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.
Yes , I can read books. I even read one or two of the 1200 around me. Those with the fuckpics and some of the funnier ones, like “Phänomenologie des Geistes” by Hegel. I wouldn’t have if they had been layouted using browser standards.
They’re not standards, it’s just default styles, which you can change.
That’s not even convincing pedantery. Nobody would assune that a browser’s standard style might be an RFC, IETF- or in any way official standard,
I meant it’s not standardised across browsers, so it doesn’t really matter if you change them within certain bounds. You can certainly set up something akin to some basic nice typesetting, get your default margins, padding, fonts, bg color sorted. They’re all reset in basically all websites anyway.
Yes. I think we’re missing each other pinpointing details while meaning the same. Every browser has it’s defaut or “standard” style, nowadays even adapting to the system theme and trying to guess if to use day or night settings etc. Nevertheless it won’t break lines in a reasonable way, won’t deal with footnotes in an acceptable way and either break the layout of pure text pages or the layout of illustrated pages. HTML5 makes these specific things somewhat better as it allows realtively advanced document structure but nevertheless, a few lines of CSS to reflect at least the prinipial character of the document are unlikely to hurt anyone in a worse way than a one-style-fits-all layout for everything will hurt tha vast majority.