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The Return of the 90s Web

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Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#331

Post by dsparkman »

arcturus17 wrote: post #214
JohnBooty wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rea…

It is because we understood the full-stack.

There was not "frontend" and "backend" developers. There were designers and developers. Designers created designs. They were usually delivered as PDFs, because the bulk of them came from print design backgrounds.

Their designs were then implemented by developers. Senior level developers tended to more of the application level heavy lifting (server-side scripting & db), with junior level developers working on converting designs to html, then to templates. By the time a junior developer moved on to app code, they were well versed and had mastered HTML and all the weird edge cases. They knew HTML.

The first real wave of "frontend" and "backend" developers came on the scene when you had designers learn Flash. They started driving more complex applications and there was a more bifurcation.

Granted even in small teams of the era, you had developers prefer "front" or "back". We tended to value "A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one"

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#332

Post by bayonetz »

derefr wrote: post #291
slightwinder wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a good startingpoint, but also something SEO can very easy hack. Obfusicating the usual hints of a popular CMS is not hard. I wonder whether doing a parallel search on google and filter out by their top-results from your own results would be a feasiable solution? Add a filter on the top 500 websites, and whether known ad-sources are used and you might get slowly there. Maybe instead of a smart searchengine it…

How about TF(PageRank)/IDF(PageRank)? As in, start by ranking the individual result URLs with their PageRank for the given query ; but then normalize those rankings by the PageRank each TF(PageRank) result URL’s domain/origin has for all known queries (this is the IDF part.) Then, the more distinct queries a given website ranks for (i.e. the more SEO battles it wins/the more generally optimal it is at “playing the ga…

Hey, nice comment! Please do this please.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#333

Post by jasondclinton »

pinkfoot wrote: post #321
jasondclinton wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the joke is that unemployment benefits are the real Endowment for the Arts. One wonders if we would have a healthier society if those who are capable of creating great art could do so by being freed up from financial constraints.

We would also play better golf. Still keen to subsidise it?

The "Player of Games" by Ian M Banks takes place in a far-future society in which the abundance is so high that many people do pass the time playing games or whatever else enriches their lives. The question is: since we long since passed the point at which most people could work one day a week and maintain the level of abundance that existed in the 1960s, is that the society that we want to live in?

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#334

Post by dumb1224 »

dsparkman wrote: post #331
arcturus17 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rea…

It is because we understood the full-stack. There was not "frontend" and "backend" developers. There were designers and developers. Designers created designs. They were usually delivered as PDFs, because the bulk of them came from print design backgrounds. Their designs were then implemented by developers. Senior level developers tended to more of the application level heavy lifting (server-side scripting & db), with…

I missed the era with flash though. I remember the original Gorillaz website which was a full flash-based game / exploration / gallery type of thing. It was so cool and I've not seen anything like that I ended up spending hours and hours on that site...extremely patiently because of the slow internet speed at that time in my college dorm in China (2002-ish I think?). The quality was astonishingly good.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#335

Post by WalterBright »

clarry wrote: post #240
ricardo81 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#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 potential…

On the other hand, most of that is stuff that human curation can rightfully reject as not worth linking and indexing. We don't need to index the entire web, we need to index the good stuff (that is likely to stay there anyway and be worth archiving).

How does one know what the good stuff is without looking at it?

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#336

Post by WalterBright »

throwingtheaway wrote: post #260
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.

That any algorithm can be gamed does not imply that the least manipulable algorithm can be made arbitrarily bad. You only need to choose an algorithm so that the amount of trash is less than you can handle.

If it's so simple, why hasn't anyone managed to do it?

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#337

Post by ZeikJT »

TuringTest wrote: post #301
koreth1 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but 1 click and 0 scrolling would be better!

Try the button I'm feeling lucky!

Before the omnibar became popular I used to use google as my homepage and I'd type website keywords then "I'm feeling lucky" to get to my frequent websites. I think bookmarks took up too much space vertically so this was my solution /shrug

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#338

Post by Aeolun »

ajmurmann wrote: post #288
slightwinder wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a good startingpoint, but also something SEO can very easy hack. Obfusicating the usual hints of a popular CMS is not hard. I wonder whether doing a parallel search on google and filter out by their top-results from your own results would be a feasiable solution? Add a filter on the top 500 websites, and whether known ad-sources are used and you might get slowly there. Maybe instead of a smart searchengine it…

I LOVE the idea of a search engine that lowers the rank of results with ads. This might be the key to success in finding projects of love rather than commercial click holes.

Oh. That’s also an idea, but maybe we’d still get tons of ad-less blogs that are just link farms to other sites.

Still, I guess that’s only viable because Google rewards lots of links. If you just disable link relevance that part of gaming the system will be gone too.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#339

Post by encom »

sidpatil wrote: post #34
binarytox1n wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how I learned web development. Don't forget photoshopping the glossiest buttons possible. Not sure if that fad was before or after the grunge.

Gloss was a trend in the mid 2000s, if I remember correctly—around the same time that AJAX started becoming really popular

It spilled over into the real world as well. I remember every electronic device being glossy black.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#340

Post by lsh »

codetrotter wrote: post #247
japanuspus wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is alive and doing well: https://wiby.me/

I tried to search for irish setter but none of the first results were related to irish setter dogs.

On the third page of search results for 'irish setter' I found this: http://blackpeopleloveus.com/

That search engine is like a gold mine! I searched for "black people love us" in DDG and it was the first result, followed by an article written this year explaining how it came about and .. the web felt like such a smaller place back in 2002 and I just don't remember this at all.

Which makes me wonder about how newspapers and free to air tv kept the culture pretty shallow before exploding with the internet and now, possibly contracting again as our filter bubbles shrink? Just an errant though.

But so much novelty and interesting stuff at wiby.me - search for 'trump' and the first result is just surreal.

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