I think the way forward is to let the HTML, CSS, JS Stack finally die and be replaced with something more appropriate. It's an ever growing mess of hacks and compatibility layers to make a technology do something it was never intended to do. Heck, your browser now supports USB.
We need something that's designed from the ground up to be a remotely loaded application layer for operating systems. But to get to that point, we need to throw away the decades of legacy requirements.
Let the browser become a user agent in the full meaning of the word. Few web sites need their own styling or navigational structure. Finding information would be much easier for the user if all websites are presented in the same format, completely decided by the user.
I've changed my browsers to load all websites in reader view by default, and it is shockingly better than the old way. You get your text, hyperlinks, images and even embedded video in a clean and legible format. Sites that need more advanced functionality can be added as exceptions, such as HN.
There is a reason why people are spending almost all their online time inside standardized experiences. It is easier and better. That's why people look at images on Instagram and shop on Amazon.
> Let the browser become a user agent in the full meaning of the word. Few web sites need their own styling or navigational structure. Finding information would be much easier for the user if all websites are presented in the same format, completely decided by the user.
You are correct that this would be the better^tm solution. But it's so far from reality that it might as well be impossible. Branding, UX Design and Marketing are far too entrenched to give up their turf. What you end up with is another Gemini Protocoll that a few nerds use and the rest of the world doesn't care about.
We need a solution that can deal with the same level of complexity as browsers but in a cleaner, easier to implement and far less legacy loaded manner. Something like a combined new HTML CSS frontend layer, with a decent sandboxed webasm-like virtual machine (preferably hardware virtualized) with clear boundaries and a decent, forward looking standard.
> What you end up with is another Gemini Protocoll that a few nerds use and the rest of the world doesn't care about.
Reader view is already half way there, and it is as mainstream as it can be, as it comes on all iPhones and Macs. But you're right, my idea doesn't have much to do with the underlying protocols.
Speaking of branding, marketing and UX design, I would say that most businesses have already completely given up on that, and are content to sell their stuff online through portals that are completely controlled by third parties such as Amazon, Booking.com, Doordash, Instagram, etc. Very few make a decent effort to have a website where their customers can easily purchase their products, even though it isn't hard at all.
Could a user-centric browser extract the HTML results of everything made by javascript and present it in a standardized way? Because text, images and videos are already solved problems with reader view. The interesting part would be if HTML input elements could also be thrown in, even though they're usually quite javascript connected. Any website more complicated than that is more of a web app, and should be rendered as the designers intend, in my opinion.
In the end, I think even a folder structure would be the right way for front-end as well as back-end for most websites. Here's your articles in HTML, here's your images, here's the product you can purchase as some kind of standardized json-object. Does this make sense?
We need something that's designed from the ground up to be a remotely loaded application layer for operating systems. But to get to that point, we need to throw away the decades of legacy requirements.