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The Return of the 90s Web

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Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#151

Post by djohnston »

stickfigure wrote: post #71

This seems to be one developer's wishful thinking, without any evidence presented to back up the assertion. Pointing out "hey, here's a couple websites that do server side rendering" does not a trend make. We're ripping out webflow, if anecdata counts for anything (it doesn't). Webflow occupies the barren middle ground of "too complicated for marketing people, too simple for technical people". I find it much easier t…

I just hit the same wall with bubble.. it definitely has some impressive attributes but sometimes I just need to see the code. I really hate clicking around looking for descendent nodes in a UI vs just looking at html template

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#152

Post by hedora »

swader999 wrote: post #137
waltbosz wrote: post #21

What I miss most from the early days of the Internet is the content. It was all created with love. My theory is that the high barrier to entry of online publishing kept all but the most determined people from creating content. As a result, the little content that was out there was usually good. With today's monetized blogs, it is often content for content's sake. People don't try, or they write about topics which the…

Like this site, I learned how to build a strong bike rim from Sheldon. https://sheldonbrown.com/

I used Sheldon Brown’s site when I rebuilt my first decent roadbike (well, it was $100, including the parts I put into it; “decent” is relative).

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#153

Post by tech-historian »

waltbosz wrote: post #21

What I miss most from the early days of the Internet is the content. It was all created with love. My theory is that the high barrier to entry of online publishing kept all but the most determined people from creating content. As a result, the little content that was out there was usually good. With today's monetized blogs, it is often content for content's sake. People don't try, or they write about topics which the…

If you want the 90s web.. you can find it here:

https://www.versionmuseum.com/websites

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#154

Post by hedora »

abrookewood wrote: post #115
simias wrote: post #48

I'm not a web developer but my girlfriend needed a website to show her photography work so I decided to make it for her. It's the simplest thing in the world, basically just three columns with photo thumbnails and the only javascript is some simple image viewer to display the images full screen when you click the thumbnails. It's really, really basic but I was impressed with the feedback I received from it, many peop…

Can you give more details? I don't think I've ever heard of M4 before.

You probably already have m4 on your development machine:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_(computer_language)

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#155

Post by api »

majormajor wrote: post #92
nextaccountic wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we really need is a new Google, built on open principles (decentralized / peer to peer, fully free software, backed by a nonprofit), and focused on indexing the long tail of insightful content that is neglected by Google because it lacks SEO, popularity, links, and other metrics that Google find interesting but we don't necessarily do.

Any new google will become the current google because it will be gamed. I agree with the parent poster about hand-curated directories being the key to finding better stuff. It's necessarily much more distributed - because one person can't index everything - and therefore much harder to algorithmically game. Google has conditioned us into thinking that "an algorithm that automagically separates the wheat from the chaf…

I was thinking the same thing. Search engines for the whole web are over. The concept doesn't stand up to spam of various kinds.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#156

Post by api »

russellendicott wrote: post #134
jandrese wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course the problem is that if your site becomes popular it will be overrun by SEOs pushing monetized vapid content. This is how people earn money, they aren't going to stop just because you want to return to a time before they ruined the internet.

At some point this monetization game must end and we just have to pay for things we want. If there was a search engine that met my needs I would gladly pay $15/month for access.

I agree, but it is unbelievably hard to compete with free.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#157

Post by WalterBright »

nextaccountic wrote: post #50
kickscondor wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are still creating great stuff along these lines - you just won't find it through Google or Facebook or most of Reddit. Complex, interesting hypertext creations and web sites are still everywhere. But try typing "interesting hypertext" into Google or Facebook and see where it gets you. You can't search for something that's off the beaten track. This is where directories come back in. Check some of these out: *…

What we really need is a new Google, built on open principles (decentralized / peer to peer, fully free software, backed by a nonprofit), and focused on indexing the long tail of insightful content that is neglected by Google because it lacks SEO, popularity, links, and other metrics that Google find interesting but we don't necessarily do.

1. The internet is far too large to use human curation, an algorithm is needed.

2. An algorithm can always be gamed.

You're stuck.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#158

Post by rkagerer »

WalterBright wrote: post #157
nextaccountic wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we really need is a new Google, built on open principles (decentralized / peer to peer, fully free software, backed by a nonprofit), and focused on indexing the long tail of insightful content that is neglected by Google because it lacks SEO, popularity, links, and other metrics that Google find interesting but we don't necessarily do.

1. The internet is far too large to use human curation, an algorithm is needed. 2. An algorithm can always be gamed. You're stuck.

Can you substantiate #1?

The content on the sites I visit is created by humans. Until automation genuinely overtakes us, I'm not ready to accept at face value the scale of the internet has grown so large that humans couldn't tackle the problem.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#159

Post by zzo38computer »

buboard wrote: post #129

please don't call it server-side-rendering. The http server was always meant to respond with hypertext content. Serving json is the oddity, not the other way around

For document-oriented stuff, you can serve HTML or plain text. For data-oriented stuff, I think that it is not so wrong to serve JSON, CSV, RDF, SQLite database, or whatever format it is, although such things should not be hidden from the user (especially if scripts are disabled); this is independent of whether or not there is also a HTML version of the data (if so, the HTML could be generated either ahead of time or on demand; which is best may depend on the situation).

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#160

Post by kyawzazaw »

secondcoming wrote: post #79

My iPad is 10 years old and there are websites that bring it to its knees, especially mobile.twitter.com links. I don't click them anymore, it's too frustrating. Maybe web devs should be given low-end machines to work on so they can experience what their non-desktop users experience. The whole 'mobile web' distinction really shouldn't need to exist, my iPad isn't a mobile phone from 2005.

I think it's a bit over too much to expect sites to cater to a device (and somewhat underpowered at that) that hasn't received any updates for several years.
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