Flutterby™! : Tragedy is a series of decisions consistent with character that lead to an undesirable end

Way back in August of 1998, in complaining about how The Web Standards Project was destroying the WWW by pushing a visual-first interpretation of HTML:

The people actually putting out content aren't having problems here, it's only the over-steroided graphics designers trying to make up for the lack of any real meaning in their sites.

In the intervening decades(!), we've seen the problem get worse. The standardization of display, and development platform, has made the web a place of megabytes of ad payload for kilobytes of actual content, of hard to close tabs pushing malware on confused users who are just trying to read, of the imposition of accessibility horrors on top of data that should be easy to access.

Anyway, this came up in thinking about this conversation started by leah's tiny pc retirement home @millihertz@oldbytes.space

i'm just going to say this: i remember when Linux could cheerfully run a GUI and a web browser in 64MB RAM. for all people like to say "oh, but web browsers did less then", they had CSS, JavaScript and multimedia capabilities by the turn of the century (the timescale i'm talking about). they also had XSLT, Flash and Java, and they could read email and news, and connect to FTP servers (and i think gopher servers too). so much for "they do so much more now". no, they really don't - they just make a hell of a mountain out of a rather smaller molehill.

Cassandrich @dalias@hachyderm.io

@millihertz A big part of the problem is how much worse websites are. Thanks largely to React, but lots of other factors too. Nothing is a proper document anymore. Everything on the web is an app with gigantic bundle of scripts and extra-high-res image assets for Apple displays. (And without UBO it's also polluted with hundreds of MBs of adtech and tracking shit.)