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SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Wednesday March 14 2018, @10:57AM   Printer-friendly
from the even-more-necessary-today dept.

Maciej Ceglowski, proprietor of the Pinboard bookmarking site, spoke back on October 29, 2015, at the Web Directions conference in Sydney, Australia about the problem of increasingly bloated web pages. His talk describes the nature of the bloat problem, fake attempts at pretending to fix it, the bloat that advertisements contribute, mishandling of images, unreasonable crufty javascript frameworks, time wasting layouts, sluggish backends, and why it is important to address these issues. The reasons to do so go well beyond just aesthetics and efficiency.

Here's the hortatory part of the talk:

Let’s preserve the web as the hypertext medium it is, the only thing of its kind in the world, and not turn it into another medium for consumption, like we have so many examples of already.

Let’s commit to the idea that as computers get faster, and as networks get faster, the web should also get faster.

Let’s not allow the panicked dinosaurs of online publishing to trample us as they stampede away from the meteor. Instead, let's hide in our holes and watch nature take its beautiful course.

Most importantly, let’s break the back of the online surveillance establishment that threatens not just our livelihood, but our liberty. Not only here in Australia, but in America, Europe, the UK—in every free country where the idea of permanent, total surveillance sounded like bad science fiction even ten years ago.

He closes with an appeal to address these concerns in order to improve general accessibility of the WWW, which correlates with its general awesomeness.

From The Website Obesity Crisis (transcript)
The Website Obesity Crisis (video)

[Ed note: Though some of the admin functions for SoylentNews use Javascript, the user-facing side is entirely Javascript-free; everything is done with straight HTML and CSS. --martyb]

[TMB note: I wish. We never could figure out a way to do collapsible comment trees how we wanted to entirely without Javascript and it's also required for subscriptions paid through Stripe.]


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  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday March 14 2018, @08:05PM (4 children)

    by darkfeline (1030) on Wednesday March 14 2018, @08:05PM (#652570) Homepage

    >We never could figure out a way to do collapsible comment trees how we wanted to entirely without Javascript

    Well, it's quite obvious why. SoylentNews is a web application, not a WWW page or site. The semantics of HTML and HTTP are quite clear with respect to methods like GET/POST and URL semantics/resource naming, and SN does not follow them, being a forum/news web app.

    If SN were a real WWW site, every comment would be found at URLs like soylentnews.org/posts/1234/comments/1234; you would have to send a GET request for each individual comment, or perhaps send a filter query to the directory: soylentnews.org/posts/1234/comments/?rating=2&excludeUser=Arik for a list of IDs which one can then automatically wget using the previous per-resource URL format. New comments and posts would be submitted via raw POST to soylentnews.org/posts/ and soylentnews.org/posts/1234/comments/ And so on and so forth.

    Let this be an opportunity to recognize that it is possible to host non-WWW applications on WWW technologies, and that this is not necessarily a bad thing.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 14 2018, @09:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 14 2018, @09:25PM (#652608)

    That's not how you define a web page.

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday March 15 2018, @07:58AM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday March 15 2018, @07:58AM (#652823) Journal

    If SN were a real WWW site, every comment would be found at URLs like soylentnews.org/posts/1234/comments/1234

    Does https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=24545&page=1&cid=652570#commentwrap [soylentnews.org] count?

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    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Friday March 16 2018, @03:12AM

      by darkfeline (1030) on Friday March 16 2018, @03:12AM (#653328) Homepage

      Not really. Those are clearly parameters being passed to a CGI script and aren't compliant with RFC 3986 semantics of "identifying a resource".

      If it was https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=24545&cid=652570 [soylentnews.org] and only returned the "identified resource" (i.e., a single comment), then yes (although I personally do not like the URI format), but it returns a bunch of unrelated resources, like the post and child comments along with the "identified resource", (and not to mention all of the website frills, like the sidebar menus).

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  • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday March 15 2018, @11:31AM

    by Wootery (2341) on Thursday March 15 2018, @11:31AM (#652899)

    SoylentNews is a web application, not a WWW page or site

    Not really. An 'application' is a type of program, and SoylentNews doesn't even require a Turing complete language (not counting CSS being technically Turing complete). Remember the old Web 2.0 buzzword for the read/write web? That's what SN is.

    If SN were a real WWW site, every comment would be found at URLs

    As maxwell demon already pointed out, every comment does have its own URL.

    you would have to send a GET request for each individual comment

    Nope. You've just invented a silly architecture and decreed that this is the one true webby way to do things. Being a 'proper' website doesn't mean adding countless pointless roundtrips.