Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Return of the 90s Web

mxb.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 357 posts

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#211

Post by input_sh »

yagodragon wrote: post #96
movedx wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered something like Ghost? ghost.org

Ghost looks great and very polished! For me though, it provides much less out of the box (no built-in comments etc). It's also harder to self host and manage and the hosted service costs 30$/month which is extremely pricey for an indie blog. 3rd party ecosystem for wordpress (plugins/themes) is huge. I can easily extend my blog to an e-commerce store, an online community etc.

> It's also harder to self host and manage

Eh, I disagree. The only difference is that it uses Node instead of PHP. You still hook it up to MySQL/MariaDB/SQLite and you're good to go.

Plus I consider its Members feature (https://ghost.org/members/) to be a game-changer, though it's powered by Stripe, so you'll have to be in one of 39 countries supported by it to make it work without extensively hacking your theme.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#212

Post by rawoke083600 »

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…

I think you are right about the "high barrier" being a filter for good work yes !

Also I miss the wide and wonderful design and color scheme of the 90's :) Long before bootstrap or "material design" !

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#213

Post by techhackblob »

tpmx wrote: post #70
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…

Back in the 90s I was working on a commercial server-side rendering "content management solution". Revision control and team workflow (with quite nice conflict resultion UIs). Templating using XSLT (sadly, because it's insane). Super expressive and solid stuff in general though. We used the actual cvs binary as a version control backend. I left this part of the business space for the browser business at this time, bu…

It's been a ride watching all this abstraction and design patterns make everything more complex

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#214

Post by arcturus17 »

JohnBooty wrote: post #195
peruvian wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s an exponentially growing recruiting, training, and hiring industry based on developers who only know how to write fat JS frontends. I think everyone has probably experienced high growth in their company’s frontend team. Many developers choose to write them not out of expertise but to have them in their resume and for job security.

developers who only know how to write fat JS frontends Yeah. This is often a big challenge for small companies / small teams. Nearly every web app is now two apps , and it's increasingly infeasible for any developer to have a mastery of both backend and frontend stacks. Not necessarily a terrible problem when you have dozens of developers, but a lot of dev teams are 1-3 people. Instead of web dev circa 2010 where you…

I don’t understand why members of a dev team back in the day would’ve been more capable of being full-stack than today...

The front/back divide also existed back then, with barely any possibility of a front person ever touching the back-end (a possibility that exists nowadays, without going into its merits or demerits).

For a reasonably ambitious and industrious individual nowadays it’s not unreasonable to become really good at one client and one server technology. There’s more to it than writing server-side code with HTML templating for presentation, for sure, but it remains well within the grasp of many people.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#215

Post by ricardo81 »

rkagerer wrote: post #158
WalterBright wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

#1 can somewhat be substantiated by some technical info, without knowing the true number of pages.

- Using DNS "zone files", the DNS database for TLDs (which are not available for all, but most) show there's circa 200 million domains registered at any moment

- A large percentage of these are parked, i.e. no unique content.

- Many domains are "tasted", i.e. bought, are alive for a few days then disappear, so potentially you waste time crawling them

- Lots of sites are database driven and can result in millions of pages that can be created in a day

- URL rewriting means you can have an almost infinite number of pages on any one site

- Soft 404s and duplicate content can be hard to spot and can waste resources in gathering/removing them

There's paid for resources like Majestic/Ahrefs/Moz that crawl the web to see who's linking to who and they all contain trillions of URLs.

I think the most detrimental fact is that pages often disappear or change, I don't have a recent number but I'm fairly certain there's a 10-15% chance that any link you see this year, will be gone next year. "Link rot". Hard to build a DMOZ style directory on that scale with that problem.

I don't think it is unmanageable, it just needs to be seen from different perspectives and managed by different groups of people.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#216

Post by jacobr »

untog wrote: post #18
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…

I think there's a lot of truth in what you're saying and the core problem is that we somehow decided there was one correct way to make a web site, and that was to use React. Are you creating a complex webapp? Use React. Go nuts! But are you making a mostly static page (blog, marketing site, whatever)? Then don't use React. It adds entirely unnecessary bloat and complication.

If I only evaluated our tech stack on a pure “what’s the most efficient way to deliver HTML to the user” I’d not choose React, but I don’t know of any other framework that ticks the other boxes required in a large organization.

- Code sharing - how do you share reusable snippets of code that includes both the SSR logic and the JS that is also required on the frontend. React’s component model is fantastic where a team can develop a component independently

- Skill set - getting 50 React developers to write HTML and JS should be fine if other problems were solved, but often the suggested solution is obscure things like Elm or Elixir

- Even if most of what a company builds is static marketing content, other parts can be more app-like and having developers be able to share code and use the same basic technology is a great productivity booster

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#217

Post by cvshepherd »

pgm8705 wrote: post #13

I'm glad this is the case. I've been a Rails developer for close to 10 years now, but 3 or 4 years back I got sucked into the React world. I bought right in and my company quickly adopted the "React on Rails" pattern. Looking back, it was one of the worst professional decisions I've made in my career. Now we're back to server side rendering and StimulusJS on the front-end when needed. Productivity is way up, and deve…

i've been using nothing but rails for the last 10 years, without missing anything. though had i known that tech like cableready/stimulus was on the horizon, i probably would have missed that. i'm always amazed when i read tech blogs focusing on the complexities, intricacies, and pitfalls of modern day JS development. then i look at the value it brings the visitor/customer, and 99% of the time i'm shaking my head in disbelief.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#218

Post by nicbou »

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…

I think we have far more quality content than ever before. YouTube is a goldmine of high quality content, and so are the other publishing platforms.

The signal to noise ratio might have gotten worse, and discovery might be flawed, but the absolute quantity of quality content has never been higher.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#219

Post by jabl »

hedora wrote: post #148
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…

They had to abandon page rank because it was widely gamed. As far as I can tell, the main reason Google succeeded was that other search engines let advertisers buy placement for keywords (and didn’t label paid links). I heard from an industry insider that was able to strip the paid links that the engine they worked on gave results that were very similar to Google’s. The second big reason was that pagerank was a usefu…

Before Google/pagerank took over, sites were successfully gaming the rankings of search engines like Altavista by adding every keyword they could think of in the html header, or hidden in the page with an invisible font etc.

It got to the point Altavista became more or less useless, and when Google showed up on the market they quickly took it over.

Seems the time is ripe for a new revolution. Doesn't have to be a better search engine, could be something completely different.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#220

Post by Tiltowait-- »

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: *…

Wow...it's like that "yahoo" email list of links that I used to subscribe to. Wonder what happened to them? Last I heard they stopped sending out the email and started putting it a web page for convenience.
Post reply on HN