> On 21/10/26 04:48, Sagar Acharya wrote:
>
>> That's a bit more primitive. It can go a bit more vibrant wrt fonts, colors,
>> break points for mobile, tablet which would still be minimal in my view. I'm
>> approaching such simplicity from the other complex end which most people
>> prefer, unfortunately.
>>
>
> These are the web pages of some of the giants of computing:
>
> https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/
> https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/
> https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/
> http://www.wall.org/~larry/
> https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/torvalds/
> https://stallman.org/
>
> Notice anything they have in common?
>
> Modern web is a perversion of what it once was - a simple environment to
> represent hypertext. Years of cruft and overengineering have lead to a bloated
> mess we have today. Things like Gemini
>
> https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
>
> have risen recently precisely to address this problem.
>
I don't think protocol is the problem. I think complexity of html, css,
javascript is. I read DOM and I found it to be just a bit too complex.
> Suckless movement is not about conformism, about "going with the flow" of what
> "most people prefer". On the contrary, it is about shaking up the core values
> of
> mainstream computing.
>
> Take dmenu as an example. Its most well known use is to launch programs from
> the
> script dmenu_run. Its counterpart in the traditional GUI would be eye candy
> icons or shortcut buttons on some panel. When first confronted with such
> concept, "most people" will find it "primitive" and even outlandish. However,
> if
> some thought is given to understanding why it is made that way, one inevitably
> starts to see the genius of the concept and why it is much better than
> clicking
> an icon or a button with a mouse.
>
> Surf is a necessary evil to be able to access the modern web. For new websites
> however, anyone who finds value in the suckless principles should actively
> work
> on reverting the web to a sane state it was in some 20+ years ago.
>
> I suggest starting by making websites one creates viewable and readable in:
>
> - NetSurf
> - links
>
People like what they feel. Majority of people out there aren't coders.
Majority of coders just code to earn and would gladly just accept what their
company pushes to them. These people just like convenience. As much as we'd
like them to accept a bit of pain for minimalist and simple code, I don't think
they'd go beyond a certain point.
I'm using dwm, st, dmenu, surf since quite some time. However, I don't think we
should ever expect a majority to shift towards window managers. They will use
desktop environments. Most people would never even know in their lifetimes what
processes are and won't appreciate the beauty of having less than 20 processes
running with 150MB of RAM on a lean OS.
I myself am a dev at Hyperbola OS which I think is the purest today. I use
above suckless softwares. Recently, I bought PinePhone and tried out sxmo which
I'm sure y'all must be excited about. I use mobian with phosh (gnome DE fork
for pinephone) which is still pretty difficult to use relative to Android. I
use Pixelfed and am off Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook. I host my website on
OSHW Olimex Lime2 with just Free software. But sadly, this purity ain't working
folks. There are not a lot of people whom I've been able to bring on my side.
It's too difficult for them! I ask them to chat with me on Telegram and out of
ego, they don't!
I don't comply with everything but the direction is to incentivize most people
towards simplicity. 20 years ago, sites were ugly. Today sites are beautiful,
but as you said too complex. Some fools even import html and css with
javascript! :D . Choosing js free sites, creating js free sites as alternatives
for js sites, without compromising much with looks, UX and animation is what
must be done in my view. I think CSS is harmless. JS has some very bad
fingerprinting characteristics.
Somethings work different to the way we want them to work. And the sad reality
is, majority people are never gonna accept simplicity as a trade off for
convenience. I think keeping convenience the same while making things simple is
the way forward. I love suckless but this is where I differ a bit.
Thanking you
Sagar Acharya
https://designman.org
