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The Return of the 90s Web

mxb.dev

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Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#261
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tracking and data collection. The way the make money. Twitter in 2010 was actively losing money, if I recall correctly.

That said... modern frontend that doesn't run proparly on a core 2 intel machine with no adblocking should be massacred.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#262

I recently watched the "Helvetica" documentary that was posted here a few days ago [0], where they briefly mention "Grunge Typography" [1], a seemingly dead-end branch of typography that, for some strange reason, became pretty popular for a short period of time. After some years however, consensus amongst designers formed that what they've created was a pile of illegible garbage, and realized that there was no other…

I began developing apps the "old-fashioned" way over a year ago. My day job is React but for my side businesses, it's all PWA and Rails. Light React/Vue (depending on my mood) when I need a fine-grained interaction or a slick animation.

What animations are you doing that you need JavaScript for these days?

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 just…

>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. Keep in mind, the 1st gen iPad was single core and only had 256MB of RAM, which was the same RAM capacity as the then current iPod touch. Compare it to any PC with a single core Intel CPU and the experience will be largely the same, except of course the Intel CPU will…

> Keep in mind, the 1st gen iPad was single core and only had 256MB of RAM

We ran immersive 3D games on less than that. There is no good reason some fucking website should be dogshit slow.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#265

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.

You mean the locked down apis that are not available to the puclic? Those can rot in hell.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#267

I really like the turbolinks approach - you simply write HTML and then include the script in your head tags. However, I'm still hooked on Markdown. So I am still prerendering HTML - and then doing the routing with Hyperapp. (See https://href.cool/Tapes/Africa for an example - you get a prerendered static HTML page, but it uses JavaScript from there to render the other pages.) The ultimate approach is Beaker Browser t…

I kinda went down the same path to generate my site. I had a static generator, which worked as most static generators, being a standalone program, and moved to having a python script (and it's .venv) in the root folder of my content, that has markdown, that converts it to a HTML.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run into very few people who claim this.. oh you mean on Twitter? well there's the problem.

Twitter is where a large percentage of web devs hang out. If something is problematic, you can't dismiss it as "but that's just Twitter". If it's a common mode of discourse on Twitter, then it's legitimately a part of developer culture. In any case, discussions around front end frameworks and especially React are scarcely any better here. Although they are usually politer at least.

> Twitter is where a large percentage of web devs hang out

Source?

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a pity the semantic web never took off. It might have greatly reduced the need for sophisticated centralised search-engines.

The semantic web will never work because there is no way to enforce it. If the topic "horses" become popular people will just start tagging their spam pages with "horse" to try to get people to look at their pages. As an example go look at the tags on soundcloud. People tag their songs with whatever they think will get people to take a listen.

Dishonesty is a problem the web always faces, whether it's lying to a person or to a search-engine.

It's not as if the semweb people weren't aware of the problem, and it's not self-evidently a fatal blow to the idea.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#270

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…

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