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30 years of tags

artmann.co

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Re: 30 years of <br> tags

#11

Post by ripe »

What a comprehensive, well-written article. Well done!

The author traces the evolution of web technology from Notepad-edited HTML to today.

My biggest difference with the author is that he is optimistic about web development, while all I see is shaky tower of workarounds upon workarounds.

My take is that the web technology tower is built on the quicksand of an out-of-control web standardization process that has been captured by a small cabal of browser vendors. Every single step of history that this article mentions is built to paper over some serious problems instead of solving them, creating an even bigger ball of wax. The latest step is generative AI tools that work around the crap by automatically generating code.

This tower is the very opposite of simple and it's bound to collapse. I cannot predict when or how.

Re: 30 years of <br> tags

#12

Post by samgranieri »

Wow. This is an incredible article that tracks just about everything I’ve done with the web over the past 30 years. I started with BbEdit and Adobe PageMill, then went to dreamweaver for Lamp.

Re: 30 years of <br> tags

#13

Post by Gualdrapo »

1718627440 wrote: post #8

> Every page on your site needed the same header, the same navigation, the same footer. But there was no way to share these elements. No includes, no components. That's not completely true. Webservers have Server Side Includes (SSI) [0]. Also if you don't want to rely on that, 'cat header body > file' isn't really that hard. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/19970303194503/http://hoohoo.ncs...

I think they meant that from a vanilla HTML standpoint

Re: 30 years of <br> tags

#15

Post by bryanlarsen »

1718627440 wrote: post #7

> For that, you needed CGI scripts, which meant learning Perl or C. I tried learning C to write CGI scripts. It was too hard. Hundreds of lines just to grab a query parameter from a URL. The barrier to dynamic content was brutal. That's folk wisdom, but is it actually true? "Hundreds of lines just to grab a query parameter from a URL." /*@null@*/ /*@only@*/ char * get_param (const char * param) { const char * query =…

> HTML represents a tree and string interpolation is the wrong tool to generate a tree description.

Yet 30 years later it feels like string interpolation is the most common tool. It probably isn't, but still surprisingly common.

Re: 30 years of <br> tags

#17

Post by stouset »

flanfly wrote: post #9
1718627440 wrote: post #7

> For that, you needed CGI scripts, which meant learning Perl or C. I tried learning C to write CGI scripts. It was too hard. Hundreds of lines just to grab a query parameter from a URL. The barrier to dynamic content was brutal. That's folk wisdom, but is it actually true? "Hundreds of lines just to grab a query parameter from a URL." /*@null@*/ /*@only@*/ char * get_param (const char * param) { const char * query =…

Good showcase. Your code will match the first parameter that has as a suffix, no necessarily exactly (username=blag&name=blub will return blag). It also doesn't handle any percent encoding.

Further, when retrieving multiple parameters, you have a Shlemiel-the-painter algorithm.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to-basics/

Re: 30 years of <br> tags

#18

Post by notatallshaw »

> At one company I worked at, we had a system where each deploy got its own folder, and we'd update a symlink to point to the active one. It worked, but it was all manual, all custom, and all fragile.

The first time I saw this I thought it was one of the most elegant solutions I'd ever seen working in technology. Safe to deploy the files, atomic switch over per machine, and trivial to rollback.

It may have been manual, but I'd worked with a deployment processes that involved manually copying files to dozens of boxes and following 10 to 20 step process of manual commands on each box. Even when I first got to use automated deployment tooling in the company I worked at it was fragile, opaque and a configuration nightmare, built primarily for OS installation of new servers and being forced to work with applications.

Re: 30 years of <br> tags

#19

Post by stouset »

1718627440 wrote: post #10
flanfly wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good showcase. Your code will match the first parameter that has as a suffix, no necessarily exactly (username=blag&name=blub will return blag). It also doesn't handle any percent encoding.

> Your code will match the first parameter that has as a suffix, no necessarily exactly Depending on your requirements, that might be a feature. > It also doesn't handle any percent encoding. This does literal matches, so yes you would need to pass the param already percent encoded. This is a trade off I did, not for that case, but for similar issues. I don't like non-ASCII in my source code, so I would want to encod…

This exact mindset is why so much software is irreparably broken and riddled with CVEs.

Written standard be damned; I’ll just bang out something that vaguely looks like it handles the main cases I can remember off the top of my head. What could go wrong?

Re: 30 years of <br> tags

#20

Post by outofmyshed »

This is a great overview of web tech as I more or less recall it. Although pre-PHP CGI wasn’t a big deal, but it was more fiddly and you had to know and understand Apache, broadly. mod_perl & FastCGI made it okay. Only masochists wrote CGI apps in compiled languages. PHP made making screwy web apps low-effort and fun.

I bugged out of front-end dev just before jquery took off.

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