Midnight Pub

Some thoughts about the small web

~pandion

> ~bartender I'll have a gin with tonic please!

> It surely is evening somewere in the world. He! he!

So with the danger of coming late to the party again,

I was thinking about the consept of the small web, and that Gemini and Gopher, are only a part of it.

There are a lot of places in the "normal web" that are of the minimal aesthetic, and there are tools and ways to discover them.

But what is the small web?

I mean is there a definition that we have come to?

Is there a set of requirements that we have come to agree upon, that a web site can qualify as a small web place?

And if not, shouldn't we?

Is it no cookies? No JavaScript? Is it No tracking and analytics? Maybe all of the above? Maybe mostly text content?

What I mean to say, is that I am wondering, if there should be a small web standart.

Someway for someone to know before following a link that they are not going to be exposed to the noisy "normal web".

Maybe a badge of conformity to the standard, or maybe a code word in the URL that indicates "you are going in a quiet place"

And what would the standard be?

My own take on it, is that it has to satisfy the following:

It must render nicely in a text browser like lynx.

It must not contain 3rd party cookies.

It must not contain any remote content.

It must not contain any advertisements,

It must distinguish clearly between links that follow the small web standard and the ones that do not.

and I guess no JavaScript?

What do you guys think?

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Replies

~ew wrote (thread):

Well, it seems to me, you try a "definition"? Why? What do you gain from it? I have a faint feeling that defining this is going to be quite hard.

~bartender? Just coffee, please. Thank you.

~beefox wrote (thread):

my take on the small web is it is made by individuals, probably by hand, and with love.

i'd rather it have no ads, no 3rd party stuff, and minimal javascript, but i don't think those things make up the essence of the small web. which is that its human made. its not made by businesses or people with millions to spend, its made by one person who wants to carve out their own space on the internet.