We all know how awful most modern websites are in terms of bloat, javascript and tracking. Not only that, but designing and maintaining web-browsers has become such a gigantic undertaking (almost the size of an operating system), that only a few companies have the resources to do it (google and mozilla, and mozilla might not hold on for much longer).
These alternative protocols offer a minimal set of features, and are trying to get back to what the web should’ve been: static content with images, text, and links, with local applications filling the void for anything more complicated than that.
Lets say I wanted a privacy-friendly way to view a page on a news site. I could:
- Copy the URL of the page
- Open some tool, (or website, anything), paste that url.
- It converts the content in the url to the necessary privacy-friendly alternative format, and I can view it with my gopher/gemini browser (or even maybe a markdown viewer).
I know there are a few html -> markdown converters that can do the last step.
Does anyone know if this would work?
The fact that there was a shift in who dominates browser share from Netscape to Internet Explorer to Chrome suggests that the amount of complexity is going to encourage a market monopoly as long as someone breaks the standards in a way that gives them a small advantage. I don’t know if the alternatives would have a different outcome, as they may be simple now, but bloat may be inevitable.
Makes sense, although it’d be nice for privacy-oriented people to have this thin-layer that converts any site into a de-bloated version that they can view safely. As far as I know, there isn’t any tool that even provides this option right now.
