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.
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I think because in 10 or so years, there might be a new standard that breaks the site again. Or makes it unusable.
TXT walkthroughs are still used for a reason. Its much harder to break txt files over decades.
All that is assuming someone still wants to read your txt but that is besides the point.
This. Text files are great for so many reasons! Hard to construct something malicious, too, so pretty great for uploads.
Anyone using basic HTML elements from the first HTML spec would still be supported in 99+% of cases today. HTML has added lots, and removed very, very, very little.
Blink tag! Blink tag! Blink tag!
Was never part of the standard.
It was a part of the zeitgeist!
Frames still break on some sites. center is still being joked about. Once in a while you still see plaintext on some very old sites.
And as a dev of over 20 years, I can say for a fact that deprecations will occur. And its all code cruft for modern browsers to navigate. Its easier to let them die. And in 10+ years the txt docs will still work. Mostly. Maybe. :D Unicode emojis make it even more confusing to the conversion.
https://www.w3docs.com/learn-html/deprecated-html-tags.html
If they are useful, people will still use them. We can have both. Modern Browsers that are closer to full scale OSes AND tiny little txt sites that give users info on the given topic.
even if the website uses deprecated elements, it wont really break. modern browsers will still have compatibility with the old ass tags
blink and center dont work on most modern sites. iframes in particular break now. Give it another 10 years. Hell React will break if you dont keep up with the updates every 6ish months. Or so it feels.
We can have both. Sites that marvel and little txt sites.