My 23 year old web site: https://jgc.org/ It's still updated from a Perl script that generates static HTML.
I'm going to SSG after playing enough with WordPress and other CMSes...
18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
201–210 of 487 posts
Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
#202These simple sites show us something profound: If you want something to last, don't base it on something that won't last. There are a some technologies that will never allow somebody to build a site and leave it unchanged for 20 or 25 years. Cold Fusion comes to mind. Almost nobody hosts it anymore for one. Can you imagine running the same WordPress version for 25 years? The version of PHP it runs on will be EOL long…
While this website still works fine, the actual HTML that Frontpage generated isn't exactly easy to maintain if Frontpage stops working for whatever reason. The author of this website is basically stuck using whatever version of Frontpage supports the markup of his website. And I bet there have been plenty of people who used who are no longer able to maintain their website because their editor no longer runs on their…
Also note that a Java Applet is included in there, which has likely not worked since 2015.
Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
#203These simple sites show us something profound: If you want something to last, don't base it on something that won't last. There are a some technologies that will never allow somebody to build a site and leave it unchanged for 20 or 25 years. Cold Fusion comes to mind. Almost nobody hosts it anymore for one. Can you imagine running the same WordPress version for 25 years? The version of PHP it runs on will be EOL long…
> If you want something to last, don't base it on something that won't last. and > I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to build a site to last 25 years without numerous redesigns, build a static HTML page. While simplicity is a great way to future proof things, I'm not convinced that this argument in general would work nearly as well without the benefit of hindsight. One could be forgiven for confusing it wit…
It is exactly the "guess the future" problem that static sites avoid.
The vast bulk of software goes unsupported in less than 25 years. If you want to depend on something that long, you can guess which package will survive that long, or you can store your data in formats that the widest array of tooling supports.
If you drop into a coma after uploading your static HTML and wake up in 25 years, you might have to use whatever fills the text-manipulation-scripting niche then to beat it into the right shape to import into whatever kids these days are using.
If you used Wordpress, well, maybe it takes over the world, maybe it ends up a Wikipedia entry. (Putting aside, of course, that your site began hosting cryptominers a week after you slipped into that coma because you missed an update.)
Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
While this website still works fine, the actual HTML that Frontpage generated isn't exactly easy to maintain if Frontpage stops working for whatever reason. The author of this website is basically stuck using whatever version of Frontpage supports the markup of his website. And I bet there have been plenty of people who used who are no longer able to maintain their website because their editor no longer runs on their…
I know a person who is maintaining a few sites she built in like 2005 with a version of Dreamweaver a little older than that, so never dares to upgrade the Dreamweaver version. The whole thing is terrifying and horrific to me, but they keep paying her to do the work so she's fine with it.
Dreamweaver 2003?
I know a website that is still maintained regulary and built with dreamweaver 2003
Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
#205Only 520 lines of HTML. And readable!
view-source:http://www.fmboschetto.it/
Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you can generalise the advice: remove as many processing steps as you can. It's not so much that you needed to guess that HTML was going to be as long-lived as it is, it's that HTML is the final product that actually loads on the users computer, and those tend to stick around for a long time (or at least be emulated). The code that lives on a backend server somewhere, not so much. For what it's worth, I don't…
This is one reason why the static site generator I use for my personal website uses HTML rather than something like Markdown. I don't think Markdown is going anyway, incidentally, or that it would be hard to process on my own if I needed to. But the HTML I use is simple enough and Markdown only decreases the probability the site will last a long time.
Markdown and/or markdown processors are known to change.
Since there's no single Markdown spec, determining just how a page will render, or what will break, is a bit of a crapshoot. And since Markdown treats nonparsable markup as ... plain text, you don't even get errors or other indicators of failure. You've got to view and validate the output manually or by some other means.
With formal tag-based markup languages (HTML, SGML, LaTeX, DocBook, etc.) you've at least got 1) an actual markup spec and 2) something that will or won't validate (though whether or not the processor actually gives a damn about that is another question, hello, HTML, I'm looking at your "The Web is an error condition": https://deirdre.net/programming-sucks-why-i-quit/)
I can't find the post at the moment, but someone recently wrote a cogent rant on the fact that a change in their hosting provider (GitHub via a static site generator IIRC) had swapped out markdown processors, with changed behaviours, rendering (literally) all their previously-authored content broken.
Which is indead a pain.
I personally like Markdown, and find it hugely convenient. For major projects though, I suspect what I'll end up doing is starting in Markdown, and eventually switching to a more stable markup format, which probably means LaTeX (HTML has ... proved less robustly stable over the 25+ years I've worked with it).
Though for simple-to-modestly-complex documents, Markdown is generally satisfactory, stable, and close enough to unadorned ASCII that fixing what breaks is not a horribly complicated task.
Up to modest levels of scale, at least.
Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you want something to last, don't base it on something that won't last. and > I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to build a site to last 25 years without numerous redesigns, build a static HTML page. While simplicity is a great way to future proof things, I'm not convinced that this argument in general would work nearly as well without the benefit of hindsight. One could be forgiven for confusing it wit…
> It's an interesting line of thinking though: exactly what properties of HTML make it so long lived? I've thought about this on and off for a few years. Here's what I've come up with: 1. Popularity. You can't really display anything in a web browser without it, blank pages with one AJAX script notwithstanding. 2. Ease of use. Open a text editor, type some markup, save the file with .html, and open in a browser. When…
I'd argue your #3 is wide of the mark.
It's not that there's a well-defined open standard.
It's that browsers will eat any old crap that's thrown at them and turn it into something plausible, if not precisely what the author intended or reader really wants.
Yes, there's a standard, and yes it's open. It's observed far more in the breach, as a few minutes with a validator on well-known sites will demonstrate.
Your comment alone (prior to my response to it) returns:
Tidy found 21 warnings and 0 errors!Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
#208These simple sites show us something profound: If you want something to last, don't base it on something that won't last. There are a some technologies that will never allow somebody to build a site and leave it unchanged for 20 or 25 years. Cold Fusion comes to mind. Almost nobody hosts it anymore for one. Can you imagine running the same WordPress version for 25 years? The version of PHP it runs on will be EOL long…
Or use free/open software, preferably popular free/open software that runs on a popular OS.
Even if the OS and software effectively die, you still would be able to run the latest version in a VM or in emulation.
Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
#209[deleted]
Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
While this website still works fine, the actual HTML that Frontpage generated isn't exactly easy to maintain if Frontpage stops working for whatever reason. The author of this website is basically stuck using whatever version of Frontpage supports the markup of his website. And I bet there have been plenty of people who used who are no longer able to maintain their website because their editor no longer runs on their…
Can't you just keep editing the html in a text editor? Frontpage's generated html isn't that unreadable.
Presumably the author used a WYSIWYG editor in the first place because he is not a technical person, so for him/her to now not only learn enough HTML/CSS/javascript to turn to hand editing but to also understand Frontpage's noisy output would probably take enough effort that they might rather decide to shut down the site if they're not able to continue using Frontpage. Hiring a dev to redo the site is another option but that presumes they have enough money to invest in a hobby site...