I suppose that's true. Accessibility and all that.

You can but the point is that people/companies/public services generally don't.

That sounds a lot like RSS.

I would like to know more about what was causing slowness than those couple of bullet points. I've only made a few websites over the years, and they were always serving semantic HTML and CSS; what scripts there were granted interactivity and weren't necessary to view the page. So is this a matter of people turning mostly-static websites into React monstrosities or is it something else?

Besides respecting sane HTML practices, the point about trying to get info that is displayed on a map is interesting. There is no reason that I can think of that that kind of public information shouldn't be freely available as an API, so that anyone can build a frontend for it - including a plain HTML <ul> frontend. That kind of thing should really be mandatory for public services, because it maximises the utility of said service. Ideally it would also be mandatory to include some more-or-less raw display of the API data so that no third party needs to build a frontend, but start small.

I guess the point of using only text is to test how far you can go with performance. Using plaintext, or a simple markup language, also forces you to not do the things you can do with HTML.

Image a news website where the focus is the actual news, instead of the weirdly sized max-contrast cookie banner, or the weird space left for ads that do not load because of uBO.

You'd think somebody would already have invented some sort of HyperText Markup Language. Oh well.

It seems plaintext blogs are a weird child of smallweb design.

I think it would be best to have some kind of markup to identify links, and provide other things like italics, bold, subscript, superscript. For example, as in gemini protocol.

Obviously a webpage without links is like a fish without a bicycle

The web without links isn't the web anymore, imho. I visited the textplain blog, but links aren't clickable. Do they expect me to copy/paste every link? This is a huge step back and reminds me of newspapers and other printed media.

People can try new concepts and, if enough people join in, it becomes normal.

I'm all for trying new concepts, but I hope this doesn't become normal. Or am I missing something?

You can totally just set up an apavhe/nginx and serve article.txt and browsers will serve it.

No. Turning things into SPAs that should have been simple websites has been. Also developing SPAs in JS.

There is a distinction between an app and a site. An application has many partial state updates. Two updates is uncommon for an app. Way different for a website where people ideally land on the right page from a search engine. There is a place for an SPA but it's not everything.

We tend to stick with an SPA even for things which are mainly reads because we're more efficient in a single tech stack. Sadly we don't have big tech budgets to do everything. In theory the JS SPA backend can simply run in the backend if there's no need for an SPA. I had thought hydration and caching to have gotten way better by now but there's still a good way to go.

my opinion is that the browser in general for rich front ends is the mistake, but i know i’m the minority

Happy to see this ! Since ~15 years I said to all dev I speak with to do less JS because HTML/CSS do almost all they need...

Neat! There's also client-side validity hints with the pattern attribute. It isn't as nice as some js UIs, but it fills a role.

More like heaven

Clicked on four things before it demanded money, including two annoying modal popups trying to train me in how to use one of the simplest applications in existence.

For what it's worth those two things I clicked looked alright.

But I'm not paying you to review your work. You should be paying me.

Speak for yourself! Personally I feel that it built character to have to click a button every time you wanted to see a different part of an online map, rather than dragging it around.

How far back are you talking? JavaScript became a standard in 1997, and IMHO Ajax really improved the browsing experience.

Do you remember the tag, or pages that wouldn't work without a Java applet or Flash plugin? Good times ;-)

The article presents a few HTML features. (From the title I didn't know what to expect.) Summary:

• There are new HTML attributes (popover) that help with modals/popups/menus.
• You can toggle (show/hide) content with HTML. (The summary/details elements have been around for a long time.)
• For text input, you can provide a datalist of entries to auto-complete. It isn't supported by Firefox yet.

Ironically, the article showed a blank space where a graphic would go before I bothered to enable Javascript. On the plus side, it was readable regardless.

You mean: how the web was before it turned into shit?

You can use Islands Architecture combined with Pjax-style page loading techniques so you specifically don't deal with full-page HTML reloads, although the honest truth is now that we have cross-page View Transitions, combined with in-browser caching those "reloads" can actually appear to perform in a fast and pleasing manner even more than janky old-school SPA techniques.

If you're interested, the guy that made the original scale of the universe has a YouTube channel with some interesting stuff: https://youtube.com/user/carykh

It's good to see some of these old tags although many I never used. Fun little jaunt to the past.

The other day i was a bit nostalgic, thinking about my old as2 & 3 applications and animations. Then I started wondering about some of the old gems that were really worth keeping around. So I went looking for one in particular and found it's modern incarnation.

https://scaleofuniverse.com/

Squarespace is very different to Wordpress.

But also you didn't really specify how serious this site is. Is it meant to be a proper business or just someone's personal site? For the latter Squarespace would be fine. E.g.

As for maintainability, it depends on whether the customer wants to pay you again every time they need to modify things. Many wouldn't want to.