I’m continually astounded by the incredible shoddiness and unfitness for purpose of so many commercial web sites. The more time goes on, you’d think figuring out how to make a functioning web site would become better known, but no. In many ways it gets worse.
Yes and no. A modern house is ridiculously bloated compared to what my ancestors lived in or even a tent but I wont give it up.
You only really need a kitchen and somewhere to take a dump (defecate), separate from the kitchen. The kitchen gets you warmth and shelter from most weather in temperate to arctic climes, shade in warmer climes. The bog need not be "inside" but should be separate for obvious sanitary reasons. Oh and you'll need clean water, something to eat and something to burn for cooking and heat.
Tesco and co (supermarkets) can bugger off for being too bloated. I'll be going in with a knife (veg and fruit), spear and bow and arrow (food that moves). Mind you the bow is a bit excessive unless the food that moves is dangerous at close quarters 8)
Having said that: FAANG n that really is bloat that could be excised with little of importance lost from the web sigh. How on earth have we found ourselves in a world where "going viral" is a stretch goal and an indicator of success? GOPHER and WAIS and USENET were good enough, back in the day. We still have email for some reason and I can still run my own, from home, but not everyone can.
In around 1994 I was asked by my boss to investigate this new web thing. I had a Windows 3.11 PC. I telnetted to my departmental VAX. From that I telnetted to the organization's X.25 PAD. From that I could get from JANET to some exotic American NIST related thing ... then I would hit a GOPHER menu (I think) and after a bit of jiggery pokery I hit the web.
I could not really tell the difference, as an end user, between WWW and GOPHER/WAIS. The hyperlinks were simply distributed (through the text) instead of a list of menus. Instead of a page of a menu of links you got text with links in it - all a bit chaotic. Basically, a tree becomes a web. I told the boss it looked a bit better than the menus of G/W but nothing really new. I think I even said to him that the status quo is organized like his hard disc and hence comprehensible but the web is a bit mad and freeform.
Do bear in mind that this is in a console, the browser was yet to become mainstream.
I'm not an important commentator on internets for obvious reasons! I completely missed the point that free form and a bit mad is exactly what was required for the web to go viral in no uncertain terms.
> You only really need a kitchen and somewhere to take a dump (defecate), separate from the kitchen
Completely off-topic, but that reminds me of when I went hunting for my first apartment as a broke grad student. One of the places I viewed consisted of (only) a tiny living room and a tinier kitchen. The toilet was in the kitchen, sandwiched between the stove and sink. The only countertop area was a swing-up board above the toilet. Must have sucked if you had to take a dump in the middle of preparing dinner.
