I am quickly falling in love with the smolweb. It feels like the antidote to so many of my concerns about the state of Big Tech at the moment. I had a treatise prepared on the things that worry me about AI and the ever-increasing complexity of basic things but that’s all been done to death. I want to talk about love.
I love a simple, permissive protocol. Formalism makes me eyes glaze over more often than not. I just want something that I can hack. Few things are as rewarding as being able to wrap my mind all the way around some concept. I want to feel it in my grasp and make it dance.
HTML over HTTP(S) is at its core a fairly simple piece of technology. It doesn’t take much to get a server set up and running and the structure of an HTML document is permissive and flexible. Browsing and rendering plain HTML is easy enough to implement that my beloved emacs even comes with a browser built in. It’s pretty limited but simple sites that are mostly text work fine.
I’m happy to see that there are other people who are interested in building in that paradigm. Deliberately choosing simple things doesn’t have to be asceticism. Sometimes it’s just about having tech that’s easy to understand and work with, and that’s a breath of fresh air.