Bloggings

Web 1.5 and Berries

2023-12-20

+ I was searching this morning for web 1.0 ressources in French. It was + interesting to see the amount of belittleing phrases, from "passive web" + through "documentary web", "Spectator web", etc. +

+ Web 2.0 is referred to as the "social web", where large companies found + how to make money from this thing through centralisation, javascript, + social networks, online sales, and the massive use of berries. The + descriptions of Web 3.0 and 4.0 are so full of bullshit, acronyms, + marketing speak, and futurism, it's not worth commenting on. +

+ +

Berries? you might ask.

+ +

+ Human evolution has included colour sight to enable the picking of ripe + fruit and avoidance of dangerous meats or insects. +

+ Icons tap into this evolutionary advantage. Images that target our + attention in order to vehicule an emotional response are another. Their + use sometimes has the side effect of manipulating you, the reader. Today + they are also used to track you or vehicule code. +

+ +

+ The current web plunges the reader in a (sometimes pretty) morass of + background images, icons, adverts, gadgets, etc. that distract you from + noticing that perhaps there's not much actual content. +

+ It also slows web sites dramatically. Try looking at most recipe web sites + for an example. Now visit Luke Smith's + Based Cooking (He had a rant about + this a while back) +

+ Scrolling through Facebook's litany of meme's, repeated jokes, and plain + rubbish, will also make you realise that there's very little content. What + remains, is formatted and presented in an identical fashion, much like + visiting adjacent prison cells. It also dissapears quickly, buried under + more meme's, repeated jokes, and rubbish. And while you are rotting your + brain in this manner, you are being tracked mercilessly while your soul is + sold for a few deniers. +

+ In a nutshell, web 1.0 wasn't something to simply discard, and while + technological advances are indiscutable, (UTF-8, CSS, backend + scripting,..) the uses they have been put to sometimes definitely are. +

+ I'm no monk: I still need to get to my bank, make the odd online purchase, + etc. but I think it's possible to have in parallel a reasoned web simply + by editing web sites responsably. Not by throwing out the baby with the + bathwater, but eliminating the chaff, reducing the C02 footprint, reducing + the illisibility, making it faster, making it easier for people with + reduced sight to enjoy the content, making sure it can be read in all + browsers, stop tracking in it's... tracks, and getting to the point. +

How about calling it Web 1.5 ?