What is missing from the web? We're asking for Google The CSS Day conference may have come and gone, but Google's Chrome team is keen to keep the spirit alive with a list of what attendees felt was missing from the web. Although Google's whiteboard asked "what's missing from the web?" the ad giant's browser gang was more interested in what engineers reckoned was missing from HTML …
But Google Groups as a way of accessing it is dead. Now read-only of the archive - as far as it goes.
I'm well aware that a proper news server is a far better approach anyway, but this hammers another nail. It has been convenient in certain circumstances.
And what had a devastating effect on Usenet was the vast quantity of spam, malware, total junk, that was posted, and cross-posted all over. Along with the impact of binaries on servers which really only had limited capacity. As a Berlin user, I saw only text - thankfully. But I let that lapse when some of the most important topics (to me, of course!) were more readily and better served by other approaches. It was always difficult to get those with web-only experience even to use mail (other than via web portals), let alone connect to Usenet servers.
Yes - there is still https://www.eternal-september.org/ - must sign up!
Dejanews was acquired by Google in 2001, seven years before Google picked up Doubleclick.
So, yeah. The acquisition of Dejanews was arguably Google's first big move away from being a pure web-search company (they introduced Google Groups at the same time), and that was definitely a major step toward enshitification, if not the start.
A search engine that returns results that are relevant to the search terms, not random adverts, sponsored links to completely unconnected websites, and irrelevant guesswork mis-direction to unrelated terms.
In all seriousness: being able to style input fields "somewhat"* would be useful, it would do away with a huge plethora of CSS/JS tricks that developers are forced to deploy to appease the crayon wielders.
* There need to be limits and restrictions to prevent complete user-confusion.
(as a side note, why the hell are the "designers" always more senior in a web-dev agency than the coders??)
Been saying this for years, two additional fields to include relevant and exclude irrelevant details from your search.
eg when searching for
‘Swift Caravans nearest dealer’
exclude
Taylor Swift, Facebook, Sodding Pinned Photographs, blogs, Ornithology.
Include
results within 100 miles from my location.
So today you can use an AI to create an image for any text input, but its impossible to search for a real image given a text input.
For example many years ago I read an article on audition that used an image of a bear on a bicycle to illustrate that all of the hearing spectrum is important.
Good luck trying to find that again...
> (as a side note, why the hell are the "designers" always more senior in a web-dev agency than the coders??)
This is something that amuses me greatly about the state of 'web development'. It is the only production pipeline I know that halfway through grabs all the assets and goes "Quick, now have the developers ape this in code". Imagine if Pixar had it's technical artists frantically transcribing all of its meshes coming from Maya into POV-Ray source files by hand.
Clowning around with repetition and waste like this means you are not allowed to wear the project management hat.
Both advanced markup and interactivity are horrible hacks on top of a format that was designed to express content with predictable semantic meaning in a static and stateless manner.
So we have the basic problem that code, styling, layout and content are weirdly spread and unreliably synchronised between a bunch of files each of which is not quite designed for the task in hand.
It would be an interesting exercise to design something that isn't "the web", but provided the functionality that is kludged on top of the web, with full knowledge of where we want to get, rather than a complicated set of legacy concerns. Of course, in turn that would become legacy, but... well we don't miss MySpace do we?
Ignoring the snooping / tracking "feck your cookies" dialogs, the thing I'd really like is for pages not to reposition items in the view as the page loads.
I want the button I'm about to click to stay the button I think it is, not shift layout so the mouse is now over the previous button 100ms before I press it.
> I want the button I'm about to click to stay the button I think it is, not shift layout so the mouse is now over the previous button 100ms before I press it.
I used to think that, until it was pointed out[1] to me that this is all part of The Gamification[2] of, well, everything. We get to have the "fun" of awarding ourselves notional points for every web item we manage to click in time or suffer a real-world penalty.
Similarly, other times we are meant to treat websites like a point'n'click adventure, just trying to find out what is active on each page (e.g. pressing the back button at the top of the browser - will that work or will it cause the browser window to close because we have been on one ever-changing "single page web app" for the last ten minutes of constant browsing).
[1] as in "Get wid da game, grandad!"
[2] apparently, you are not supposed to pronounce that to rhyme with "ham', or the state of your leg
Following on from the suggested "2. ActiveX, 3. AI chatbot, and 5. ads", I'd say the web needs to become much more agentic, with deep access to connected machines, down to the lowest-level hardware for added convenience. Want to know if a "friend"'s at home? Just dial in remotely to their machine and take a peek, and a listen, with the built-in cam and microphones. Alexa and Siri already do this of course, but their lack of agentic olfactive sensors makes them yesterday's tech. After all, how else might one ascertain whether a "friend" is stuck in the lieu, pushing a hard one through, with the door closed?
But agency also means that the web should be constantly doing this on its own, of its own free will, and under its own initiative. Safekeeping the results in appropriate database caches, and analyzing them continuously, in real-time, for the convenience of fast commodity access, and to optimize the logistics of related dispatches, via drones and creepy crawlers, all transparently to the user. The web could then easily rewind the timeline of any sequence of events, pinpoint such critical landmarks as the expression of intent to ingest mutton vindaloo (for example), and pre-deploy the consequent countermeasures ahead of time, with surgical precision, for the preemptive administration of relief.
All-access AI-driven web agency is the future we all seek, in both free and totalitarian societies, to safeguard the joy of a convenient lifestyle, with an ever lesser need to ask oneself any question at all, especially What The Fuck?!, What Were They Thinking?! or, What Were They Smoking!?
A day without questioning (except by licensed professionals) is a day well spent. AIweb will help us all get there most efficiently, IMSO! (yes, the S is for Sarcastic ...)
Ads that not only do not track you, but contain no executable content. (Image only, no video, sound, Javascript...)
Search engines that simply don't list ML-generated content.
Search engines that can search for punctuation or other characters (very useful for looking for code-related stuff).
A prohibition on the "I see you've chosen to use an adblocker, which means we don't make as much money off of you..." popups.
Email with confirmed-to-be-correct "from" address.
No email spam from romance websites (95% of them coming from gmail addresses).
More actual, static webpages instead of URLs with an imbedded query or that don't link to the page currently being shown, but instead to the first page the user saw on the site.
Turn 90% of videos into a paragraph of text each. (I don't need a 15-minute video to tell me where to find a particular setting, just a single sentence in text!)
Patience, calmness, and quiet, especially on forums.
Eh, that's probably enough to be getting along with for now. When they've fixed those, I'll probably have a few more to add.
We need URL shorteners that point to URL shorteners that point to URL shorteners, that may eventually point to a web page, or maybe to one of the URL shorteners up the chain.
I do love URLs that exist solely to track you and probably will 404 in 6 months, and you can't tell if they point to a legit site or something malicious.
From social media operating user to user without a central server, rich media displayed in e-mail clients right through to an alt DNS built from the ground up rather than top down.
Browser add on scripts that cannot be blocked.
Script based bouncing of web traffic via web pages, encrypted.
Persistent search (ebay operate a version of this). And proper search results, not the heavily censored irrelevant half dozen pages of cack they serve up today.
Digital cash in distributed wallets.
Less flashy-flashy, more text I can actually read.
The "SPONSORED" tag to be larger and more prominent on Google search results so I can more easily know how many pages to skip before I can find a result I was actually asking for.
Some way to corral together all the ways people contact me: I have some business contacts who text, FB messenger, and email me, and if I had Instagram, WhatsApp and TruthSocial (shiver, oh H no!) there would probably be tender missives from those too, all from the same individual, and necessary info scattered (buried) in each method in a long string of back-and-forth. ARGH! I hate playing "where's the date for that meeting?" I am tempted to go back to a business card with address and maybe phone number (landline - no texting!) for sanity's sake. And always reply by return post, written in fountain pen on nice linen stock.
Yes, I AM old, did you have to ask?
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