221–230 of 487 posts
Nothing wrong with readable content, regardless of the generator. In fact, I like reading his site precisely because it is speedy to load and render, and because it has content (unlike, for example, Apple's developer documentation).
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What do you mean? The text isn't much smaller than on HN on my 5.5" phone. It's entirely readable.
HN is hardly a good example. It's terrible on mobile.
These 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…
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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.
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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 has ... proved less robustly stable over the 25+ years I've worked with it
The first website I made in 2002 still views fine in a modern browser. I didn't do anything fancy, though. I would be interested in what has been unstable as it might give me ideas on what to avoid in HTML.
I don't find HTML to be that much harder than plain text or Markdown so I think I'll keep using it for smaller projects. LaTeX is worth considering as well, particularly given that I will have math on some of my webpages. One issue is that the stability of LaTeX depends strongly on which packages you use. I need to take a closer look at the health of every package I use. I think avoiding external dependencies is easier with HTML.
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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…
Microsoft has been fairly good at allowing older binaries to run on newer systems. Apple is pretty annoying in this regard. There’s a lot of software that doesn’t work on versions maybe only 5 years old. A lot of software doesn’t need to change to be honest. Microsoft word for example. Word processing: you sit down and type stuff, maybe change the font once or twice. I guess the collaborative features are nice being…
These 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…
Sounds similar to the Lindy Effect.[0]
These 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…
There is an obscure search engine called wiby.me that only indexes pages like what is posted here. I used to design websites in the late 90's, and very much miss the simple HTML pages of yore.
These 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…
$ nc www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk 80
HEAD /staff/m.handley/ HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.0 200 Document follows
MIME-Version: 1.0
Server: CERN/3.0
Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2020 17:02:59 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 9185
Last-Modified: Sun, 16 Jun 2019 15:27:37 GMT