As I see it, modern web consists of several distinct things, that are only loosely coupled together, mostly by being accessible via the same technology:
* Social networks. I personally still fail to see any value in these tools, so can't suggest anything here. * Content delivery (newspapers and blogs) venues, which are basically fancy versions of newsgroups / mailing lists. I believe that this particular class of the web use cases is the easiest to replace simply by providing mailing list backend in combination with some sane lightweight markup language, preferably like ReStructured Text. * Portable GUI software that has no dependencies, installation and local storage needs. This class of web uses is the most problematic, and I am not aware of any possible replacements. Thankfully, many services have APIs, which may be used to build more or less suckless clients. FWIW the real problem with making web suck less is that if tech behind web would not suck this much, users would be able to easily decouple interesting parts of the content, omitting ads and other things that actually allow publishers to pay their bills, making web economically viable. Another, lesser problem is that content providers are really keen on differentiating themselves, and thus use CSS/JS quirks much more then is really needed to address issues with aesthetics, usability, accessibility and other aspects. Ultimately, this need of being different will always provide incentive for making web more complex, and thus ultimately suck more. P.S.: Lately more and more sites tell me that my version of Chrome is not supported, which is probably related to surf being stuck with webkit1. Likely things will only become worse over time, so I'd probably have to switch back to Lynx soon. While it sucks, it does so much less then most GUI alternatives. -- Dmitrij D. Czarkoff
