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.

  • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    4 hours 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.

  • the_q@lemmy.zipEnglish
    17·
    8 hours ago

    Get this bs outta here. I write on paper! No one knows my thoughts or feelings!!

    • stormeuh@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      7 hours ago

      What devilry is this? Written word? Real cultures use oral history to store knowledge!

      • jsomae@lemmy.mlEnglish
        4·
        4 hours ago

        Passing information between two simultaneously existing entities? Get outta here! All cultures use the Jung collective unconscious to store knowledge!

  • moseschrute@lemmy.mlEnglish
    11·
    9 hours 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

  • Matriks404@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    13 hours 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.

    • Vinstaal0@feddit.nlEnglish
      4·
      11 hours ago

      A lot of websites can be static HTML + CSS.

      Yeah they can, I can understand you might want to use something like php to not need to edit the footers and headers every page if you ever change them, but still.

      I also like how some websites like Amazon.com refuse to add a payment platform which is more than a credit card checkout. Especially because their EU sites do have payment platforms with more options to pay. So then you have an over complicated site already with a lot of bloat and some amount of your consumers can’t even pay.

      • AbsentBird@lemm.eeEnglish
        4·
        7 hours ago

        Then use a site generator like Hugo or Jekyll to stamp out new versions of your site with matching header/footer/etc.

  • frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1·
    7 hours ago

    Maybe we could have No-JS and No-Client-Storage (which would include cookies) headers added to HTTP. Browsers could potentially display an icon showing this to users on the address bar.

    Theoretically, browsers could even stop from the JS engine from being started for the site in the first place. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if the engine is too tied into the code of modern browsers for that to work.

    • sylver_dragon@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      4 hours ago

      Theoretically, browsers could even stop from the JS engine from being started for the site in the first place.

      The NoScript extension is basically this. Most of the client side stuff is off by default and you can enable it per-domain. It breaks a whole lot of websites, but often in ways where the main content of a website is still readable. Over time, you can build up a list of “allow by default” domains and most of the web you care about works. Though, you may have to spend a moment or two sorting out permissions when you visit a new site.

    • snowfalldreamland@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      6 hours ago

      A Content-Security-Policy with script-src ‘none’ should already allow for that . no js can be loaded like that

  • Rose@slrpnk.netEnglish
    51·
    18 hours ago

    “No HTML club” is kinda going too far on the Web. If you go there you might as well start a No HTTP Club and serve stuff over Gopher and FTP.

    But we definitely need an HTML 2.0 Club.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      17 hours ago

      HTML 2.0 doesn’t have tables, and tables are not so bad, even org-mode has tables.

      Since HTML 4.01 was a thing when I first saw a website:

      Being able to have buttons is good. Buttons with pictures too.

      And, unlike some people, I liked the idea of framesets. A simple enough websites could have an IRC-like chat frame to the left and the main navigable area to the right.

      And the unholy amount of specific tags is the other side of the coin for not yet using JS and CSS for everything.

      I think an “RHTML” standard as a continuation and maybe simplification of HTML 4.01 (no JS, no CSS, do dynamic things in applets, without Netscape plugins do applets with some new kind of plugins running in a specialized sandboxed VM with JIT) could be useful. Other than this there’s no need in any change at all. It’s perfect. It has all the necessary things for hypertext.

        • kazerniel@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          9 hours ago

          I hated frames, but I do have a tiny bit of nostalgia for them because I started web design in the early '00s when they were all the craze for handmade blogs and portfolio sites :D

          And the iframes took up like 1/4 of the screen (with miniscule faint text!) while the rest of the page were large brush swoops and other graphical elements 🥹

          And the tiny navigation buttons without any text that you had to figure out from the hovered URL.

          Ah I it was all so fucking unusable, but pretty xD

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zipEnglish
    7·
    15 hours ago

    No HTML should rather do all-Commonmark instead, imo. Background color and text width & stuff should not be your (the creators) business but my (the users) business only. But some basic styling is nice.

    • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      2·
      13 hours ago

      i guess Commonmark is the same thing as Markdown?

      in that case, this is why i love the fediverse (especially lemmy) so much: comments and posts are simple markdown.

      it comes quite close to the principle of distributing content in the way of markdown articles.

  • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1532·
    1 day ago

    JavaScript, AJAX, and modern web frameworks have pushed us away from displaying information in a pure and clean way. We need to go back to a better time!

    Looks at no-HTML websites

    Shit, we’ve gone back too far!