Some very early announcement of something very noteworthy that is happening on the Fediverse right this moment. Currently most of the discussion still takes place under the #weblite hashtag only.
As you know the current Web specifications have become very bloated. They serve established browser vendors, which operate monopolistically and dominate the (corporate) internet. For new FOSS browser projects it is nigh impossible to start from scratch and implement crisp and modern web rendering engines. The complexity and scope is just too high.
Existing standard bodies such as WhatWG, W3C and IETF move slowly and are beholden to Big Tech lobbying and influences, who want to keep this the status quo.
But there’s nothing that withholds the free software community to derive their own open standards that are lightweight and intuitive. So it happened, only yesterday 15 October, that some fedizens decided to pick up that glove.
Adrian Cochrane and Alexandra kicked off the Weblite initiative. Adrian has been working for a long time on two very cool greenfield browser projects, Odysseus and Rhapsode, an auditory browser. From this many insights on what #weblite specifications should and should not contain was gleaned and hopefully and with collaboration from many others this will be transcribed into Unicode chars in some initial drafts. So, if you are interested, then don’t hesitate and lend your helping hand.
You’ll notice that the linked repositories on Codeberg are still mostly emtpy as of now. Yep, it is indeed that early. On Fediverse you always learn the cool things first 😜
As posted by Adrian these are the principles of Weblite:
- Simplicity
- Vendor, platform, and device independence
- Forwards and backwards compatibility
- Maintainability
- Flexibility
- Richness
- Accessibility
Note too that with these principles Weblite is somewhhat different than what ProjectGemini aims to achieve. Gemini strips to absolute essentials and has more in common to Gopher, that came before the current web.
Join forces, Lemmy people! Let’s bring lite where now darkness rules… (Don’t forget to add a #weblite hashtags to your fedi toots)
This is just my quick 2 cents based on your question, so far from a definitive answer and certainly don’t consider it one.
So while you definitely have a point there are many webapps which have complicated functionality, let’s face it there are also substantial portions of the modern web which really only need something like Weblite to perform their primary task: basically all news sites, any form of articles, recipes, non/partially-interactive tutorials etc.
In order to perform their primary function, they don’t really need js at all. So then we get to the darker side of it, almost all of them use enormous amounts of js, not to perform their primary purpose but to basically snoop on their users. There’s a largish chunk of the modern web which doesn’t need js for anything other than doing nasty things!