- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
The web is fucked and there’s nothing we can do about it. Kev Quirk looks back fondly at Web 1.0.
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Pseudo romanticizing of the old web. Yeah, I don’t like that we’re heading into a corporate super controlled web but as of now, that still vastly better than it used to be before search engines were a thing. I also only look back with a nostalgic eye at the time of gaming magazines because it was fun, but it’s so much better to be able to Google stuff now. I don’t miss dealing with web design out of order, wild west style.
Old website navigation was often bad and ugly. Everyone had a forum but you never found what you were looking for. And web design unavoidably had to change to allow better mobile access. You could no longer load in font size 6 blue on top of blue as that would (correctly so) annoy people and make them stop visiting your page, when ther was a better site available.
Now social media isn’t necessarily bad, we’re on one after all, but there are definitely harmful social media who are just made for ragebait, like Twitter and Facebook.
It’s a fact though that you need more googlefu now, to find what you’re looking for.
When you see an article dismiss problems with “but that was all part of the fun”, you know that usability isn’t high on the author’s agenda.
As usual for these people, they seem to hate people with disabilities or those simply older. You know what Web 1.0 “design” (there’s a reason for the scare-quotes, properly designed sites were of course a thing) was? Utterly inaccessible. I won’t cry a single tear for all these horrible unreadable designs, and I barely even have issues (I mainly get overly distracted and annoyed by movement, I disable GIF animations by default and have “prefers reduced motion” active), but for people with more serious issues, it was/is way worse. Now granted, there’s still horrible inaccessible shit on the web today, but it’s far better than it was and especially far better than what these old-web defenders seem to cry to return.
And the best thing? People tend to get worked up when you say you’d like to consume the content without annoying shit. When it’s about JS, everyone applauds you “Yeah, fuck those JS only sites, we want basic text!” but when you say you want basic text without 50000 moving and blinking things? “Fuck you for wanting a sterile web where everything is boring”
/rant
The article acknowledges this in the conclusion (emphasis mine):
I’m done. There you have it. That’s my opinion about how ____ed the web is. Look, we will never get the web of old back. Let’s be honest, it wasn’t perfect either. The web of today is more accessible, more dynamic and pretty much a cornerstone of our society.
Accessibility wasn’t the main topic discussed in the article. It was mostly pointing out that the current web is too centralised.
Accessibility wasn’t the main topic discussed in the article
That’s part of the problem. All these rants about the glory of Web 1.0 are ignoring the fact that Web 1.0 wasn’t usable for anybody with accessibility issues and the modern web is better for them. A tiny acknowledgement at the bottom of their rant shows how they value accessibility lower than all of their other concerns.
The article wasn’t really about Web 1.0 as much as it was about the time that Web 1.0 was around. The author could remove “Web 1.0” and replace it with “late 1990s to early 2000s Internet”.
That’s part of the problem.
No, thats just the angle that the article wanted to take. Just because it ignores an aspect of something doesn’t mean that its position is moot.
Are you asking for every article ever to have a section discussing accessibility? I’d rather we let the author speak their mind, and focus on what they want to say.
Are you asking for every article ever to have a section discussing accessibility?
No. I’m asking that when they complain about how the modern web is “fucked” and web 1.0 was better, they don’t try to act like that is an absolute, since that’s an opinion that is not widely applicable.
No, thats just the angle that the article wanted to take. Just because it ignores an aspect of something doesn’t mean that its position is moot.
Ignoring part of a topic makes your argument weaker.
they don’t try to act like that is an absolute
Again, to write an article means to cut out things that don’t matter to the core argument. You’re asking for the writer to complete a thesis.
Ignoring part of a topic makes your argument weaker.
And again, this is an opinion piece, not a well developed thesis. What you are asking for is both unreasonable and impractical when writing an opinion piece.
I think it’s time for a new standard to replace HTML and Javascript for the web that formalizes all the most used functions and gives developers way less freedom to make a crappy website.
Alternatively train AI to recognize crappy websites and severely punish them in search.
Or use AI to reformat websites into something user friendly. Considering the coding skills of GPT-4, I don’t think that’s too far away.
Between GDPR prompts, auto-generated articles, banner ads, normal ads, filler content, related articles, the web has become unusable.
Really it’s Google’s fault for not cracking down on these practices. And their competitiors for not doing so either.
Search engines in general have become beyond useless. I barely find anything anymore and it’s not just the fault of bad web design. Even if the search results followed human friendly design, they don’t even contain anything related to my search.
My only hope is that retrieval-augmented LLMs can fix this mess. Basically they read all these crappy websites for you and extract the actually useful information.
Replacing HTML and JavaScript does nothing to stop people from creating bad websites. People would still post auto-generated content or ads, filler content, related articles, etc… And having LLMs summarize bad content will only give you a shortened version of bad content.
