Some very early announcement of something very noteworthy that is happening on the Fediverse right this moment. Currently most of the discussion still takes place under the #weblite hashtag only.
As you know the current Web specifications have become very bloated. They serve established browser vendors, which operate monopolistically and dominate the (corporate) internet. For new FOSS browser projects it is nigh impossible to start from scratch and implement crisp and modern web rendering engines. The complexity and scope is just too high.
Existing standard bodies such as WhatWG, W3C and IETF move slowly and are beholden to Big Tech lobbying and influences, who want to keep this the status quo.
But there’s nothing that withholds the free software community to derive their own open standards that are lightweight and intuitive. So it happened, only yesterday 15 October, that some fedizens decided to pick up that glove.
Adrian Cochrane and Alexandra kicked off the Weblite initiative. Adrian has been working for a long time on two very cool greenfield browser projects, Odysseus and Rhapsode, an auditory browser. From this many insights on what #weblite specifications should and should not contain was gleaned and hopefully and with collaboration from many others this will be transcribed into Unicode chars in some initial drafts. So, if you are interested, then don’t hesitate and lend your helping hand.
You’ll notice that the linked repositories on Codeberg are still mostly emtpy as of now. Yep, it is indeed that early. On Fediverse you always learn the cool things first 😜
As posted by Adrian these are the principles of Weblite:
- Simplicity
- Vendor, platform, and device independence
- Forwards and backwards compatibility
- Maintainability
- Flexibility
- Richness
- Accessibility
Note too that with these principles Weblite is somewhhat different than what ProjectGemini aims to achieve. Gemini strips to absolute essentials and has more in common to Gopher, that came before the current web.
Join forces, Lemmy people! Let’s bring lite where now darkness rules… (Don’t forget to add a #weblite hashtags to your fedi toots)
I’m curious where do you see the ballast to drop? Javasript?
Yes, dropping JavaScript made a massive difference to the spec! Which is appropriate to drop anyways because all other browser engines than the big 3 (Gecko/Firefox, WebKit/Safari, and Blink/Chrome) barely support it if at all.
As a carry-on from dropping JavaScript, HTMLite no longer needs to describe how to handle edge cases when altering the DOM. Or even how to expose the DOM to any scripts!
The other main thing is WHATWG’s error recovery algorithm. That gets better support, but in my view isn’t fully used enough to be worth implementing.
HTMLite specifically discourages use of <div>, <span>, and image maps to better cater towards non-visual browsers.
Beyond that, to allow for specialization, HTMLite is currently very lenient towards how webpages are rendered: no element, attribute, or even CSS is described as being required.
I’m no expert, but I guess that will be a big part of it. Browser implementers will be most aware of gains to be made, as rendering enginges are humongous beasts with millions of lines of code to them. A ton of API’s, edge cases and being forgiving to formatting mistakes, etc. Browsers have become like OS’es. I dunno if Adrian is on Lemmy, but he can probably explain best.