(2023-10-27) Branching Paths Grazing The Web

Jan Stepien: Branching Paths · Grazing the Web. The Web that we have right now is a curious evolution of the Web of the noughties

The Web became an advertisement-clad sumptuous festival of colour and sound, in particular for those who could afford the bandwidth to download the assets having uploaded the cookies. (advertising)

I don't think the Web will get smaller before it gets larger, and I don't feel I'm an isolated case

Maciej Cegłowski, Dave Copeland, this guy, small web, smolweb are only some who proposed solutions. Others, such as Gopher or Gemini, went a step further and declared a schism, abandoning all they saw superfluous. Let's start with the latter.

Gemini is a good example of a hard cut

protocol is not designed to be versioned or extended, thus locking its users in the current and final version

Despite all my praise, the decisions such as the hard separation from WWW is a hard pill to me swallow.

Having rejected the clean cut solution, let's take a look at the other path forward. It is less draconian, but likely as controversial: keep using the Web, but use less of it.

what if instead applying the filter on the producer side we limit the consuming endpoint.

consider one core feature of every modern web browser: the reader mode.

The browser extensions marketplaces are awash with plugins that can extend the user agent by reducing its functionality.

Should we instead start at a lower level? Instead of extending a browser, build one?

Alas, building a web browser has been getting progressively more difficult and expensive

I've arrived at a conclusion that the only way forward is to trim. Take the curatorial scissors, and cut out all the components of the modern web that are not immediately conductive to having—in essence—a nice reader mode

How much of a modern web browser will we need to trim? An awful lot

CSS is dauntingly complex and we'll need a restricted subset to achieve our goals.

Ecmascript, with its reliance on browser's APIs, will likely have to be wholly left out. As long as your website uses moderate amount of scripting and adheres to principles of progressive enhancement, I'd want the grazer to render it without major issues.

One aspect of the modern web I do want to preserve is its contributory character.

The web grazer feels to me as a natural extension of European institutions' long term goal. It enables the citizens to engage in the online world in a safe manner, that protects their rights, and isn't siphoning data to overseas GPU clusters in order to build advertisement profiles or large language models.