Like fuck all the proprietary junk and versioning, and just have a bare bones HTML ASCII extranet designed to be simple and without any bugs to patch? Obviously a naive question.
But seriously, the 56k dialup world with Napster GeoCities and AOL Instant Messenger was better. Add capacitive touch screens, current data throughput infra, and lithium batteries to 1999 and we are peak Matrix internet territory. Yahoo and net navigator were better than chrome stalkerware and google digislaver fascism.
howrar@lemmy.ca 11 minutes ago
We can have static HTML websites, but that basically limits you to sharing static information (which, by the way, still have “bugs” in the form of typos). There’s already lots of great resources for that. Wikipedia, personal blogs, books (physical and electronic). That’s not usually what we’re on the internet for though. We’re here for interactivity. We want to connect with other people (e.g. Lemmy), and we want tools to help us with various problems we have (e.g. any portable software that just needs a browser to run). Avoiding JS would hinder that goal. If you just want to read, go to your local library, take out a book, and start reading. Or get an e-reader and download some e-books.
You also point out the problem of online privacy. While JS does empower the tracking, it also does way more than that. The solution shouldn’t be to throw out the baby with the bath water.