We Are Not At A Crossroads: My Yesterweb Manifesto

Originally written June 2023. Edited and published July 11, 2023. Last modified July 18, 2023.

Section I: The Initial Manifesto

I browsed a few different Neocities sites and found they all had a manifesto page. After thinking about I decided to write a little manifesto myself. As such here are some minor thoughts on "yesterweb", HTML1-4, HTML5, PHP, JavaScript, Wasm, JXL and general internetwork things.

I recall the era of "yesterweb" very well. Simple websites, pure HTML, maybe a little PHP, heavy GIF usage, some flash and what is now considered that 2000s semi-futuristic style. I'm hesitant to use the term "Frutiger Aero" because that was just one piece. You had sites like DeviantArt with a cool green style that was definitely not Frutiger Aero. As many would say, 'the internet had soul'.

With regards to flash web design, I didn't care much about it. As a young-in it fascinated me but the novelty quickly grew off. It looked neat but was merely just a predecessor to what would later become JS-heavy sites. I see a direct lineage there. I still look back on it fondly though it was an easy decision to not include any flash elements in the design, EoL or not.

Nowadays most websites have large text, 'minimal' design, flat appeal, heavy use of the corporate Memphis art style, heavy use of pre-loaded elements, page loading as you scroll, dynamic elements and heavy, HEAVY, downright excessive use of JavaScript. A lot of pages are now optimized for mobile devices on a vertical 16:9 ratio. This often means the information on the site could is now squished to the centre of the page (Wikipedia's 2023 re-design is a good example of this).

"Dirty URLs" are another thing that's appeared. Too many links are "https://mywebsite.wq/?Lorem=ipsum?dolor+sit-amet" as opposed to https://mywebsite.wq/index.html. I won't harp on that too much but there are instances where it too excessive (Bandcamp comes to mind). Maybe I'm misremembering but I don't recall many URLs back then having such barrages of crap.

Popups have never been more aggressive. Privacy warnings (as a result of GDPR), tracker acknowledgements (especially on sites that clearly don't need trackers), WideVine DRM / DRM-in-Browser, Google Analytics, excessive advertisement placement occupying 2/3 of the web page and more.

Advertisements have never been so intrusive. Between targeted ads, outrage marketing and ads using notifications the advertising field is a whole new minefield.

Course advertisements have been a thing since time immemorial.

I wanna say that advertisements back then were not as aggressive and sometimes fun (remember when you play games in ads?) but I think that's just rose-coloured glasses. I've become bitter over the years at them.

That's how much the web has changed since I was younger. Of course, not all those things I mentioned above are inherently bad.

Flash design looked cool even if excessive, dead space isn't that bad and dynamic sites can create some interesting interactivity.

And, I get that sites need to make money. And I understand if you're some random business doing work online exclusively you need clicks.

I'll also acknowledge that advertisements are a cornerstone that allow the internet to be as free as it is currently. Donations only go so far, sometimes even less (see the case of core-js1).

What GDPR did was inherently good too, even if privacy popups are annoying. But as short as my praise was there is plenty wrong now.

On Ads, there is such a thing as too much. Advertisements have gotten too aggressive, and even malicious to the point where the FBI has personally issued statements advising citizens to use ad blockers2. Back then, worst I had to worry about was figuring out which download button was correct.

Dead space has been added to sites that don't need it. Look at Wikipedia's 2023 design. Why would they even change it? There was nothing wrong + the .m domain worked fine for mobile. Not to mention Wikipedia now doesn't work well without JS. Most people at least 720p displays, so why not take advantage of them? It just gives me yet another reason to not use Wikipedia.

And tracks, my goodness. I can excuse some of them but like all things it's gone too far. I mean, we're getting websites that do port-scans?3. That's just vile. A lot of these sites don't even need to use cookies! You don't need that information.

I also genuinely dislike "#:~:text=" (no idea what its technical name is). It ruins the URL and makes it a pain for copying. That feature is tied to JS so if I'm browsing with NoScript I'm now left with a page that looks like someone spilled paint on it! (will note that at least Brave has implemented 'copy clean url' to combat this). I can do CTRL+F I don't need or want your highlights.

I could complain about the rise of webapps but I won't. While on the go I used Photopea to help fix transparency on some images. EZGif was also used since I couldn't access ffmpeg. I would like a lot more if executables or if they were downloadable however. The internet is ephemeral and while Photopea or EZGif exist now there's no indication they will in the future.

And now we're getting technology like WebGPU which will allow the browser to interact directly with the GPU. This will only lead to even MORE top-heavy sites. Sure we'll get cool things with it but for each interesting thing they'll be 10 garbage sites now loading so much crap it overheats the GPU. And I haven't even mentioned the cryptominers!

A lot of social media is also guilty of loading tonnes and tonnes of crap in the browser. And you can't even say that it's required. Mastodon, Pleroma, Medium and Twitter (post-Elon) all prove that incorrect.

Ad-blocking is getting harder too. It's always been a cat-and-mouse game but with Google effectively controlling the browser market they can easily implement adblocker-breaking tools like ManifestV3. And because of the Chromium-chokehold it's leading to browsers have to make their own solutions to stop this.

So now we're getting a split where either browsers implement their own ad-blocks (Brave, Opera), try to support ManifestV3 forever (Firefox) or people are required to use more radical solutions (AdNauseum, PiHole).

Shoot, sites gotta make money. Ads are not inherently bad but they don't need to take up 2/3s of the page! Bring me back the ads that you could play. The site can have ads no problem. But we're getting to a point where my own safety can be affected by these ads.

And people are putting everything in to Chromium. Look what they've done to Steam! Went from requiring a few MB to run to using several GBs. Like c'mon. What happened to 'if it ain't broke, don't fix'? Tons of products are going XaaS and online only.

But at least I can look at old stuff then? Go wallow in nostalgia you Luddite.

The internet's always been ephemeral. The whole adage of 'internet never forgets' should never have entered public consciousness. (though we should have also told people not to stick everything on the internet either. we should've found the balance).

But more recently it's become even more ephemeral and incomprehensible. Discord servers not indexed, social media infinite scrolling so I can't see old stuff, self-destructing content (Snapchat and all they did was hide it from public view), deterioration of search engines (Google, literally just Google) and more.

Oh but back in the day I could just spin-up wget, cURL or HTTrack and download a website. Not anymore. It's getting harder to archive sites. wget and cURL are nice but hit them with a site that uses lotsa JS and they will fall.

There's at least been a few efforts which seek to continue website downloading (SingleFile, ArchiveBox, Selenium) but there is no one-tool-fits-all. (only referring to FOSS efforts, I don't know anything about commercial web-archival).

The Internet Archive has entire suites of tools to pull this off. For them it's a whole science.

And the sites are slow!

One of the most noticeable changes is that sites take longer to load! This is consistent across all websites. A lot of places are on average let's say 200mbps (rural), 1gbps (urban), dial-up speeds (remote). Either way things are faster. But sites now have to load so much crap that they take longer to load. Websites are now suffering from the same problem AAA games have.

Back then game developers had to work around space limitations. Compress text, music, textures and more. It required them to think long and hard about how best to fit every single piece of that game in that cartridge.

Now that space isn't a limiting factor surely that means we can just install more games right? No. Let's have sound effects in WAV and FLAC! Let's have textures in 4K. Graphics don't make the game. I seriously doubt the average players can even tell, let along care if those gunshot sounds are in WAV. They want to have the music in lossless? Then release the soundtrack. Let's just 100gb updates. Let's have a game that could easily be 10gb be 200gb. Okay. We're getting way off-topic now.

What I mean is websites have become the same. Let's just load tons of crap and not optimize sites anymore. Who cares if there are some websites straight leaking memory? The average user can waste the RAM on it. Efficiency has been thrown to the wind.

Is it not taught in advertising you only have X seconds to catch the target attention before they move on? Quick! Load the site quick before the user leaves! But nope. The only thing that philosophy has done is make it so advertisements load first, then the site.

Section II: In Which Charinus Whinges About JavaScript

A lot of this site-bloat and maximal-loading stems from one tool.

JavaScript.

I don't like JavaScript. I treat it like one would treat harsh chemicals. Use as little as possible and provide warnings when it is used. I used to program in JavaScript and can still read JS programs. It's not the most unreadable language either.

But even if I went back in time and stopped Eich from making JS something else would have replaced it. I'll even argue that if JS wasn't a thing and say Rust, was the main language to piggyback HTML, people would still corrupt it.4 JS at its core is a tool.

And it's the over-use of the tool is what is causing this bloat. Boy is JavaScript being over-used on pages. I've seen entire pages that are loaded with JavaScript. It's disgusting. Disable JavaScript and try to load The Washington Post. Nothing will load at the time I wrote this.

This is just an article that could be easily just be loaded with p and img src tags. But nope. Whole thing is JS. Takes forever to load and bogs the browser down once it's finished.

And then the ads and trackers come in to eat whatever RAM isn't being consumed.

In fact, most news sites are the worst culprits of this. I haven't been on The Guardian or Daily Mail in years but I image it's utter cancer to look at (possibly a security risk too).

You know what? Maybe JS was made with pure intentions but as years gone by it has gotten bad. Real bad. Here are two articles that go beyond me coping about JS-bloat. It's got security issues too! Let's just say it. JavaScript isn't good.
Open source developer corrupts widely-used libraries, affecting tons of projects, written by Emma Roth on The Verge, 2022 JavaScript's Dependency Problem, written by Dan Prince, 2022

I realize this puts me at odds with most of, if not the entire webdev community but I don't really care. I know what I like and value it. I'm just one person, I don't need sites catered to me and I know that this will make little difference in the grand scheme of things.

I feel compelled to map out my thoughts here. Who knows? Maybe it will inspire someone?

Of course, that's not to completely diminish the roles of those programmers. I worked with a web developer to help make the site! Granted, he used PHP and a framework but still. I have good friends who are JS-heavy webdevs. People go where the industry goes and that kind of design and state of sites is just what is in right now.

Things can change in an instant.

Okay. Deep breath. Shoulders down. Let's talk about what I do like in general. I'm getting off-topic.

Section III: Okay, so what do you like?

The top 3 biggest issues with modern web-design are these:
1. Excessive use JavaScript.
2. Excessive use of advertisements.
3. Excessive use of trackers.


If I made a website standards score those would be the top three things I would check to determine if a site passes or not.

I prefer websites that are minimal. And by minimal I don't mean lots of dead space and a few design elements. I mean a website that doesn't need to load a ton of assets, can load quickly and isn't running more analytics than spy agencies.

Such a site could be jam packed with text and images but load instantly. No extra stuff in the back waiting to be deployed, no pre-loaded elements, no trackers, few advertisements, no embed frames, etc.

Basically, it isn't loading a tonne of elements. My site uses just HTML and CSS. There is one section where JS/WASM is used. I consider my site to be minimally designed, even if its physical design is busy. I treat JS like one would treat harsh chemicals. Use as little as possible and provide warnings when it is used.

Instead of minimally-loading sites what we commonly get are minimally-designed, maximally-loaded. That is the thing I don't want my site to be. I have taken great care to ensure I not violate these principles. Hell that's why a lot of the subpages don't just use history.back() and have it hardcoded.

Section IV: Miscellaneous Opinions & Conclusion

There could probably be a section of me complaining about PHP but I don't know much about it. I programmed in it briefly and hated it. Has PHP ruined web-design? Let me know.

I have no opinion about web frameworks like HUGO and Pelican.

Don't know much about WASM. Heard it's vaporware. Heard it will the save us all against the JS-Menace. Heard it's the largest security risk since HTTP.

No notes on WARC and newer ways to archive. I've used WARC very briefly and didn't like it that much. But I'm not going to hate on it. I have to mess with it more.

No thoughts on NFTs, the Chia Network or Web3.0. I think naming it "Web3.0" is completely idiotic and that we're already past Web3.0. They should have AT LEAST called it Web4.0. It's some vague pipe dream that nobody has a clear answer for.

This is the way I see it.
Web1.0 = DARPA and the first echoes of the internet.
Web2.0 = BBS, Usenet, Mailing Lists, Dial-Up, XBAND
Web3.0 = Flash, Shockwave, HTML/CSS, phpBB, LAN-Parties
Web4.0 = Webapps, JavaScript, HTML5, Dynamic Sites
Web5.0 = AI, Crypto, NFTs, Fediverse


If you really want then just consolidate 1 and 2 into 1 and then 4 becomes 3. That's my opinion anyways.

I don't see a purpose of emulating games in the browser beyond skirting school or work firewalls. But even at that point just get an executable.

Alright. That concludes random crap I had to include.

While this was supposed to just be a manifesto about yesterweb it's trailed off into me yelling at clouds. I'll leave it with this.

One possible conclusion could be that I want a 'suckless internet' or 'just go to gopher' but those are both wrong. A suckless internet would just be barebones HTML, no CSS. Give me some middleground between bloated-internet and reading TXT files on a browser. Way I see it, that's what Yesterweb was and is.

Yesterweb is great. The movement's real cool too. I hope more people start to make personal websites again. Japanese web-design is one of the last direct descendants of the yesterweb.

Neocities, Hypnospace Outlaw, Vaporwave, Weirdcore have all assisted in creating a new yesterweb, one that I hope will continue to grow and prosper as years go by. I doubt we'll ever fully return to that era though I welcome it.

One may raise the question of what can I do to stop the decay of the net? Idk. Use uMatrix or uBlock, have white and blacklists for sites, stop using certain websites all-together, make a personal website, be your own person, realize that there's more to life than fighting for better website design, don't support Tim-Berners Lee, touch grass, etc.

I browse with some adblocks, some sites I allow. I refuse to use certain social medias beyond shameless self-promotion. For Android apps hit them with Permission Ruler. There's a bunch more. Ultimately I would say to support the yesterweb.

Like so many have said before me. "I want things to go back to the way they were." Yeah, I know. It's unattainable. But like so many before me I want to try. This manifesto is the fruit of that labour.

What follows here is a final section of what I think will happen with the internet. Depending on your opinions you'll probably find this even more cynical than the above sections.

Just a heads up.

Section V: The Internet in General, Predictions

Let's make some predictions.

So where is the internet headed?

What's the future of website design?

Corporate Memphis will eventually die off, AI-generated stuff will be in, more sites will just go for a more mobile look and that's probably it. HTML6? CSS4? What else could they add? Maybe we'll get some unholy combo of them and see a monstrous language form out of HTMLCSSJS.

Someone will win the image wars. I hope JXL will be the winner against WEBP and AVIF. Apple's support is a good sign and they alone may be able to force it into the limelight. JXL's abandonment by Google is just another sleight against them. I like JXL and am seriously considering converting all the page assets to it.

I don't see many radical changes coming to how sites function.

I instead believe the internet as a whole will change.

I predict things will probably get more and more consolidated than it currently is. Less open sites, more walled gardens. Google may try to force Discord to allow indexing its servers as more people go there.

I think the internet will eventually fracture into large NANs (Nationwide Area Networks) and you'll be expected to exclusively access them. I don't think advertising forces are going to let that happen though. There may be conflicts.

Either that or there will be some cross-NAN advertising rule or body. Regardless, it will be harder to access what we currently call the Internet.

The Fediverse will continue to grow until it eventually becomes either another 'Silicon Valley' (lots of big players taking up large instances) or a parallel internet entirely with many small players. In the latter situation you'd have MAAAM (Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta) or some equivalent for general media crap and then you'd have the Fediverse as some 'cool, alternate thing'. And Tor, Gopher, Freenet, etc will still exist unabated. Yesterweb may become automatically considered as part of the Fediverse when that line is drawn.

Chromium will continue to dominate. Mozilla will continue to struggle and suffer the same bloat Wikimedia does. Servo and Ladybird have the potential to disrupt markets and I hope they do. I want Opera to open-source-BSD-license the Presto Engine so some hopeful souls can resurrect it as another option.

More things will end up being done in the browser to the point it supersedes the OS for functionality. We're already seeing this with new technology such as WebGPU.

Windows 11 is already predicating this with how much Edge is built into the actual system. We will reach a point where Chromium is less a browser-engine and more a toolkit for OS development. I don't know much about ChromeOS or Fuchsia but as I understand those are still 'just' regular operating systems.

I have nothing to write regarding the future of piracy. I don't want to will things into existence.

As a random aside I think we'll also shut down the POTS network at some point and then just move everything to VoIP or some new "Internet-based" equivalent.

E-Mail will still be used and continued to be monopolized making small players impossible to function5. Nothing short of government intervention or extreme tactics will stop this. Either that or the complete death of e-mail as a tool but that's not gonna happen.

IPv4 will probably be exclusively used for Intranets (via NAT, PAT and CG-NAT) and IPv6 for exclusively public internet. I don't like each device having its own distinguishable IP. It just seems like a security risk if it's easier to pinpoint a machine (versus trying to find one through NAT). No idea what the 'professional cyber-security' opinion on that is but if anyone could stop adoption it's those people.

Maybe WASM will fix everything? Maybe AWS will take over everything and will control the internet. Maybe WASM will be released and just never used. Maybe in the future everything will be written in Rust?

I also think we'll see a lot of the 'unseen' corporate forces of the internet either get politicized or sold-off. Things like ICANN, Cisco, W3C, etc. They'll start making outright political moves.

I don't think we'll see a successful attempt at ID-to-access but who knows? It would quickly become a racket in which people buy off IDs and character-assassinate or blackmail individuals.

Finally, I believe that what we currently define as the "Internet" will not have the same meaning in the future.

AI can destroy the internet. Imagine that, hordes of bots released onto all social medias. Nothing online is true anymore. We make the Dead Internet Theory a reality. We have the average citizen believing in it.

I believe such a scenario is extremely likely for Kbin and Lemmy which have seen record sign-ups in recent times. Someone is planting a bot-army there anyway.

The internet would become like how teachers saw Wikipedia, unreliable. At that point, because of the sheer amount of misinfo people will begin using the internet less and instead do more in real life. Because what is the point of online discourse if you aren't speaking to a real person? 'What argument was ever won on the internet?' would become the prevailing belief.

Such a scenario would lead to the complete destruction of the advertising industry. Who advertises to a bunch of bots? And then if that happens you'll see ad-based companies like Google and Meta fall.

And at that point? I don't know. Maybe we'll just have community-wide networks and you talk to your friends through. Because at least you know they are real.

Time. Will. Tell.
~ Charinus

Section VI: References