I want to have empathy for this viewpoint, but dogging on HTML as being a difficult markup language is… comical?

HTML literally continues to be one of the easiest markup languages to learn.

Also, this person has clearly not heard of HTMX.

It’s a good ethos, but it really seems like it’s asking for the world on a silver platter. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, you know?

I’m also not really sure how or why they connect paying artists fairly with HTML being easier to use? There was a great way to pay artists directly for a long time: Bandcamp. Hardly anyone used it and most chose Spotify instead. That has fuck-all to do with how HTML works?

Finally, if we’re talking about the web being accessible, when are we going to start talking about fucking ownership of hardware and connections? Even if we own our own servers, we’re still using infrastructure to send data over that is owned by private companies.

How is open software “freeing” us if we’re still doing it all on someone else’s property?

EDIT: Also, obligatory XKCD on them wanting to build another, new markup language: https://xkcd.com/927/

I disagree with the $ per hour framing (it’s more about the value the entertainment provides than the amount of time it takes to consume) but yes you should pay for your entertainment. I got far too used to paying nothing or close to nothing as a student that it took me a while to readjust.

I totally agree. I pay for most of the podcasts and written stuff I read with subscriptions. For the most part, that gets me ad-free content.

It’s annoying that there are professional podcasters who don’t give me an ad free subscription option. I’m pretty sure a $50/year subscription fee would be more lucrative than the fractions of a penny they get for throwing an ad at me. But whatever.

“cheap” is poor branding. “the open web” seems to fit this ideology better

I disagree that it costs more to make things better.

In that page in particular, they had to put in effort to use a specific background, specific fonts, specific graphics, to make a page less readable, than if they’d just used some standard, basic page formatting.

But a clean, neat doc doesn’t make their point.

All that garbage at the top that looks like a jumbled mess, would’ve taken no effort whatsoever to not put in there. So they spent time and effort making the page worse.

It can cost more to make it more readable, more useful, or cost less. It all depends.

Until we adopt simple and stable building materials, all websites will continue to look the same

Sounds like the typical excuse making - blaming the tools instead of how they’re used. All websites don’t look the same, but many/most do look like shit and perform no better than a page in 1999 over dialup. That’s becuase the developers build garbage, not because the tools suck (not saying the tools don’t suck, or don’t have issues, but these are the tools you get when they grow organically as new ideas produce new capabilities).

There are good, even great pages out there. How then are those built if the tools don’t permit it?

To be honest, PWAs and static sites hosted on IPFS seems like a way forward to this. I do static sites every year for Mother’s day, because I can make cuter cards than I could buy that way, for example. Are they good? shrug idk about that, but they are more personal.

Pushing for more distributed infrastructure is the way forward to me too. Even tech giants can’t really afford to run the way they do without burning investors money and cheap loans (which having been drying up). Using things like petal.dev and hivemind.io for AI. Using IPFS for generic data storage. ActivityPub for async connections (like social media, git forges (Gitlab and Forjo moving forward here), and more!). Matrix for complex real-time p2p connections (check out thirdroom.io for one of the coolest examples of this to me). As well as WebRTC, WebTorrent which is used to good effect with peertube to create a p2p cdn!

All of this exists just as a solution to reduce the cost of running the web and distribute across the existing hardware and infrastructure that has to exist on the client-side.

In the cases where the backend HAS to be run on someone else hardware, you have volunteered, academic, and publically funded support to help offset public good support, but also things like the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM), filecoin, etc. Which attempts to provide an open market for providing some parts of the infrastructure where volunteering is possible, available or preferred. I only mention ETH because it’s not POW and at least publically influenced with its DAO. POW is, and understandably, extremely low value in our current climate.

This helps reduce the centralization and therefore inevitable enshittification of these services too.

Getting money to creators through art funds, patronage tools like LibrePay, Open Collective, etc. and even Brave’s reward systems are all good on the surface efforts to get funds to creators, but I personally prefer seeing more things to lower the labor and capital needed (and therefore cost) over just getting more to them.

It’s ironic that this would be posted in the Lemmy Technology community, where the universal sentiment is that all entertainment should be free.