[deleted]
Does anyone remember websites?
81–90 of 386 posts
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be kind of cool to make a modern network of sites robots.txt'ed out of search engines.
It'd also be cool to make a search engine that catalogged all of the websites that other search engines politely did not. Is there any proper enforcement of robots.txt or is it just polite? Because I don't see how one search engine could maintain an advantage if others start catalogging every site.
Well, most sites want to be discoverable, so the incentives are aligned for the time being.
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#83http://neoticies.org Welcome back :) I am currently doing a minimal OpenBSD site in Spanish :D
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#84> Most websites were written with html, so they were all unique. Every single website on the internet always was, is and will be HTML (with various kinds of XML/SVG markup sometimes). People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible. I don't see why I should feel nostalgia for an Internet plagued by ` `s, poorly-laid out flash…
> Every single website on the internet always was, is and will be HTML (with various kinds of XML/SVG markup sometimes). People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible. Unstyled HTML (optionally with user style sheets) is more usable and accessible than today's one-size-fits-the-designer design for the kind of content that u…
Sure, but 100% unstyled HTML was extremely rare even in the 90s. The problem with everyone writing their own crap HTML is that the sites become terrible and unusable, because they lack good design. What platforms like Twitter/FB initially did was just provide a unified, usable interface to a certain kind of information. Compare to MySpace, which collapsed partly because vast amounts of the profile pages were horrible.
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Some bigger websites at the time were like mazes with some of the words on each page hyperlinked to other pages on the site that were about each of those separate topics, and you had to open up multiple links from each page otherwise you'd lose them, and you wanted to read every word.
One notable example from the 90s that I was referring to with this statement was a site that had many, many pages about unusual science/mystery/gnosis/anarchism. I haven't been able to locate it. (- the author)
Was it ZetaTalk? Ah, the 90s internet, where kookery and legitimacy stood side by side.
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#86> Most websites were written with html, so they were all unique. Every single website on the internet always was, is and will be HTML (with various kinds of XML/SVG markup sometimes). People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible. I don't see why I should feel nostalgia for an Internet plagued by ` `s, poorly-laid out flash…
I saw a lot of people trying to avoid HTML in their websites in the past. The flash ones are the obvious example, but I once had the pleasure of an entire site that looked like any other, except it took forever to load and links worked weirdly. That was because the entire site was an image map over a giant .bmp for each page.
Oh yes, totally forgot about flash and ``s – but one could argue even those were originally designed to solve the problems of 'vanilla' HTML. They of course failed and HTML kind of prevailed, but only by being coupled with a massive set of APIs on the Web Platform. If it wasn't for those JS APIs, we might be stuck with Flash forever.
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be kind of cool to make a modern network of sites robots.txt'ed out of search engines.
It'd also be cool to make a search engine that catalogged all of the websites that other search engines politely did not. Is there any proper enforcement of robots.txt or is it just polite? Because I don't see how one search engine could maintain an advantage if others start catalogging every site.
It's polite, but the teeth behind it is that it's much easier to secure a CFAA conviction for scraping if you can show evidence that you specifically forbade a scraper from accessing your site (via robots.txt, authentication, or IP blocks) and they circumvented that restriction than if you gave them no notice that you dislike what they're doing.
Legit search engines and aggregators have a strong incentive not to kill the golden goose by getting sued, particularly when the vast majority of sites actually want to be indexed.
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Useful? I would argue that it's actually a lot less useful today.
I grew up with 1980s dial-up modems (slow 300 baud!) to dial directly into BBS systems and USENET. I then continued dialup access into the early internet (GNN not AOL) in 1995. I now have Verizon fiber optic. To me, the modern web today is better in virtually every way compared to 1990s web surfing. + Google search engine is better than Alta Vista and Excite. + Google Maps with smooth scroll, 3D streetview, and satel…
Respectfully disagree on more votes == better. Visible score systems often lead to groupthink, and commenters aiming for the lowest common denominator in the form of karma whoring.
While HN has some measures to reduce hivemind voting, it's quite rampant on the default subreddits.
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#89I was a part of the Geocities team in 1998. Part of the reason a large part of the early web no longer exists is that many of these web pages were hosted for free by Geocities. Tragically when they were purchased by Yahoo, Yahoo decided to simply shred the early web, they decided it was not worth it to keep supporting the service and simply hit delete on a huge chunk of the content of the early web.
https://archive.org/web/geocities.php
Here is an interesting example: https://archive.org/details/TheGeocitiesMidiCollectionVersio...
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#90I miss them, they were a great example of how creative everyone can be, now doing "awesome" things on the internet is so cookie cuttered.