>returning a 200 and a body containing "error: I didn't do what you said because _insert error here_"

I've seen this approach before, it mostly follows from using the code to signal application errors (200 + ok/error) from other kinds of errors that might arise.

HTTP error codes are divided between server (5xx) and client (4xx).

Where do these "application errors" occur if neither on a server nor a client?

I think the reality is that management sees "5xx means server error, so our team's KPI is now server error rate, the lower the better!" Then the team just stops using 500 errors as much as possible. They probably justify it with things like "well, such and such problem isn't our fault so its not really a server error." This kind of thinking is perverting the intent of 5xx messages. They are supposed to indicate any failure to handle the request that happens on the server, NOT measure whether the dev team is making a good application.

It can happen out of necessity: if the failure is in an ajax request and you need to send back a message or additional data in json, apache eats the body of error responses. So a success response is all that's guaranteed to get through.

I don't know about others, I know about this one because I had to dig into a bug where something on live looked like it succeeded but didn't, while the error worked fine on dev. Ended up downloading the apache source and finding where it was happening before just using a 200 response.

I'd probably start learning how to homebrew beer.

More like they get away with it because hundreds of thousands of people around the world demand the service.

nyxt? helium? midori?

There are hundreds of browsers these days, you shouldn't have a hard time finding one that fits your needs.

No offense, but you don't get it.

w3m, lynks, elinks? falkon?

I'm not sure what you mean given that JS and CSS account for at least half of the kitchen sink.

Hell, wasn't there someone that implemented an entire OS stack in CSS?

My point is a new standard, document format, and browser that doesn't have the capabilities which limits publishers to ... not what we have now.

The existence of elinks which is marginally useful on the modern web doesn't make the cut nor do tools to un-shitify the existing web.

What's the difference between that and a subset of what we have now, without, say WebUSB?

I'm talking about no javascript, no additional requests besides the bare document, no sending any information back home. Dynamic behavior only by a simple declarative language.

You are trying to express something that is logically impossible. Not technically difficult or socio-economically difficult to get companies to agree to or get users to care about, simply not a valid string of words.

There is no way not to send information back to the host.

Merely requesting a document is sending information to a host.

I don't mean all the extra metadata in the request header or cookies let alone the all the functionality in javascript or wasm or plugins, I mean nothing more than the name of a document, the bare minimum info required to get something you want it to give you.

If you want me to give you an apple, at the very least you have to tell me to give you an apple.

It all started with nothing more than that bare function, and we don't even want any less than that.

You do need to be able to request a document, and there is no way for a client to prevent a server from replacing a simple static document with a cgi script that performs logic based on the file name. Even without the extra cgi query string, just a document name itself.

But about query strings... there is no way to make a typical query string illegal anyway. It's all just strings of characters. Anything can be encoded within anything else. If you try to make a system that makes say the & and ? characters illegal, that accomplishes exactly nothing.

You just pick any sequence of legal charaters and interpret those in place of the old ? and &, and = and % and anything else you want that doesn't look like part of a legal file or document name.

The special encoded charaters can even be different for each document, even different for each request. It's not possible to make a rule that prevents it.

Let's go totally off the deep end and say that you aren't even allowed to make up your own file names any more. All documents on earth have known names in a whitelist. You can't encode anything because every valid document has a known name and known content. Then you can still encode information in the pattern of access. Requesting file A followed by file F means something extra to you and the server.

But don't take my naysayer defeatist lack of imagination word for it. Go ahead and try to actually explain how the system should work.

Ok tone it down a little.

Caching, distributed sharing, the lack of a redirect mechanism or cookies all can contribute particularly if the goal is kneecapping surveillance but not the platonic ideal of secrecy.

For example, you can't do very much surveillance with DNS or bittorrent.

I started using this web browser in 1992...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

It's about as stripped-down as the web can get.

To this, I once moved to a city in a neighboring country and ended up having the exact same zip code as where I moved from.

I have a tiny but very comfy bluetooth keyboard, though 90% of the time I use a keyboard with android I'm using my tablet (and it's easy to forget it's not a laptop).

Never heard of that, nor of a union in tech. What part of Europe?

The discourse here is more of a criticism of Puentes, who is a very controversial minister overseeing this.

Yarmuk 636 is one of the most depressing events in history.

Whenever I read about that or the disasters that ensued in the following centuries I always spend a day depressed.

Grim.

Hey, get with the times. Whitewashing jihadis is in vogue these days.

You might be into that. The rest of us like to analyse things honestly, especially given America is going down the route of making the same moves as history. If you don't see that, then it'd probably be better for you to go read something than to offer pithy comments on here.