A lot has been written about the declining usablity of the World Wide Web due to web sites not respecting what visitors really want or need. So I'll just summarise here before I'll try to get to the point.
Megabytes of CSS and JS to display 15 Kilobytes of content and another few megabytes of ads and other bloat. It has become completely normal to have a hundret and more tracking cookies installed for wisiting a single web page. Many popular sites can't be read by at least some people because the distracting ads have become too much. Thise are the first major problems that come to my mind. Depending on who you ask the problematic development has started in the last couple of years, about a decade ago, in the mid-2000s or even in the 1990s. But most people above a necessary age to have experienced the difference seem to agree that the web experience was a better one in 2005 than today. Back then RSS was integrated by many popular sites. You could use it to read Twitter and subscribe to YouTube channels, for example, and sites that still offer it in the background used to place links to feeds visibly, not hidden in the source code for browser extensions to discover them. Web browsers themselves could not only display RSS feeds but placed an icon next to the address bar when a feed for the currently viewed page was available. RSS is often used to show how the web was more open in general. Even commercial web sites were created with a more open approach. A site were you had to register before you could view its content was an exception for which privacy was the reason, not monetary expectation or greed. This is the time to which most people seem to want to return to. When I say most people, I mean most people whose thoughts on the open web I read, which is those who post to the open web and are interested in such things to a degree that they want to write about it. So what I probably mean is "most people who are dissatisfied with the current state of the web". It's possibly that most people, or most internet users, love the way things are going now and hate the ideas advocated of the open web have, whether that is for or against their own good.
Sometimes I boost thought-out or new takes on the subject, well formulated demands or promotions of software solutions on the fediverse. And I often think about this myself. Because the web has brought me so many nice things and I want it to be a positive thing in society as well, which, overall, it doesn't seem to be anymore. What does the web need to make it better again?
First of all, the open web isn't gone, nor has it shrunk in size. There way more personal blogs, open networks and non-commercial projects out there than 20 years ago. Even new web forums open all the time. But it's less visible below the very very loud, commercial web. Maybe the greedy web is a good name for what I mean. Not every commercial web site is an example of how the web is devdeloping in a bad direction in my view. I want to be able to get information about a business from the business-owner themselves when I'm interested in their services, for example.
A search engine that returns links to non-commercial sites first, unless you really need information that can only be found on a page of a greedy site. I think- let's just not talk about the many problems (not even just challanges) that such a search engine would introduce if it is to be useful in practice.
A browser that only links to non-bloated/non-tracking/non-greedy/open web sites or warns when a link leads to a less-nice site. Again, I don't have the time right now to list all the problem that there would be if an attempt to implement this would be made. Maybe I'll write another entry about my deeper thoughts on the technological solutions that I mention here. But these thoughts don't contain any real solutions. So I don't know.
Create a literal small web, that only uses resources from and only links to, web sites that are following the same standard (e.g. only (X)HTML4, maybe only CSS2, possibly restriction on JS usage). That is in principle similar to building a whole new network, as is Gemini and Gopher doing. (I know Gopher isn't new, but I reckon the majority of sites is.) I forgot what other protocols with similar aims are there. As far as I know none that are widely used. There are initiatives to restrict the WWW to a smaller or older set of standards. Those probably influence site builders (mainly in personal web sites), but won't change the web as a hole. And so you'll eventually while browsing come across a site that doesn't restrict itself it what it's linking to, or you'll catch yourself linking to a bloated site because it's important to link to the original source of something.
JavaScript needs to be optional again. I've recently come to think that this is actually the one major goal among the technological changes that the current web would need to undergo in order to make it user-friendly and more usable again. In a time where you couldn't 100% expect that visitors were using a client that understood JavaScript, and had it enabled, web developers didn't have much of a choice and built in fallbacks so that a site was still usable without JavaScript. But the number of visiting clients without very good JavaScript became so small that it started to look optional, and in reality became not only optional but even rare, that fallbacks are included. JavaScript really took over the web. I could make so many words around this but don't have much time left this morning. Not only are there sites that are empty without JS loading the entire HTML. Such a thing isn't even special anymore.
If you are creating a new web browser, please include a switch in the GUI that allows to enable/disable JavaScript permanently (until deliberately switched on again) either entirely or for the currently viewed site. Or, maybe make it off by default.
tbd:this entry needs some links;write follow-up entries