by easyThrowaway
1 subcomments
- He's missing the last step:
Somehow around the 2010s we all decided that everything in the web had to become "reactive" and "asynchronous" - which is a fancy way of saying things can theoretically happen at any time but realistically if you try to make it happen in ways that don't resemble the previous serial approach you get weird race conditions - and instead of making sure this was implemented in HTML now we have to write another web browser on top of our web browser in javascript, using a thing called shadow DOM.
Also somehow now you have to understand how the internet works at protocol level unless you want way worse performance than that page written in Dreamweaver 20 years ago.
But this is fine because this is the way big companies run things, which we all know they always make the correct decisions like giving their AI full access to their login and password recovery process.
- And there were a bunch of WYSIWYG editors in the mid-late 90s. It seems like everyone had one, including Netscape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer
- What a brilliant piece of writing. I remember almost every single step—safe for actually getting angry emails. Maybe I ended up being the one writing them.
What a glorious time period.
Interestingly, it would’ve been impossible to share this writing with as many people as the author did by publishing it on mastodon and then it ended up on HN in 1998. The network effects are real.
by nadagast
10 subcomments
- I enjoyed this. But reading the claim that the iPhone was bad compared to other phones of the day makes me question it all. That's so incredibly backwards. It _was_ a much better internet in your pocket. If you couldn't see that, it says something about you, not phones.
- I read the beginning of the post and immediately tabbed back to start writing a rant about standing up a website being fine, but the real loss of web functionality was Flash, glad I kept reading. I'm quite good with CSS and doing tricks with SVGs, but constantly run into things I want to do in 2D web I find to be complex enough and time consuming enough I don't even bother, while I would have been able to do it in Flash as a 13 year old in a few minutes. The modern web is a prison built out of <div>s, the tricks you see for "amazing" websites with obnoxious scrolljacking/parallax don't hide it.
- Actually, do things ever get easier to tinker with as technology matures?
Is it easier to build or repair a radio now than it was when they were first sold? A computer? A car? A washing machine? A vacuum cleaner?
- My experience was almost identical. Don’t forget all the time spent balancing image quality with load speed to get that perfect blend of shit quality and slow download.
- Something powered by an LLM is going to end up being the tool that makes this accessible in the way it always should have been, and that gives me complex feelings.
- SSI is still the perfect balance of just enough power to do templating with .html fragments with a minimal attack surface and no maintainence from version churn. It's stable, it's tested, it's left alone. It's in most major webservers as a core module. It's as good now as it was in 1998.
- > Making a website should be the easiest fucking thing in the world by now. There should be a program that you can use to spit out a website as easy as Word spits out words on paper
squarespace?
> and we - us fucking foss nerds or whoever - should've made it.
wordpress?
- Not seeing anything
Looks like its getting a ton of traffic
Spinner and load bar at the top
- Missed Twitter bootstrap which was huge for web design.
Also missed the HP IPAQ.
- > back then, it sucked so hard that web designers with a decade of experience would crank out articles about trying to achieve "the Holy Grail of web design," which was three columns, a header, and a footer, with stuff in the middle bit and links in the left bit and maybe some other links in the right bit, that didn't fuck up in some hilarious or obscure way. Shit that was trivial and intuitive with tables, but absolutely fucking impossible with CSS.
This fact (which is 100% true) makes me so angry about CSS. They had a really good idea—separate structure from content. But they didn't design CSS about what people Actually Wanted To Do, so for what, a decade plus? CSS was this steaming pile of hacks and hoops and bullshit. Designers wanted 3-column layouts. They wanted pinstriping. They wanted drop shadows. They wanted to center things vertically. And rather than make those dead simple, they made them all pains in the ass. Why spend all that time designing and developing and proselyting a technology, without ever thinking about what sort of thing people will want to do with it?
by surgical_fire
0 subcomment
- My actual thoughts were "Wow, doing front end is a shitty experience in 1998, I'll bet it'll be even shittier in 2026".
- Completely ignoring accessibility
by macroteam
1 subcomments
- the prediction wasn't even wrong, it just split in two. deploying a static site in 2026 is genuinely easier than 1998. you drag a folder into netlify and you're done, no ISP instructions, no FTP client, no guy with a tarp. what exploded is everything before the deploy. and the funny thing is the actual complaint buried in this thread, "i don't want to paste my nav into every page and update it by hand," is the exact problem we've spent 25 years re-solving. frames, then SSI, then php includes, then templating engines, then the whole frontend framework industry. react is, underneath everything, a really elaborate way to not repeat your navbar.
- Those angry emails from guys (it's always guys) felt so contrived and wedged in just to attack other guys. I reminded me of the tweet about how people online invent someone doing a hypothetical situation and then get mad at them
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