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---
date: 2022-10-22
title: The Old Web was Better
---
When I go to an average "modern" World Wide Web site with the default
configuration of Lynx, a wonderful plain text Web browser, I am usually
greeted with things like
`example.com cookie: some jibberish Allow? (Y/N/Always/neVer)` for which
I'd press V a couple times. Then, I would press C-f or page-down a
couple times to scroll past a giant navigation bar full of nested lists,
a few HTML login forms, multiple search bars. Then I'd see the actual
text of the article I'm looking for. Or sometimes, the site would show
"Please enable JavaScript to view this page." or some Cloudflare prompt
saying that I need to enable JavaScript to solve a proprietary CAPTCHA
to view the page because they have detected "unusual activity from my
network". Or I would be met with a blank page. If I decide to visit the
modern Web with a "normal" Web browser such as Firefox or Chromium, with
a default install, I'd get a ten-megabyte load of a bunch of fancy
advertisements at the top of the page, a giant navigation bar that's
really colorful to distract me from what I actually want to see, some
pop-ups wanting me to fill in my email address to sign up for their
newsletter (which as people say would usually be weekly HTML email
spam), flashy advertisements on the side bar, and when I finally
scrolled past the header part of the page, a few hasty paragraphs with
large paragraph separations unreadably wrapped in a narrow column. All
to display a few kilobytes of actual text, and rarely a few hundred
kilobytes of useful images.
The Web, which people often refer to as the aggregate of human knowledge
and high-speed distribution of information, has turned into a degenerate
mess of advertisements, JavaScript, slugishness, tracking and profiling,
security holes, and slowness. In summary, the modern Web is *painful*.
I'm looking back towards the 1990s, where Websites would be like this
one. Simple (X)HTML, plain text, or another lightweight markup language.
No ads, trackers, JavaScript, popups, [Software as a Service
Substitute](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html)
etc. Just distribution of information and ideas, as gophertext, plain
text, or simple (X)HTML. As simple as that---basically "use the simple
defaults of your Web server program and don't bother with huge
management systems".
Though, some semi-modern things are good. MediaWikis, for example, while
their behind-the-back workings of mulplitudes of PHP mountains, SQL
databases, and recently JavaScript-infested visual editors are extremely
unelegant, they do provide a consistent simple user interface, without
many browser requirements, for users to distribute useful information
with. Just not loads of JavaScript and margins and paddings and ads,
please.
It would also be better if more people were to have personal Websites to
express themselves with, rather than relying on centralized social media
giants, who once again display a bunch of ads and wraps articles/"posts"
at 30 columns to make people uncomfortable reading comprehensive ideas
and get them inclined to write short illogical rants and personal
attacks. [Tuxiversity](https://learn.tuxiversity.org/) and
[LandChad.net](https://landchad.net/) are useful resources to get
started with.
The same applies to the Internet more generally. Don't send huge, clunky
HTML emails. Simple chat protocols like IRC. Whatever.
|
