This is a draft for something I want to call the Simple Web Manifesto. There seems to be a general discontent in the tech community with how the web and technology in general develops. This manifesto is a counter to the common feeling of loss of control or loss of access to what was possible in earlier times.
v1.0_2023-12-30
The year is 2023. The World Wide Web (WWW) evolved from websites as one-way information displays to fully-fledged applications that run on the visitors' computers. This opened the gates for an incredible wave of resource waste, inaccessibility, privacy violations and user nuisance.
This manifesto calls out this behavior, and paints a future of a simpler, more humane web. We are guided by the ideas of
Javasript was developed with a good intention, a vendor-independent display of dynamic web elements. These days, it is often used against actual users, immensely increasing resource usage and excluding people not behaving like everybody else. User tracking, advertising, circumventing pop-up blocking with spontaneous overlays to ask for sign-up to newsletters, etc., all would not work without JavaScript.
There are many reasons to not be able to use JavaScript; still, it is added to more and more websites and reduces accessibility.
JavaScript shall only be used where it is
Tracking is never used to benefit the user, marketing speech aside ("improving user experience"). Privacy issues aside, tracking technologies add an immense bloat to websites, reducing available bandwidth and rendering speed.
Website traffic analysis and tracking shall only be done with the information the webserver logs provide us with anyway. There is no need to further invade users' privacy and pester them with our own lack of intelligence.
A website's primary purpose is the transfer of information. The user does not wish to see anything else than this information, no newsletter subscription form, no advertising, no related content.
No deceptive technologies shall be used to enforce or steer certain user behavior. The website content is the uninterrupted and most visible content on the website.
Including external sources for loading common elements like fonts, scripts and images has become common. It is done to provide better performance by serving some content from content delivery networks (CDNs) and for simplicity of a website's development. However, at the same time it enables tracking by adding external sources. It decreases control of the websites provider as the external source can change any time, and for the same reason it works strongly against the longevity of a website.
No external sources shall be used in the website except for where it is legally or technically required. All elements are hosted by the website provider themself.
There are ways to encode certain media content directly inside a website, like CSS or SVG images. As there are clients which by choice or nature cannot display such content, they will load a lot of content that is not useful.
No big inline SVGs shall be used, no large CSS definitions or JavaScript scripts, but rather separate files.
Cascading Style Sheets is a highly welcome, standardized approach to define the style of a website. However, they have become so powerful that they are not only used for styling a website, but for actually arranging all the content. This is a problem for clients not able to render CSS appopriately, or choosing to ignore them because of different reader properties than those commonly accounted for (line readers, big displays).
A website shall always display sensible content, no matter if CSS is interpreted.
The actual content, especially for text-focussed websites, is often in the range of few kilobytes. At the same time, the website might be multiple megabytes, a factor of 1024! This makes it almost impossible for people with low bandwidth or overall data plans to access information that could be transferred at very low cost otherwise.
We will keep in mind that a website has to provide a reasonable ration of the overall website size to the content it is actually supposed to deliver.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has developed into its own profession over the last decades. However, it is a digital arms race between the search engine providers trying to ignore optimization and the optimizers on the other side. While it is normal behavior to adapt to the market, this should not come at costs to the purpose of a website. At the very core, SEO describes how to make a website interesting to search engines, rather than its users.
SEO shall be kept to an extent that it will not impact the user. This means that no visible content will be optimized for a machine rather than the user. Neither will there be any unproportional non-visible content that will eat up users' bandwidth without providing benefit to them.
The general idea is that a website should deliver its content to the user as comfortable as possible for them. This includes no distractions, no unnecessary bandwidth usage, no knowing-better than the user what they want, and retaining their dignity and ability to choose their own way of living a digital life.