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The Return of the 90s Web

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Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#181

Post by killjoywashere »

kickscondor wrote: post #38
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…

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: *…

Well, sheeeeit. If we're going for fever dreams, don't forget the electric sheep! https://electricsheep.org/

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#182

Post by astura »

mafuyu wrote: post #127

Along these lines, does anyone have any recommendations for a service or framework to create a simple personal site? I just want a basic blog, project pages, and photo gallery. I use Jekyll at the moment to statically generate pages to host on github.io, but frankly, I don't have much webdev experience and I'd rather just have something work out of the box at this point.

WordPress?

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#183

Post by tonyarkles »

Jtsummers wrote: post #97
the_other wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a fuzzy concept, but I think you're pointing toward something there's a need for. PageRank is/was useful in a lot of ways, it's just not enough by itself. Its weaknesses have been ever more apparent, and it has become less effective over time. Would you speak to why you think this way about PageRank? What are its shortcomings? To me, who only paid surface-level attention to this, it seemed like Google results…

SEO with Google was about gaming PageRank. A lot of work happened in the 00s trying to prevent that, but it requires an army of moderators and others to identify good/bad links and link sources. Is HN a good source? Sure. Are HN comments a good source? Not once spammers realized they could drop links in comments to boost their site's results. How do you tell the difference? Plain PageRank is weak against this, and th…

Nofollow helps a fair bit but requires cooperation from all high ranking sites to ensure that they don’t leak their PageRank juice.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#184

Post by jamil7 »

coder543 wrote: post #135
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.

If your iPad is 10 years old, then it’s an original iPad. The original iPad received its last update 8 years ago. I really enjoyed my launch day original iPad — it was incredible, just because it was such a new experience, but the hardware was severely underpowered even for the time. Laptops from 2010 are probably much better equipped to browse the web today than that 2010 iPad. It just seems very idealistic to expec…

But what is the great new experience offered by something like twitter’s web site that demands all that new power and brings that machine to it’s knees? What cutting edge features is it offering that it didn’t offer in 2010? Thats kind of what made the web a cool platform, it was backwards compatible by default and could run on all kinds of things.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#185

Post by astura »

deadbunny wrote: post #40
DoubleGlazing wrote: post #9

Maybe I'm missing something, the article isn't very clear. One of the reasons why we have front end apps pulling from an API is because it allows for interoperability. The same API that serves data to the web browser can serve that data to mobile apps and to third parties as well. The idea of bringing HTML rendering back on to the server just doesn't seem useful to me.

Maybe I'm being dumb (I'm a sysadmin, not a developer) but wouldn't you just shift those API calls to the server rendering the page rather than the browser?

Yes

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#186

Post by simonbarker87 »

juliend2 wrote: post #149
mafuyu wrote: post #127

Along these lines, does anyone have any recommendations for a service or framework to create a simple personal site? I just want a basic blog, project pages, and photo gallery. I use Jekyll at the moment to statically generate pages to host on github.io, but frankly, I don't have much webdev experience and I'd rather just have something work out of the box at this point.

I would say: start by doing pure HTML, then progressively work with PHP to include header.php/footer.php on every page. Then create helper functions for a few things you don't wanna repeat. You'll be surprised by how good it feels to know your website from A to Z. This is what I do for my own site: https://www.juliendesrosiers.com/ . Almost every URL ends with an old-school .php for that very reason lol. But I like t…

This is exactly what I did a few weeks ago after getting fed up of Wordpress for my personal site. Static HTML pages and some php for the header the and the blog homepage. It means I need to write in plain HTML but that’s fine, the only js is prism syntax highlighting.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#187

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

renewiltord wrote: post #75
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: *…

The alternative to Google for discovery is Reddit. Reddit is the modern web directory: - Directories are Communities defined by their link rules - Human-curated - Easy to start a new one - SSO across all communities - Built-in forum technology - Unified comment technology for every website You can get communities like reddit.com/r/Sizz for instance or larger ones like /r/esp8266 or massive ones like /r/sanfrancisco o…

Reddit is a feed, and therefore a link that was posted a month ago is no longer going to be seen by anyone. Basically, whatever appears to users between now and the moment when things drop off the page is a crap shoot, and Reddit will be inferior to a real web directory that can amass a larger collection of interesting links and, importantly, preserve them all together at one time.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#188

Post by echlebek »

coder543 wrote: post #135
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.

If your iPad is 10 years old, then it’s an original iPad. The original iPad received its last update 8 years ago. I really enjoyed my launch day original iPad — it was incredible, just because it was such a new experience, but the hardware was severely underpowered even for the time. Laptops from 2010 are probably much better equipped to browse the web today than that 2010 iPad. It just seems very idealistic to expec…

A 1 GHz Cortex-8 is a ton of computing power. The proof of this is iOS itself. When you bring the GPU into the mix, it's obviously capable of a lot as an operating system. There are no problems displaying high resolution static content and video content on an iPad. But around the same time, it became fashionable to start rendering static content on the fly, maybe inserting some not-so-static content around it to justify this choice.

Add in advertising. And a browser that you might have trouble controlling script execution on.

Add in tracking. Remember that story about how eBay fingerprints your browser in part by mapping the open websockets you have? That costs power and cycles. And the cookies have been piling up since the 90s.

Speaking of storage, it's now much more common to use localStorage. Now anyone with a website on the internet can store appreciable amounts of stuff on your computer if you visit their website. And they can read and write that storage as much as they want while you're on their site, without regard for your computer's performance.

And all of this is just considered normal and regular. This isn't even getting towards abusive behaviour like running a crypto miner in a browser or something. This is just web applications continually expanding their resource entitlements.

The web is a great honking tire fire. Many articles and books have been written about this, many of them are summarily dismissed by web developers as ivory tower nonsense. But the trajectory of system requirements for displaying mainly-text documents is growing at an unsustainable pace, and there is eventually going to be some kind of reckoning.

I have a $3000 1 year old laptop, and sometimes slack gets so slow I have to kill the browser process and start over again. The issue is not hardware.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#189

Post by rkagerer »

esfandia wrote: post #161
majormajor wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So we have hand-curated directories, and we have social networks. Put them together and you could have a scalable, crawlable, searchable, customizable and non-gamable decentralized indexing system. Just don't know why nobody has come with this yet. Maybe lack of (monetary) incentives? Maybe something for IETF or WWWC to initiate?

Just for fun, imagine an alternate reality where nobody cracked the problem of an effective automated indexing algorithm. Hand-curated directories emerge, some structured by taxonomic categorization, others using keyword tagging, still others reliant on user-based rankings. The most successful grow in popularity and consolidate, becoming highly lucrative properties with recognizable brand names. As they grow to gargantuan size, research in the field explodes and innovators race to come up with improved methods to connect people to content they seek. Sergey Dewey and Larry Linnaeus make a breakthrough they call SageRank. Instead of computer code, it leverages "social algorithms" and game theory to incentivize participant behavior. Vladmir Bezos sinks billions into a clandestine effort to game the system. Once the story breaks, public backlash rallies into a worldwide, anti-"fake links" campaign. In one little corner of the internet, some schmuck says, "Imagine an alternate reality where two nerds came up with an impartial computer program to crawl the whole web..."

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#190

Post by basch »

dredmorbius wrote: post #145
spc476 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you go: https://millionshort.com/

An equivalent which provides sources older than the past hour, day, week, month, year, decade, century, or millennium would be an opportunity here.

Google has that, it's just stopped working. You'll end up with articles from 1997 that say they updated 4h ago. And the amount of seo garbage that gets through has polluted the remaining results.

What would be really cool was if google could show what the results for a search looked like on a given day. Not the current algorithm, not any sites indexed since then, but what it looked like at the time. Going back to use 2010 Google would be a dream.

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