Surf the web like it's 1999

Startups were a little odd back then. Some would be in the process of changes but the employees wouldn't know until they pulled the trigger. I am just guessing but maybe you saw the exit stage of XDrive and I saw the entry of Myspace but there was some hush-hush secret overlap. It certainly wouldn't be the strangest thing I saw back then.

Nostalgia is the opiate of the elderly.

Taking small sips before you get truly wizened is sometimes harmless, which I think is the case here.

Too big a sip leads to yelling at clouds.

From the little experience in web design I have, my opinion is that what killed the joy of web design were smartphones. Before screen size fragmentation you could just have a sidebar because everyone had the screen width to see it. You could just put two drilling workmen gifs and a huge under construction gif in the middle and everyone would be able to see it the way you designed it. Now you can't count on that anymore, which would be a bit of a problem if we were talking about JUST having a desktop design and a mobile design, but that's not how it works these days.

Fluid, responsive design is sheer insanity to me. In principle, it makes perfect sense, but HTML is EXTREMELY inadequate at supporting this paradigm. You literally can not have a design that is minimal for mobile devices and then unfolds into glorious fixed width sidebars, because you MUST include the HTML for the sidebar in the mobile version and hide it with CSS black magic if you want it to unfold on wide screens, which means now the mobile version which should be as slim as possible is bloated with HTML it won't use, or you'll have to dynamically load the sidebar with javascript for desktop, which means the desktop version can't work without javascript enabled even though you're only using it make the sidebar it should have by default appear.

I feel like many problems could be solved if we just replaced HTML with something else.

Having read about the Internet in magazines since its launch in India (Aug 15, 1999), the first thing I did on the first day I landed in a city with the Internet was going to a cybercafé[1] to create my Yahoo! and Hotmail ID in 1999. I still own the Hotmail ID but lost the Yahoo! Re-taking back the Hotmail ID was also a nice story from the past. ;-)

My recollections of the actual events could be clearer, but here it goes. I started with Blogspot[2] before Google bought it. It had no commenting options. A Russian developer contacted me to try his commenting script, which works with Blogspot. I'm either the only person or part of a few people using it. He helped me set up, and we emailed regularly, and that's how comments started on my website. I let go of my comments recently (they are in the 5-figures after removing spam.) I searched my blog but I either deleted it or have forgotten the name of the program that powered it but it was a good thing. Thanks to another nice person on the Internet.

Then, Blogger to Movable Type to WordPress (before it even had options to create pages). Now, I'm in "plain-text".

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_café

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogger_(service)

Unfortunately it’s still Windows 95.

Not trying to be a hater, but I did recently install a Windows 95 VM on my Mac to relive that old experience… and then the very first error alert sound, that incredibly tinny really loud annoying sound that would always make me jump out of my chair with crappy PC speakers came blasting out of my much much better speakers backed by a subwoofer and I realized there is no nostalgia value to be had here.

I liked what I had at the time when it was all that I had but I would never want to completely relive that experience. If I got sent back in time to the day Windows 95 launched and had to live the rest of my life from that point on, I honestly don’t know if I would want to touch another computer until like early 1999, maybe late 1998 at the earliest, and only for work.