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I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

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Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#221

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

Frondo wrote: post #86
77pt77 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just miss that it was mainly text and could be used in a terminal without missing much. More content density, better S/N ratio.

Not specifically directed at you, but sort of directed at you: I wish everyone who pined for the 25-years-ago days of mostly text pages would, instead of pining, just go out there and produce that content they want to see. Instead of pining, start writing. Hosting is cheap or free, browsers still parse simple HTML, there's nothing stopping anyone from creating a return to that simpler form.

It's impossible to produce that content because the culture was very different.

For one, it was largely un-monetised. There were no banner ads, no ad trackers, no giant shopping sites, no market-driven content design.

But many ISPs offered free web space, and HTML 1.0 was so simple almost anyone could hack together a basic site with a plain vanilla text editor.

So people did. For fun. Lots and lots of them.

It looked like crap, but it was weird/hilarious/insane/inspiring in equal measures in a way that's impossible to reproduce today.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#222

Post by vxNsr »

bloaf wrote: post #196
hawski wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm beginning to think that there is a niche for a peculiar kind of a search engine. A search engine for static almost-none to none JavaScript pages. It would penalize pages for ad-network usage. I would really like to not have in search results most sites that try to monetize on my attention. I want raw facts and opinions. No click-bait to grab my attention or feed my internal cave man with rage. No ad-networks or d…

https://millionshort.com/

This is terrific, I wanna add this as a ddg bang...

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#223

Post by overcast »

CaptSpify wrote: post #201
overcast wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't really mean anything though in the context of things.

Sure it does. The grandparent is saying that we should have a higher quality web, and you are saying that we should have a more dynamic web.

I'm not saying we should have a more dynamic one. But JS fundamentally changed how we interact with websites, and it's here to stay. The majority of big players in the last decaded wouldn't have existed without the dynamic interaction. Saying we should go back to static only, is nonsense.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#224

Post by squeaky-clean »

Frondo wrote: post #86
77pt77 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just miss that it was mainly text and could be used in a terminal without missing much. More content density, better S/N ratio.

Not specifically directed at you, but sort of directed at you: I wish everyone who pined for the 25-years-ago days of mostly text pages would, instead of pining, just go out there and produce that content they want to see. Instead of pining, start writing. Hosting is cheap or free, browsers still parse simple HTML, there's nothing stopping anyone from creating a return to that simpler form.

All the content I read will still be the way I don't want it though.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#225

Post by stordoff »

jacquesm wrote: post #3

Linkrot is a real problem. Especially for those sites that disappear before the archive can get to them. On another note, the more dynamic the web becomes the harder it will be to archive so if you think that the 1994 content is a problem wait until you live in 2040 and you want to read some pages from 2017.

That's actually one of the reasons all my personal stuff gets built as HTML/CSS, then just use Javascript for quality of life stuff (image lightboxes that work without putting #target in browser history, auto-loading a higher-res image -that sort of thing).

I know I won't be maintaining it forever, but I want it to be accessible through the archive.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#226

Post by sjclemmy »

sjclemmy wrote: post #171

I've got a book about javascript from 1995. It mentions closure once and says something like "... but you'll never need to use that feature of the language." How I laughed.

Ok, it was 96 or 97. But the point still stands.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#227

Post by notahacker »

rffn wrote: post #121
aidenn0 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those were both founded in 1994, and the book spent relatively little time discussing the web (much of which still works, according to the article, despite the headline)

Mea culpa. I just read the heading and remembered the old times when they told us that Lycos finds everything. The author only briefly mentions Usenet. That was great fun at the time though.

I have an internet guide from 1995 which describes Usenet and its varying focuses and levels of seriousness in great detail, including an extended section on trolling which concludes memorably by explaining that people that do this "probably have a very small penis (especially the girls)", which could just as easily have been written about Twitter yesterday.

Every time I read something about how social media is changing everything, I remember that it pre-dated the web by a decade...

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#228

Post by pault »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #111
SwellJoe wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With wider monitors, my browser is actually narrowed. I split the screen in half and devote one half to the browser and the other half to a text editor and terminal. I used to have two monitors to do that, but now just one is fine, but the side effect is that I browse in a pretty narrow window. A narrow window also makes reading somewhat nicer on some sites, since it's harder to read very long lines of text.

>> A narrow window also makes reading somewhat nicer on some sites, since it's harder to read very long lines of text. Curious to know how this works with ad-heavy sites. Do responsive sites display differently then too? Been flirting with going to a single 32" monitor for a while. Just wondering if you think it's worth it with your experiences since I do development as well and have a similar setup (one monitor for…

I recently got the Dell 42.5" 4k monster (P4317Q), and while the dpi and color reproduction aren't good enough for serious design work, I'm able to divide my desktop into thirds for browsing and text editing. I usually keep a browser on the left, documentation in the middle, and a terminal on the right. I still get a little giddy when I turn it on every morning. What I really want is for apple to start producing 42" 8k "retina" screens, but I won't hold my breath. :)

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#229

Post by glangdale »

The reason the book didn't mention spam all that much is that it was from 1994 and probably mostly (or entirely) written before April 12, 1994, which is when the infamous "immigration lawyer spam" hit every newsgroup. It wasn't the first spam, obviously, but it did seem to mark a line where spam (USENET and email) became more and more prevalent.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#230

Post by whitef0x »

vxNsr wrote: post #222
bloaf wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://millionshort.com/

This is terrific, I wanna add this as a ddg bang...

Just filled out ddg's suggestion form to add this as a bang. I'll let you know if it goes live.
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