

Mini Web - Mini-WWW
http://mini-www.com/blog/mini_web/

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ramanujan
How did this obvious troll make it to the front page of Hacker News? And why
is anyone taking this seriously? The post is almost incoherent.

pg might want to investigate how exactly an account created 3 hours ago got 25
votes for such a bizarre Time-Cube-ish link.

~~~
jacquesm
Hard to tell right now, 25 upvotes is quite a bit, but all it really takes is
about 4 or so in the first couple of minutes for anything at all to get a
bunch more upvotes, I've seen that often enough. If it had a bunch of upvotes
in two minutes or so that would be definitely suspect. Even PGs posts don't go
that fast, so that's a good indicator something is fishy.

The <http://mini-> news.com/ (url messed up on purpose) seems to be an SEO
spam site, so you're probably right.

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Mini-WWW
Hey, jacquesm, honestly, - have you EVER VISITED the <http://mini-> news.com/
(url messed up on purpose) you mentioned so angry? Does it look like a spam
site full of ads? Absolutely not! The spam is to tell people you don't know
for sure!

~~~
jacquesm
> have you EVER VISITED the <http://mini-> news.com/ (url messed up on
> purpose) you mentioned so angry?

Actually, yes, I looked at it before I wrote that.

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lukeqsee
I like the idea. The execution is suspect.

The site seems cluttered. The mixture of typefaces, italics, and colors grate
against everything I've come to love about minimal sites.

If this is what is ahead for the minimal web, count me out.

~~~
Mini-WWW
Thank you, Lukeqsee! The execution is just in early ALPHA stage. I even run it
on a cheapest shared web account (more powerful dedicated server and search
soft are to be in October only). As for what minimal page is, I would tell you
I've seen a LOT of websites that call themselves Galleries (Top Lists, or
whatever) for MINIMAL Webpages, where only few of their links point to really
minimal ones. No matter what the name for the Minimal pages could be, I see
them as SMALL and FAST ONLY!

~~~
lukeqsee
If that "Thank you" was sincere: you're welcome. If it's not, sorry, I'm only
trying to help.

My definition of a minimal webpage: a design that doesn't get in the way of
it's content.

Unfortunately your current font-* styles get in the way of your content.

It's that simple.

It doesn't matter what web server you use, or how _you_ define a minimal page.
If I can't read your content, I'm not going to take stock in what it's trying
to present.

~~~
Mini-WWW
My "Thank you" was sincere! I launched the Mini-WWW Search Engine because I
SIMPLY COULD NOT _READ_ many beautiful websites their developers still very
proud of. So, that's my first criteria for the Ideal Minimal Webpage, - the
one that it's EASY FOR DOWNLOADING!!! I'm also sorry that you don't like my
current fonts and styles (in fact, the only serious drawback about them I know
is that fonts are with fixed size). Tastes differ, and although I accept my
pages may not be excellent, they are very good in emphasizing idea of
SIMPLICITY! More important, - they LOAD FAST!

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RyanMcGreal
For instant Mini-Web, just use this browser:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_%28web_browser%29>

~~~
rogeriopvl
For even better instant Mini-Web, just use Instapaper.

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Mini-WWW
As far as I remember, the Instapaper simply saves web pages for reading later.
Although it may somehow facilitate easy reading of long text content (e.g., by
moving it into another reading platform like Kindle), but not too much.

~~~
adambyrtek
When you click on a "Text" button in Instapaper you get a simple uncluttered
textual representation of the page.

~~~
Mini-WWW
Unlike Mini-WWW, the problem with Instapaper is the resulting format is the
SAME for all pages! It's rather boring world!

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corin_
<http://mini-news.com/2008/04/bye_bye_ads/>

Reading that article made me stop caring in any way about this submission.

~~~
mahmud
Agreed, there are some crank elements to this, but it's better to give people
the benefit of the doubt.

If he re-tools this to some kind of sever-side Readability, a good chunk of
people who can't use bookmarklets will jump on board.

~~~
arethuza
"sever-side Readability"

Maybe add NoScript like features as well.

Does anything like that exist?

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inerte
You would use? Seems "simple": crawl webpages, remove html tags from source,
wrap blocks of newlines around <p>s, style accordingly (good, readable font
and generous white spacing).

Depending on the execution, this could be characterized as stealing other
people's content, but anyway, are the above mentioned "features" what you
want?

~~~
arethuza
It was just a thought - I find myself using Readability a lot and imagine
there might be some interesting things that could be done with it (e.g. better
support for things like iPads).

~~~
Mini-WWW
How one can use Readability for the cluttered site like Digg, if the latter
practically stops low powered PCs at the very first stage, - downloading!!!

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adambyrtek
> Although launched with a zero funding, the business model for the Mini-WWW
> is highly scalable: The more you invest into it, the more reviwers can be
> hired.

I don't think this is what we usually mean by scalability. If you find a good
algorithm to measure the "simplicity" of a page, it could be useful, but
relying on a manual review process is a recipe for failure.

~~~
Mini-WWW
Relying on a manual review process would be a failure only in the case you
want to include into your search engine the whole Web. In contrast, the
proposed niche is for a small Sub-Web, where a slow, - yet quality! - manual
reviewing would be quite sufficient: <http://mini-www.com/blog/next_big_thing-
be_small/>

Use Google to access the Web. And Mini-WWW for the "Mini Web"

~~~
NathanKP
The problem is that such a slow reviewing process means that the results are
likely bad, because only manually submitted pages are indexed. For example:

<http://mini-www.com/search/?find=c%2B%2B>

The results are currently terrible, and at $1 per page indexing fee, or a
backlink to mini-www.com required I expect the results will stay bad for a
long time, perhaps forever.

~~~
Mini-WWW
Who said the actual implementation for the Mini-WWW search would be the same
next week? And WHO SAID THE MINIMAL INTRODUCTION PRICE OF $1 IS FOREVER?!!

~~~
adambyrtek
Don't shout, please.

~~~
Mini-WWW
OK, I will not :-) I'm somewhat confused why some my answers I think are very
important for this topic are down-voted ...

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arethuza
So what you want to do is to create a minimalist web? By working out what we
could remove and still leave a reasonable functioning core?

Having used the Web since '92 I can see the attraction of that :-)

What practical steps do you see for realizing such a vision?

~~~
Mini-WWW
Rather, I want to highlight existing Minimal sub-Web through introducing the
special niche Search Engine <http://Mini-WWW.com>! Hopefully, it can encourage
webmasters to create more USABLE pages, like mobile or RSS movement. But to
get to that point the project must become a really popular service!

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yawniek
combine this with the semantic web and we would have a truly ubiquitous
computing capable information architecture.

why not start it in ipv6 sphere only.

~~~
Robin_Message
Your first sentence is buzzworded to hell. Do you mean a structured database
of all published facts and opinions? Because I'd say the facts worth having
are in wikipedia, or should be, so that's the place to work on semantics of
facts, and opinions worth hearing are distributed by journalists, so work out
how to make the New York Times semantic and work down from there.

As to your second question, because that would be a very stupid and bloody-
minded idea. In order to make a simple web everyone can use it might just make
sense to do it over a transport everyone can reliably and easily access, i.e.
ipv4. Why the hell would you want to restrict it? ipv6 is not magic, just a
complex new protocol for routing internet traffic that is not yet rolled out,
and has no particular benefits for web transactions. It won't affect the web
(that is, HTML served over HTTP) a damm.

~~~
adambyrtek
I think you are taking this too seriously, the post looks like a good irony
which has been down-voted because most people just didn't get it.

~~~
yawniek
thanks :)

