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The Return of the 90s Web

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Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#271

Post by coder543 »

giantrobot wrote: post #234
miffy900 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

The issue is that when the GP's iPad was new, it didn't have many problems browsing the web. I know mine did not. Outside of Flash-using sites or extreme JavaScript beasts the original iPad was a pretty capable web browsing machine. The web has regressed when an old iPad (or PC) can no longer reliably view it. It's not like words got harder to display in the intervening decade. A blog post, news article, or a tweet s…

> The issue is that when the GP's iPad was new, it didn't have many problems browsing the web. I know mine did not.

Those are some rose colored glasses. The first page (technobuffalo) loaded in this video takes 10 to 15 seconds:

https://youtu.be/caTUPKJ5Zfo

Based on what was said, that page had already been loaded once, and it still took that long.

Loading a Google Search took only about two seconds, because of how extremely minimal and optimized the search page was back then.

Loading The NY Times took about 8 to 12 seconds, depending on where you draw the line.

So, at the time, maybe we were used to webpages taking a while to load on mobile devices, and it seemed very reasonable. I’m sure there were some extremely simple websites that loaded quickly, but The NY Times was one that Apple promoted heavily at the time (apparently) as demonstrating what a good experience the iPad browser was.

Nowadays, we hold the web and our devices to much higher performance standards.

It’s not an apples to apples comparison because the content is entirely different, but the context of this thread is that modern websites are significantly harder to load and render.

Even though content is supposedly much more resource intensive today, my 2018 iPad Pro loaded the technobuffalo home page initially in less than 3 seconds, and subsequent page clicks are even faster.

This iPad loads google search results even faster than the original iPad.

This iPad loads the New York Times in under 3 seconds, with subsequent page clicks taking the same or less time.

Based on the numbers, a contemporaneous 2010 iPad was 3x to 5x slower at browsing the 2010 web than my 2018 iPad is when it comes to browsing the 2020 web, and that’s a roughly two year old iPad design, so it should be even more at a disadvantage. My iPad is also rendering more than 5x as many pixels while doing that.

In conclusion, the original iPad was severely underpowered.

> A blog post, news article, or a tweet shouldn't require a quad core CPU and gigabytes of RAM to be readable.

Conceptually, I agree, but every image and video we use for content in websites now is significantly higher resolution and quality than they were back then. If you just want to read text, then you’re correct.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#272

Post by zozbot234 »

greggman3 wrote: post #257
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #229

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.

> 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.

There are plenty of trusted sources that would not spam their pages in this way. And if you spam too much, you risk getting dropped from search indexes, directories, links etc. because your source is just not useful.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#273

Post by Aeolun »

slightwinder wrote: post #256
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.

> What we really need is a new Google, built on open principles (decentralized / peer to peer, fully free software, backed by a nonprofit), We have them, they suck. > and focused on indexing the long tail of insightful content that is neglected by Google because it lacks SEO How would you even define that? SEO is changing all the time. And google is fighting it all the time. And how would you prevent SEO focusing on…

I think the goal is to exclude anything that was created with a popular CMS (to exclude some content marketing), or in the top 100k websites.

Then we might go back to something sort of interesting.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#274

Post by [deleted] »

majormajor wrote: post #93
asdff wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Results could be better filtered. SEO spam isn't very nuanced, it all reads the same and frequently plagiarized. I wonder if you can crudely use something like turnitin to filter for original content. Maybe you could try and make a model SEO article for your own search engine, just taking your existing SEO results and figuring out which parameters are contributing the most to their ranking, then filtering out results…

If it was that easy, someone would be able to do it. Instead every algorithmic content delivery platform, from Google to Twitter to Youtube to Facebook, is constantly chasing just to keep from being underwater against the spammers.

[deleted]

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#275

Post by yosser »

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: *…

It's still all indexed by google. For example; all you need to do is search for a unique seeming piece of text from your dreamwiki gem, and the site will appear on the first page of googles' results:

https://www.google.com/search?q=WHO+ROAMS+THE+KIRUGU+NIGHT&o...

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#276

Post by tikiman163 »

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 have good points, but I would also add to it that the high barrier to entry also prevented people from being copy cats. A simple messenger was a major accomplishment, so when something worked there weren't 10,000 copies of it by the end of the week, so nearly all content you found was actually the original and not just some repost or copy paste job.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#277

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#278

Post by aarong11 »

rpdillon wrote: post #128
pphysch wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitpick, that's kind of a non example because the official Postgres docs let you swap versions more or less seamlessly. IME I will click the top result then click the correct version for my Postgres SE queries. 2 clicks, 0 scrolling.

You're right. I tend to click back, then revise my search to include the version, and then click the result, so Google gets the message that when I search for Postgres docs, I want the most recent version. I have no idea if this actually works, but I heard Google uses bounces to determine relevancy, so I thought it was worth a shot.

Might as well piss in the wind. The number of back-links from different sources probably has a much larger effect.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#280

Post by wlll »

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…

A company I contract to for backend and server stuff made the jump from static HTML to client side rendering with react. They did it because the consulting company they went to receommended it "because it was the future", and I am sure in no small part because that was what the consulting company specialised in.

It was the worst decision they have ever made. The site they ended up with was incredibly slow, and given the relatively few pages on the site you never really make for that initial load in time saved later.

It's also incredibly hard to write well, requires a special third party service to show anything in Google and is incredibly hard to manage.

They don't realise this of course, and are now attempting to solve the management and initial load issues by splitting the app up into three distinct apps. It won't help.

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