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Title: Thoughts of Simpler Times
Date: 2019-11-04

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  I'm sick with something, and I'm just waking up at 04:00 in the morning due
to whatever I have, This would normally be when I'm winding down for bed, as
I'm a bit of a night owl (insert Night Fury joke because dragonkin). But as I
sit here early in the morning, uploading a clone of tridactyl[0] to my gitea
server before I start looking into the code to see what I can do to help, my
brain has decided that it's more interested in being nostalgic for the old days
of the web.

  I'm not just talking about /Web 2.0/ or whatever, but the days when you could
spin up a text-based browser, go somewhere, and the site would actually work
without several MB of javascript fighting to display the page. Hell, if you go
to my own website[1] in something like Lynx, it works perfectly fine, though
the blog doesn't. I'm planning on fixing that with my own static site generator
once I can get un-lazy about it, but I digress. The fact that my site works on
a text-based browser and doesn't eat through system resources like mad is what
I liked about the "old web". 

  Even during the Angelfire/Geocities/Lycos days of people using free hosts to 
put things up on the web, that was still something you could rely on. But now,
it's like you need enough computing power to run the latest games just to load
a website sometimes, and if you're on a metered connection like mobile
tethering, it's far worse. That stuff can get expensive in a very short time.

  Then I run into stories about studies that WebAssembly is being used mainly
for malware[2], and think back to the number of times I've had to avoid
getting caught out by JavaScript-laden websites trying to do the same thing.
Something that happens even today.

  I think that's why I'm so drawn to the likes of Gopher. I don't have to worry
about arbitrary code from a remote system being run on my own computer. It's
all plain text and files. And as much as I like the web, I really only like the
"old web", when we weren't trying to reinvent HTML through a poorly-coded
scripting language.

  Then again, maybe it's the new chair that's making me thing about these
things.

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[0]: https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl
[1]: https://www.primsdragon.net/
[2]: https://www.tu-braunschweig.de/Medien-DB/ias/pubs/2019-dimva.pdf