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This is a web page

justinjackson.ca

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Re: This is a web page

#271

Post by teh_klev »

simpleglider wrote: post #156
ChuckMcM wrote: post #34

First time [1] my in-laws saw "the web" they were trying to find information about vacation spots in Brazil but their travel guide was obsolete, I found a web page a student had written up about where the best places to stay and see were in Brazil. I could almost see the dots connect when they realized that someone they didn't know, in Brazil , had written up a piece of information at some point that they were now se…

That's a great anecdote. Out of curiosity, how did you find the site? I had just turned four at the time, so I don't quite remember what browsing the Internet was like then.

Back in the day you bought magazines like ".NET" (a UK publication) that told you where the hotspots were on the web.

There were other physical publications like the "Internet White Pages" or some such thing (no seriously) which I remember seeing in UK bookshops and thinking "that's gonna be outa date in a week or two".

Back then you felt you could contain all of the websites (or pointer sites) in your head. It was truly an exciting and exploratory time.

Oh and I forgot, using KA9Q [1] for your TCP/IP stack on Windows 3.1, because Microsoft had't quite caught up at that point. And hacking the UK's PSS network to find your way into a university that was connected so you could access usenet. And the early days of Demon Internet in the UK....oh the nostalgia of it all :)

[1]: http://www.ka9q.net/code/ka9qnos/

Re: This is a web page

#273

Post by makeset »

teh_klev wrote: post #261
kmfrk wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like such a hipster for having used AltaVista and Dogpile as search engines.

What is hipster about that? Your statement makes no sense. I'm 46 and started using the "internet" in 1992 - usenet, gopher, FTP et al. Then came the World Wide Web". Altavista was really all there was before google, why is that "hipster"? That's like saying you were a hipster for using horse and carriage before Henry Ford started mass producing cars. If anything being an early adopter of Google seems more "hipster"…

Between Altavista and Google, alltheweb.com (FAST Search) also had their day. I was in charge of a major web portal around 2001, and we were contracting out site search queries to FAST. One day I got a call from a new company named Google. The guy said he could give me a better price than FAST. I asked what price. He said, "Any price."

Re: This is a web page

#275

Post by 1123581321 »

vorporeal wrote: post #182
bitwize wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web is not just a place for text / words, that is not its heart and soul, and therefore neither is that the case for web design. I'd say that text is not only the heart and soul of the web, but also of motherfucking civilization . Animation and video are nice, and great adjuncts to text. But language is still the most common and easy way to store and share information intended to be consumed by humans, and since…

Drawings are the heart and soul of civilization. For one, they originated ~37 thousand years before the first written language. Second, understanding text requires knowing how the information it contains is encoded (what language it is written in). Drawings are far more universal.

It is speech that is most universal -- words. Drawing came after, and relegated to being foci of rituals and stories that were spoken and symbolic of spoken agreements.

Re: This is a web page

#276

Post by chebucto »

bcRIPster wrote: post #234
simpleglider wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great anecdote. Out of curiosity, how did you find the site? I had just turned four at the time, so I don't quite remember what browsing the Internet was like then.

In 1994, the main way you found websites was mostly from hub sites that maintained large libraries of links to other sites (like a directory), newsgroups (UUCP/Usenet), friends in IRC trading links, AOL, Delphi and Compuserve forums and print magazines. Webcrawler was revolutionary when it came on-line in 1994, but there were no comprehensive search engines that had a high index count until probably 1996. The mother…

Many sites, including most home pages (remember those?) had a page of links, a small curated set of links[1]. Ooh, and guestbooks! Thousands and thousands of guestbooks!

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/19991022011955/http://www.geociti...

Re: This is a web page

#277

Post by melvinram »

makeset wrote: post #273
teh_klev wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is hipster about that? Your statement makes no sense. I'm 46 and started using the "internet" in 1992 - usenet, gopher, FTP et al. Then came the World Wide Web". Altavista was really all there was before google, why is that "hipster"? That's like saying you were a hipster for using horse and carriage before Henry Ford started mass producing cars. If anything being an early adopter of Google seems more "hipster"…

Between Altavista and Google, alltheweb.com (FAST Search) also had their day. I was in charge of a major web portal around 2001, and we were contracting out site search queries to FAST. One day I got a call from a new company named Google. The guy said he could give me a better price than FAST. I asked what price. He said, "Any price."

lol that's great. Wonderful to think that even Larry and Sergey had to hustle. Everyone has to put in their time.

Re: This is a web page

#278

Post by undo »

I think this is a great reminder to make our words on the web more meaningful. If you create something, make sure that the words make sense and are well supported by design, not the other way around.

Re: This is a web page

#279

Post by at-fates-hands »

petercooper wrote: post #239
simpleglider wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great anecdote. Out of curiosity, how did you find the site? I had just turned four at the time, so I don't quite remember what browsing the Internet was like then.

Because other people have given good answers, I just wanted to add.. the Web was so much better linked together back then. Prior to Altavista made searching useful most of the time, it was common to rely on jumping from one site to another through plentiful link pages, web rings, and lists of resources that people had put together. There was also Usenet which people often posted links on and which was sorted by topic…

>There was also Usenet which people often posted links on and which was sorted by topic and a handy way to find stuff.

When my college roommate showed me how to download a graduate student's thesis from Usenet, I thought my head was going to explode I thought it was so cool. Here I am, halfway across the country, and I can download, read and cite some grad student's paper from the University of California Berkeley.

I now feel like a guy who grew up during the 1950's when you tell kids, "Yeah, the internet wasn't always about Reddit and Porn kiddies."

Re: This is a web page

#280

Post by dthunt »

e3pi wrote: post #236
adventured wrote: post #69

"At it's heart, web design should be about words." No. The web is not just a place for text / words, that is not its heart and soul, and therefore neither is that the case for web design. It really never has been. I see no great argument in favor of words being the core over any other form of expression. Today's bandwidth more than allows for beautiful video, animation, high quality graphics and photos, etc. Or low k…

"At it's heart, web design should be about words." Yes. I corrupt too many hours concerned with flash, and dressing words in garish nonsense. Minimalist HN is an excellent model to excise and distain word flash dreck, and images or whatever kind of vid snippet. Look at HN's traffic, others agree. With the myriad digressions of image, js, and html5 magic, it's difficult for me not to be seduced by other's new eye cand…

I honestly believe that we could fix HTML by stripping javascript out, or narrowing its scope such that it was incapable of asking anything about the presentation of content and interface devices.

Why should anyone care whether a web-page is being read by a human using a cell-phone, from a terminal, by a blind person with a braile reader, an elderly man with essential tremor (hint: fiddly pop-up-and-disappear menus are really hard for some people), someone using JAWS or other screen reading technology, whether someone is actually not a someone at all, but a rather a computer program Jim wrote to alert him of news stories he might want to read. Why should we care if someone uses a mouse with or without a scroll-wheel, or if he has an 24-bit display?

It's frightening to think that the peak of web-accessibility may have been in the past, and that the web is getting harder, rather than easy to 'design for', as people slowly but surely continue to try and gobble up the browser's job of presenting content, so that they can get it to do display according to their own arbitrary sensibilities instead of expressing basic intent.

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