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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.

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[-] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks 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.

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[-] IllNess@infosec.pub 1 points 3 weeks ago
[-] mesamunefire@piefed.social 1 points 3 weeks ago

!links2@lemmy.sdf.org

[-] sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I love this.

I thought I was being "bare-bones" when I remade my website with PHP & XML (no framework or database). What would they think about a python app that delivers plaintext or html? Is that still kosher for the no-js gang? Or does it have to be static files?

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[-] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 1 points 3 weeks ago
[-] HubertManne@piefed.social 1 points 3 weeks ago

I always loved text stuff. The old rogue games were awesome.

[-] harsh3466@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 weeks ago

BBSes are back!

[-] Olap@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

Gemini protocol is fab btw. Come join the tildeverse

[-] lmr0x61@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 weeks 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.

[-] RagingRobot@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks 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

[-] x0x7@lemmy.world 0 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks 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.

[-] mad_lentil@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 weeks ago

I guess all that's left is to form a no-utf club.

[-] Matriks404@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks 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.

[-] oakward@feddit.org 1 points 3 weeks ago

You are using ASCII? Weak. True website surfers use raw character values, like The Matrix in 1999.

[-] moseschrute@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks 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

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[-] AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 weeks ago

That is just stupid. How about a slighly more complex markdown.

What I really want is a P2P archive of all the relevant news articles of the last decades in markdown like in firefox "reader view". And some super advanced LLM powered text compression so you can easily store a copy of 20% of them on your PC to share P2P.

Much of the information on the internet could vanish within months if we face some global economic crisis.

[-] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

And some super advanced LLM powered text compression so you can easily store a copy of 20% of them on your PC to share P2P.

Nothing can be that advanced and zstd is good enough.

The idea is cool. With pure p2p exchange being a fallback, and something like trackers in bittorrent being the main center to yield nodes per space (suppose, there's more than one such archive you'd want to replicate) and per partition (if it's too big, then maybe it would make sense, but then some of what I wrote further should be reconsidered).

The problem of torrents and other stuff is that people only store what's interesting to them.

If you have to store one humongous archive, and be able to efficiently search it, and avoid losing pieces - then, I think, you need partitioned roughly equal distribution of it over nodes.

The space of keys (suppose it's hashes of blocks of the whole) is partitioned by prefix so that a node would store equal amount of blocks of every prefix. And first of all the values closest to the node's identifier (a bit like in Kademlia) should be stored of those under that space. OK, I'm thinking the first sentence of this paragraph might even be unneeded.

The data itself should probably be in some supercool format where you don't need to have it all to decompress only the small part you need, just the beginning with the dictionary and some interval.

There should also be, as a separate functionality of this system, search by keywords inside intervals, so that search would yield intervals where a certain keyword is encountered. With nodes indexing continuous intervals they can decompress and responding to search requests by those keywords. Ideally a single block should be possible to decompress having the dictionary. I suppose I should do my reading on compression algorithms and formats.

Probably search function could also involve returning Google-like context. Depending on the space needed.

Would also need some way to reward contribution, that is, to pay a node owner for storing and serving blocks.

[-] AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I was thinking of the Gemini (protocol) - Wikipedia but a bit more elaborate, and yeah I'm not sure how far text compression can be pushed. But I think LLMs could be useful and help reach a critical mass of being able to download and store tons of articles.

Torrent V2 and other official extensions Updating Torrents Via DHT Mutable Items allow some ways to do this. Like hosting a youtube channel and updating it with new videos, without any new network protocol. Well theoretically since this isn't yet supported well in torrent clients or lib.

I've been thinking how this would work for a while but it's kind of frying my brain haha. Like a "P2P version control database" that is truly open source. For articles and blog posts, but also for metadata for manhwa, movies, tv, anime, books etc. Like anybody can download and use it and share, edit, fork it without needing to set up some complex server. Something that can't be taken down, sold or if abandoned someone else can just pick it up and you can merge different curated versions and additions easily.

You'd basically want a "most popular items of the past X time" that almost everybody downloads, and then the whole database split into more and more exotic or obscure items. So everybody has the popular stuff but also has to host some exotic items so they don't get lost. And it has to be easy to use and install.

But the whole database has to be small and compact and compressed enough that you can still easily host it on a normal HDD. It the current times with economic and political dangers lurking this would be a crucial bit of IT infrastructure.

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this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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