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Does anyone remember websites?

tttthis.com

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Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#51

Post by bee_rider »

mojuba wrote: post #29
bee_rider wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should we go back to the shack era? Of course not. This isn’t obvious, at least, we can’t write the idea off with an “of course not.”

Keep in mind the early websites were mostly built by an enthusiast minority, technical or not but willing to learn HTML and Netscape Composer. You can't expect the whole humanity to be as enthusiastic. The skyscraper era, no matter how much we all hate it, makes the web more democratic: it gives everyone some standardized space (Facebook, Youtube, etc) with algorithmized discovery which is parking and elevators if yo…

Facebook and YouTube are top-down managed systems, and I think it is a real disservice to the idea of democracy to call this sort of thing “more democratic.” They are democratic like a mall is, which is to say, not.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#52

Post by devin »

zahlman wrote: post #25
devin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is true to the original, I am surprised to see this was table-oriented layout and not a bitmap image with clickable x,y coordinates.

It was common to make tables and use them to assemble a bitmap , where each cell had zero border/margin/padding and an exact size, and contained a "slice" of the image. Web authoring tools (and Photoshop) even had explicit support for generating this sort of thing, as I recall. This was I guess simpler to automate than defining clickable regions of a single image, and it allowed for the individual pieces of the image…

Yeah, I remember this. Macromedia Fireworks had a slice tool that I used quite a bit. You'd basically make an image which was your website, and then do all the layout with zero border tables. But for me, this was what I was doing circa 2004 before CSS was dominant. Earlier software from the '96 era like Frontpage I think would use bitmaps whole cloth, but maybe I'm misremembering.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#53

Post by techjamie »

jmclnx wrote: post #50

This comes up every so often, and I always post something like this :) It still exists with Gemini protocol and gopher: https://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2021/245/The-Rise-of-t... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://geminiprotocol.net/ https://wiki.sdf.org/doku.php?id=gemini_site_setup_and_hosti... https://sdf.org/?tutorials/gopher I have moved m…

I can't speak for Gemini, but when I found out about Gopher I read the specification and made a very simple server implementation for myself. If you're looking for a quick project to play with, it's not a bad one to try.

It didn't support everything, mostly just basic browsing and linking. But it was cool to build something mostly compliant to a spec that quickly.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#54

Post by techjamie »

pessimizer wrote: post #40
krapp wrote: post #24

Websites do still exist. People do know what they are. There are more of them on the web than there ever have been. Nothing is stopping anyone from creating a website if they want. Nothing is stopping you.

They will not be indexed by search engines, though, so you had better email all your friends so you'll have a few visitors.

I've created a few sites and never explicitly told search engines about them, and they got picked up just fine surprisingly quickly.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#55

Post by _DeadFred_ »

mojuba wrote: post #34
gdubs wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to live through what social media has done to society over the past decade without at least entertaining the idea that the higher barrier to entry of being online was maybe not a bad thing.

I don't disagree but notice how it's about the second decade of Web 2.0, not the first one. Profit-driven algorithms is a separate era in its own right. I.e. you can't blame the skyscrapers themselves for your shitty life, you just need to demand more regulation.

If the skyscraper is designed with elevators that try to keep me in and away from the first floor so I don't leave I can definitely complain.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#57

Post by bigjobby »

I mean. There was a lot of absolute toss also?

I like the current state of webpages. I'm confident they will load quickly and render properly. I'm happy to read streamlined posts and find the bigger sites will organised and much easier to navigate than sites of old

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#58

Post by mapontosevenths »

bee_rider wrote: post #13
mapontosevenths wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's silly to try and encrypt everything, and arguably it can be worse for the authors privacy. Sometimes a blog post on a plain http web site doesnt need to be encrypted.

What’s the argument that it can be worse for the author’s privacy? In general, I think we should encrypt everything. The more encrypted stuff floating around, the less it stands out, and the better for everybody’s privacy. Of course, nowadays encrypted content is quite common. But it didn’t become that way without effort!

Thanks to let's encrypt it's now at least possible to get a valid certificate anonymously, but it's a pain that requires renewal every 60 to 90 days and puts you at their mercy.

If they decide they don't like your brand of free speech it's lights out and they are the only game in town.

Yes, I know you can automate renewal if you have shell access, but you'll probably have to remember to do it manually if you use shared hosting that doesn't provide a cert for you.

That's a lot of work, and a lot of risk, to secure a message that's meant to be publicly broadcast in the first place.

I imagine it to be a bit like encrypting OTA television. Sure, you could stop a pirate broadcast from inpersonating your station by encrypting it, but that's not actually a threat model that applies to normal people most of the time and it makes everything far more complex.

Can your ISP MITM you? Yep, and if they do you should cancel your service then sue them into the ground.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#59

Post by mapontosevenths »

username223 wrote: post #22
zahlman wrote: post #3

> You’ve enabled HTTPS-Only Mode for enhanced security, and a HTTPS version of tttthis.com is not available. This, too, is nostalgic, in a way.

It was kind of awesome that you could telnet to port 80, type "GET / HTTP/1.0", press return a couple of times, and receive a web page. Then shitty hotel wifi that injected ads happened, so we had to encrypt traffic that had absolutely no sensitive information.

Our solution was technical, the problem was political. It should have been solved using criminal penalties for the criminals who did this.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#60

Post by ranger_danger »

devin wrote: post #7
snitzr wrote: post #2

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

If this is true to the original, I am surprised to see this was table-oriented layout and not a bitmap image with clickable x,y coordinates.

Looking at the code, it has definitely been modified from the original... there is now CSS as well as a google ad tracker... but visually it's probably almost exactly the same.
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