remember the wonderful feeling when Discord had a redesign in like 2017 or 2018 where they undid that awful gray-on-white design trend and made the text actually have contrast. These days the annoying trendy design thing is articles/blogs with extremely narrow width.

      no i do not want to read paragraphs
that are this wide. this is making it
way more annoying to read. please
stop doing this.

      at least Firefox has Reader Mode.

      • bluesheep@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        I’m annoyed by that too, and I think the reason is so they can cram more ads in it. I had to turn of my adblock for a second and forgot to turn it back on while going to a news site and I swear to God 2/3rd of the page was ads. Turned it back on and those spaces were empty making only 1/3rd of the page used. Still way better tho I’m never turning it off again.

      • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        Will teenagers with shitty vision be able to get away with lying about their age or will there be verification?

  • moseschrute@lemmy.mlEnglish
    11·
    2 months ago

    Just out of curiosity what percentage of people here are using Voyager as their Lemmy client?

    Spoiler

    Voyager wouldn’t work without JavaScript… shhh don’t tell anyone

      • moseschrute@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        There are so many people here that hate cloud based services. And the same people also hate JavaScript. Like you realize if your app was just static JavaScript files, you could literally just download the entire site to your computer and run it? Why is JavaScript the enemy?

        JavaScript isn’t the enemy. The enshitification of technology is the enemy.

  • lmr0x61@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    2 months ago

    I host my own website, and I decided to rewrite the JS portions in React, in order to learn the framework. Boy was it a learning experience: To do the same thing required 2-4 times the amount of code—and that’s just in the scripts, let alone the all the bloat from the packages and the bundler.

    I know this is a bit more radical than cutting out frameworks, but working with the JS ecosystem was such a pain, largely because there’s you need to piece together different software to make a stack work, which may or may not go together well. And since your stack is likely unique, good luck getting help on your problems. It made me miss Rust (albeit most languages do)—in Rust, you have Cargo for everything, and it’s beautiful. Rust has its own difficulties, but they actually feel surmountable compared to the dependency hell of JS.

    • x0x7@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      2 months ago

      The dependency hell of JS is caused by React. It’s an ironic turn because node gained popularity in part because it was one of the first to have a coupled package manager with a massive public contribution model, full of a billion packages that follow the unix philosophy of “everything should do only one thing, and do it well” Dependency hell would disappear if people stopped popularizing competing swiss army knives. It’s made worse by people trying to mash these swiss army knives together just to improve portfolio.

      We’ve gotten to the point where you aren’t considered a real professional unless you start even the smallest projects with maximum technical debt.

      It should never be impressive that you used a tool. If the tool made programming it easier then it’s not a mental feat. If the tool made programming it harder, then people should think you are kind of slow for using a tool that made development harder. This is why brag culture over what tools are used makes no sense. Just use tools that make life easier. If it doesn’t make life easier, stop using it.

      • lmr0x61@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        That’s fair, actually: my project had 2 packages in my node_modules (not my package.json, total dependencies!) in vanilla JS, now it has well over 100. Unreal.

      • mad_lentil@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        We’ve gotten to the point where you aren’t considered a real professional unless you start even the smallest projects with maximum technical debt.

        They’re just following the example laid out by the venture capital model, really.

    • RagingRobot@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      React is probably overkill for most simple sites. You could still use JavaScript for some cool stuff without needing all the libraries and frameworks