Proposal to go back to the 90s web standard

[aaroncdc]

While everyone is opening issues to criticize this proposal, nobody has suggested any ways to actually improve it. So I'm going to go a little bit further and make a proposal to make the web actually a much better and usable space, by reverting back to the late 90's "standard" (if you can call it that anyways). That's right, let's go back to the times when Google was not evil and, in fact, their motto was "don't be evil", instead of being the "icon of sin" of the modern web.

Some (but not all) of the benefits of the old 90's standard include:

1. Lightweight for mobile devices.
2. Responsive by default (No divs, only text and images, and AVI movies).
3. Less dynamic, more secure (Javascript is used only to make clocks, animated snow effects and such).
4. Awesome graphics thanks to animated GIFs, jpegs and PNGs.
5. The current standard has as many pages as the entire Bible and the Quixote together. The older standards didn't have as many. Clients (browsers) were pretty easy to implement.
6. Ads were static and smaller, and would allow you to actually browse the site and read it's content. Instead of covering the entire page.
7. Admins didn't value your privacy because it was granted by default (duh!).
8. Sites didn't call home with user data because your browser didn't have a way to call home, unless it's using third party plugins.
9. HTML over Gopher (Because everyone knows Gopher was the superior protocol).

And so on.

I know a lot of you will argue that back in those times browsers still didn't follow any standards and that made things more difficult. Also there is the fact that most sites relied on third party plugins (mostly Adobe Flash, sockwave, Java applets, etc) for them to work or offer dynamic content, which was even more insecure. While that's true, the web was never designed to be this bloated and was designed just to be a simple, interactive book. Nothing else, nothing more.

So I suggest we go back to this vision, and basically give our backs to all these companies who are exploiting our network to create an Orwellian (1984) mass surveillance platform by not only bloating the web, but also enforcing "multiplayer spyware" on our browsers (like Chrome) with proposals like this one.

[millionsofplayers]

I wish

[Lana-chan]

Javascript is used only to make clocks, animated snow effects and such

yes. hell yes

[jbruchon]

If a browser can't be written by one person working full-time in six months then the Web standards have gone way too far.

[elbosso]

nobody has suggested any ways to actually improve it. - there is none - save for its abolition!