Necessity is the mother of invention (not laziness). The internet was invented for surviving nuclear war with Russia.
We say laziness motivates us to become more efficient, but I can’t agree. It’s people who want or need to get things done faster that find innovative and creative ways of doing so.
Sorry, you misunderstand. I’m not defending billionaires, I’m condemning politicians.
Politicians and policy should not be for sale in the first place. The fact that they are means, yes, rich people have more power to control policy, but the solution isn’t to ban rich people from getting rich. We need to ban money from influencing policy.
Instead, the Supreme Court decided that money is speech and political corruption is protected by the first amendment. We need to undo that.
The brain dead part are the people (apparently common on hacker news) who think that stopping people getting rich is a better solution than, for eg., campaign spending limits.
Money only gets you things when you spend it. Real power is how much money you have to spend, not the market cap of the companies you own. There’s a tired meme that billionaires are somehow more powerful than the politicians in charge of all the money.
I can’t give specifics, I know someone who had to deal with “delete me” requests from these “privacy” companies. The privacy company would literally take your personal info (name, email), and _email it to every company they could think of_ asking the company to delete your account _even if you didn’t have one_.
> It's because it ensures everyone can use the same web and gives the user agent as much power as possible to act on the user's behalf.
Those aren't the principles underlying HTML, and I doubt Tim Berners-Lee was thinking about that at all when he designed HTML. Instead, he was trying to design a format which could be read by both machines and humans, which is why "semantic" HTML elements were introduced. In the end, LLMs were what allowed machines to understand web pages, not semantic HTML elements.
If we do want to make this about accessibility, anyone who has worked with screen readers knows that semantic HTML has failed on that front too. Screen readers rarely understand fancy elements. Instead we often have to create obscene DOM structures to get the reader to say something reasonable, which is at complete odds with the ideals of the semantic web.
I interpreted this post completely differently. I think it is talking specifically about design principles for code/systems. The core thesis appears to be "principles should be based on what works in practice, not what sounds good in theory."
The example given in the post was using <div>s rather than semantic HTML elements. The motivation for the principle of using "semantic HTML elements" comes from the lofty ideals of the Semantic Web[0]. However, these principles didn't come from best practice. Instead, someone (Tim Berners-Lee) thought that it was a cool idea and tried to convince everyone of it without demonstrating that it could actually deliver on any of the promises it made. The argument instead is that principles should be based on what is proven to work, rather than what sounds good in theory. I agree with the sentiment in the post.
We say laziness motivates us to become more efficient, but I can’t agree. It’s people who want or need to get things done faster that find innovative and creative ways of doing so.