Anything not text based is problematic. But beyond that it is hard.
18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
241–250 of 487 posts
Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 (…
I appreciate your reply. Seems Markdown is more complex than I recognized and this just makes me want to avoid it more. If you do find the rant you mentioned, let me know. > 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…
My sense is that Markdown is probably pretty safe for most uses, particularly if you control the processing. If not, then yes, it can bite. For me that means pandoc to generate endpoints such as HTML, PDF, etc. I'm fairly confident that most of that toolchain should continue to work (provided computers and electricity exist) for another 2-4 decades.
For certain more complex formatting, Markdown has limitations and features are more likely to change. But I've used Markdown to format novel-length works (from ASCII sources, for my own use) with very modest formatting needs (chapters, some italic or bold text, possibly blockquotes or lists), and it excels at that.
For HTML, it's a combination of factors:
- Previous features which have been dropped, most to thunderous applause. (, , etc.)
- Previous conventions which have largely been supersceded: table layouts most especially. CSS really has been ... in some respects ... a blessing.
- Nagging omissions. The fact that there's no HTML-native footnoting / endnoting convention ... bothers me. You can tool that into a page. But you can't simply do something like:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
Consectetur adipiscing elit
Nulla malesuada, mauris ac tincidunt faucibus
In Markdown you accomplish this by:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.[^consectetur] Nulla malesuada, mauris ac tincidunt faucibus
[^consectetur]: Consectetur adipiscing elit.
- Similarly, no native equation support.
Maybe I'm just overly fond of footnotes and equations....
But HTML and WWW originated, literally, from the world's leading particle physics laboratory. You'd think it might include such capabilities.
- Scripting and preprocessors. I remember server-side includes, there's PHP, and JS. Some browsers supported other languages -- I believe Tcl and Lua are among those that have been used. Interactivity and dependency on other moving parts reduces reliability.
The expression "complexity is the enemy of reliabilty" dates to an Economist article in 1958. It remains very, very true.
HTML is for me more fiddly than Markdown (though I've coded massive amounts of both by hand), so on balance, I prefer writing Markdown (it's become very nearly completely natural to me). OTOH, LaTeX isn't much more complex than HTML, and in many cases (simple paragraphs) far simpler, so if I had to make a switch, that's the direction I'd more likely go.
Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
#243I had this perception that those spinning gifs and moving text made pages crazy hard to parse but I was pleasantly surprised that this site seemed simpler and easier to parse than half the sites today with pop ups, notifications, and blocking modals. Is it just me, or are these notifications and modals that are getting so prevalent really degrading a lot of the web browsing experience today.
Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
#244These 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…
VMs solve this problem.
Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
You say that as if it’s weird to call an iPad a mobile device. Would you say that a tablet is not a mobile device? What do you define as mobile device, and what devices would you use to determine if a web site is “mobile friendly”? The common definition of mobile device is phone or tablet. The common definition of laptop is computer. These despite the fact that phones and tablets are computers and despite the fact th…
Does that definition matter if tablets are probably less than 1% of all mobile devices?
Depends on your audience. One of my healthcare web sites is almost 60% iPad, because doctors love them.
Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
#246My personal site was posted on September 12, 1999, is still updated, and has no problems. It;s a static site that mostly uses straight HTML/CSS. There are a few scripts that generate pages, but generating HTML/CSS pretty easy. https://dwheeler.com . Geocrasher said: > 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. Yes. I don't get pai…
Pbatengf, lbh'ir qrpbqrq zl frperg zrffntr. Fbeel, ab cevmrf. ?
Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
#247Earlier 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.
I mean .. it's just a static HTML editor at that point (maybe it does some includes/builds to simplify things). If you're just pushing out static content, you don't have to worry too much about outdated libraries and security issues, so long as the web server it's being served from is maintained and up to date.
Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
You haven’t tried to run 16 bit software on 64 bit Windows have you?
Not to be snarky, but if there is a need to do this, it's pretty easy. If there is a real need, it is pretty trivial to do with VirtualBox or DosBox. Those applications from 20 years ago running in emulators will work far better in 20 more years than Apps from today that stop working due to remote service dependencies to force vendor lock-in. It is endlessly amusing to me that the more tightly integrated the cloud se…
So if emulation or a VM is your go to. How is that any different than what yuh can do with older versions of MacOS?
Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
You haven’t tried to run 16 bit software on 64 bit Windows have you?
True enough. Though to be fair the last new version of a Win16 OS shipped 26 years ago, and Win32 became the standard API in consumer products 24 years ago. There are degrees of worry here. Software of the vintage you're talking about was contemporary with System 7, and the closest ancestor to current OS X was called "NextStep 3.3". The point upthread was that genuinely useful stuff gets retired just a few years afte…
Apple shipped the last 32 bit Mac in 2006 over 10 years before 32 bit software wasn’t supported. There were plenty of FireWire to Thunderbolt adapters.
No the closest ancestor to MacOS X is System 7. There were Carbon APIs until last year. A poster up thread said they could use an emulator. There are 68K Mac emulators available too.
AppleScript for instance is a System 7 technology - not a NextStep technology.
Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
#250I visited this on mobile expecting it to be a laugh, but was surprised to find that it's actually amazing!
You can see the whole page in a single column, and just pinch zoom to the bit you're interested in to read/interact. Scrolling downwards and sideways to pan around works fine, super intuitive. The UX of this is so great, feels just like that original iPhone demo [1].
...why don't we do this again?