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The Return of the 90s Web

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Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#171

Post by stan_rogers »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #160
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.

No, it really isn't. Treat every connection like horrible shared wifi in a convention centre, all data as if it's an overage charge, and all of the processing as if your users' batteries are mere seconds from dead. Always. As a pleasant side-effect, you get pleasantly snappy performance on old gear - which may be the latest and greatest your users can afford without avoiding whatever it is you're trying to sell.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#172

Post by hedora »

bradgessler wrote: post #91

I’d love to use a search engine that simply didn’t index websites with moderate or excessive amounts of JavaScript, images, and video. You wouldn’t need AMP because it would load quickly, ads would be minimal, and the text content would probably be forced to be higher quality because it would have to stand on its own. Does such a thing exist?

Even better. Blacklist all sites with ads. I’m guessing google will never implement that.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#173

Post by indigochill »

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.

#1 doesn't matter because there's no rule that the entire internet needs to be visible. People only care about the sites they find value in. Search engines are one way to quickly locate those sites.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#174

Post by djhaskin987 »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #86
JohnBooty wrote: post #15

I can't wait for server-side rendering to take its place in the sun again. There are many use cases for which a client-side framework like React is eesential. But I feel the vast majority of use cases on the web would be better off with server-side rendering. And... There are issues of ethics here. You are kidding yourself to an extent when you say that you are building a "client-side web app." It is essentially an a…

The less stuff on the server the better imo. Whenever I can get away with it I use a static site generator or I use vuejs with a json file containing all the data for the site. Being able to just drop a static set of files in to a webserver without any risk of security issues in my code is great. I also hate the tools for backend rendering since if you need any kind of interactivity it becomes so much easier if you h…

At my old company they were moving from client-side to server side because they had 30 different clients -- Roku, desktop, smartphone, Xbox, etc. -- and all of them had to reproduce the same logic. At the time I left they were trying to centralize all of that logic on the server and then just put the lipstick on the pig at the end.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#175

Post by pdxandi »

rudolph9 wrote: post #102
JohnBooty wrote: post #15

I can't wait for server-side rendering to take its place in the sun again. There are many use cases for which a client-side framework like React is eesential. But I feel the vast majority of use cases on the web would be better off with server-side rendering. And... There are issues of ethics here. You are kidding yourself to an extent when you say that you are building a "client-side web app." It is essentially an a…

https://nextjs.org/ is a react wrapper framework that has some nice SSR features. It makes a ubiquitous dev experience where the majority of the app can be rendered server or client side. Last time I worked with it about a year ago it was only the first page load that was rendered server side though but the first one the one that arguably affects the user experience the most.

I love ️Vercel (formerly nextjs). It's such a great platform and their free tier services do a lot of the heavy lifting of configuring a website and managing deployments.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#176

Post by rkagerer »

rkagerer wrote: post #167
WalterBright wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google says there are 2 billion web sites. Each one may consist of a huge number of web pages (see wikipedia.org). All I can say is, good luck with your human curation startup.

Sure, it also estimates more than twice that many people in the world with access to the internet. And Wikipedia is already well-curated by humans. If there were orders magnitude more pages than humans, I'd agree. But I'd also ask: Who created them all?

Granted it's silly, but I'm fascinated by this thought experiment.

It's not easy to quantify the amount of useful content on the internet. The 2bn figure above seems to stem from registered domains, and depending who you ask [1][2] around three quarters of them are "inactive" (e.g. landing page for a parked domain).

At the other end of the spectrum, Google's index surpassed 130 trillion pages four years ago [3]. Point in favour of my opponent!

If everyone connected to the internet indexed one page a day over the course of their lifetime we might just about do it. And anyone creating a new page would need to [arrange to] index it themselves.

[1] https://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/

[2] https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/how-many-websites/#:~:text=....

[3] https://searchengineland.com/googles-search-indexes-hits-130...

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#177

Post by pentae »

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…

This. Often you'll find this low quality SEO content is just a result of people hiring low-cost copywriters often from developing countries, the 'uncanny valley' of written content

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#178

Post by PZ81JUXJE7uJ »

yagodragon wrote: post #25

I really hope personal blogging becomes popular again!. Speaking of which, I still haven't found a really good alternative to the "horrible" WordPress for blogging. It has: - Integrated API, RSS - Tons of plugins - Accessibility, translations - Easy and powerful editor(Gutenberg) - Comments sections and forms w/ complete ownership and moderation - Easy data imports from multiple platforms. - Users and roles - 100% op…

That sounds exactly like October CMS.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#179

Post by badsectoracula »

> Frontpage and Dreamweaver were big in the 90s because of their “What You See Is What You Get” interface. People could set up a website without any coding skills, just by dragging boxes and typing text in them. > > Of course they soon found that there was still source code underneath, you just didn’t see it. And most of the time, that source code was a big heap of auto-generated garbage - it ultimately failed to keep up with the requirements of the modern web.

If you do not see the source code it doesn't matter if it is garbage or not or if it is following any "modern web requirements" or not - all it matters is if it does what you expect it to do. Besides, it is a bit of a hypocrisy nowadays to complain about the code underneath a WYSIWYG tool when many web developers use transpilers that target CSS, JavaScript and pretty much all sites rely on dynamically generated and altered HTML that doesn't let you make more sense on the final output than something like Frontpage or Dreamweaver would generate.

Sadly the closest thing i could find nowadays to something like a WYSIWYG site editor is Publii[0]. It suffers greatly from the 'developer has a huge screen so they assume everyone has a huge screen' syndrome and i really dislike pretty much all of the themes available for it (everything is too oversized). And it is an Electron app because of course it will be an Electron app despite not needing to be one (it doesn't offer full WYSIWYG functionality, only for the article editor which isn't any more advanced than Windows 95's WordPad and it relies on an external browser to show you the final site). But it does the job (i tried on a new attempt for a dev blog of mine[1]) even if i dislike how oversized everything is.

[0] https://getpublii.com/

[1] http://runtimeterror.com/devlog/

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#180

Post by jb3689 »

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.

> What we really need is a new Google

Maybe, maybe not. How useful is Google (or search in general) to you?

For me search is more of a convenience tool than for finding sites that have information. There are questions I need answered but without search would have an easy time figuring out (e.g. "how many cups are in a pint?"). Sometimes I want opinions, but I almost always am going to the same sources. Sometimes I use search because I'm too lazy to click around using a site's own search. The only things that are actually useful for me from search are for specific expert knowledge that I want in a structured manner (e.g. "what do I need to consider when buying a house?"), and those queries are incredibly few

I feel like search is slowly becoming irrelevant

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