Code and content for https://www.the-light-web.net
The Light Web is a philosophy, a synthesis of ideas that have resonated with me recently, aimed at creating websites that live up to the ideals of the early web. The early years of the World Wide Web were filled with whimsy and optimism. There was so much potential in this new medium, and so many people excited to explore that potential. But halfway through the third decade of the 21st Century, the web has suffered from the same late-stage capitalist degradation that so much of society has. The Light Web is a movement to recapture the idealistic, humanistic promise of the web in its infancy.
The term "The Light Web" came to me late at night in a sort of "the Dark Web implies the existence of the Light Web" sort of way, but the Light Web does not stand in opposition to the Dark Web. In fact, the Light Web philosophy is fully in favor of the sort of privacy and anonymity afforded by tools like TOR. The darkness that the Light Web opposes is that of dark patterns—tricks used…[to] make you do things that you didn't mean to—and other user-hostile designs like third party trackers, ad-blocker blockers, and nagging popover windows.
Internet connection speeds that are considered intolerably slow today would have been incomprehensibly fast at the dawn of the web. My own internet connection today is roughly 50,000 times faster than the modem I first used to connect to the internet. With that multiplier, a site that takes 10 seconds to load for me now might have taken five and a half days on that old 9,600 bit/s dial-up modem. Modern broadband speeds have allowed modern websites to grow bloated and inefficient. The Light Web philosophy in no way suggests that websites should abandon multimedia content or return to the postage stamp sized images of yore. Instead, it espouses the idea that the weight of a page should be reserved for its content. Stop bogging down websites with large amounts of code, garbage advertisements, and chum. The Light Web favors static pages where possible and carefully considered, efficiently crafted web apps where not. It also favors hosting your own content. Creating readable, semantic HTML and hosting on a platform that you control is better for you as a creator and for your consumers.
The web should be a fun place. The early web was whimsical. My favorite example is the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol. Embracing the Light Web philosophy does not mean never creating websites about important or weighty topics. It just means remembering that the web is a more pleasant place to be when people don't take themselves too seriously.
The Light Web is not a standard. It is not a set of rules. It is not a certification. It is not a rubric. There is no quantitative way to adjudicate whether a given website is part of the Light Web.
The Light Web is a philosophy, an organizing principle, maybe a movement. It is inspired by my memories of being a teenager online and by writing like Louie Mantia's Make a Damn Website & The Teenage Web and We Need To Rewild The Internet by Maria Farrell & Robin Berjon.
My only express goal in publishing this site is to encourage others to keep the Light Web philosophy in mind when creating online. I don't know what or when I might expand on this single page, but I would like to. I would like to refine the ideas presented on this page, and I would love it if others took up the idea. I would like to hear others' thoughts too. Pleaese reach out to me via email or Mastodon, or join a discussion about the Light Web on GitHub.
Timothy Rezendes, May 2024
This website, its code, and its content—©2024 by Timothy Rezendes and 232 Software—are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
