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Resurrect the Old Web

stevedylandev.bearblog.dev

251–260 of 263 posts

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#251
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It really is crazy how much was lost when Apple killed Flash. Steve Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash" [1] in 2010; Flash was discontinued by Adobe in 2017. If Apple supposedly "killed" Flash, they sure took their time doing so. The iPhone had about 14% marketshare at the time, so it's not like Apple was in a commanding position to dictate terms to the industry. But if you read his letter, what he said made total s…

Getting rid of Flash was never ever about using HTML5 for Apple. It was always to obviously to make battery life better and ofc adding more experiences to their walled garden store. Safari is lagging on HTML5 features for decade far behind Firefox. And any features useful for "PWA" is just sabotaged. E.g like Screen Wake Lock API finally implemented in iOS 16 but to this day broken on Home screen. And like not quite…

> And any features useful for "PWA" is just sabotaged.

From "Every site can be a web app on iOS and iPadOS" [1]

Now, we are revising the behavior on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26. By default, every website added to the Home Screen opens as a web app. If the user prefers to add a bookmark for their browser, they can disable “Open as Web App” when adding to Home Screen — even if the site is configured to be a web app. The UI is always consistent, no matter how the site’s code is configured. And the power to define the experience is in the hands of users.

This change, of course, is not removing any of WebKit’s current support for web app features. If you include a Web Application Manifest with your site, the benefits it provides will be part of the user’s experience. If you define your icons in the manifest, they’re used.

We value the principles of progressive enhancement and separation of concerns. All of the same web technology is available to you as a developer, to build the experience you would like to build. Giving users a web app experience simply no longer requires a manifest file. It’s similar to how Home Screen web apps on iOS and iPadOS never required Service Workers (as PWAs do on other platforms), yet including Service Workers in your code can greatly enhance the user experience.

Simply put, there are now zero requirements for “installability” in Safari. Users can add any site to their Home Screen and open it as a web app on iOS26 and iPadOS26.

[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/17333/webkit-features-in-safari-26-0...

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do not mock what you do not understand. This person (persons? collective consciousness?) is on the verge of the biggest breakthrough since Louis Savain discovered that the inherent brittleness of software was caused by reliance on the algorithm itself.

Developing a bypass to language is hardly a breakthrough. It's been underway 20K years. We just got sidetracked by symbols. You engineers are so reliant on math, you can't see a way around it. That was the only way, math was a trick to specificity. It can't work.

whats your solution to bypass language? I do see the point that its a lossy compression medium but I also dont see how we can directly hook up our latent spaces

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#254
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple was still selling the iPhone 3GS at the time, a device with 256Mb of RAM and a 600Mhz 32-bit processor. That's a ton of ram. I recall spending a lot of time on flash websites in the early 2000s in college on the school issued laptop with maybe 64 mb of ram (and I think maybe pentium iii 650mhz so more cpu oomph)

Remember that iOS, unlike desktop operating systems, didn't have virtual memory and could only run one app at a time.

One app at a time means even less memory pressure. Plenty for flash!

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developing a bypass to language is hardly a breakthrough. It's been underway 20K years. We just got sidetracked by symbols. You engineers are so reliant on math, you can't see a way around it. That was the only way, math was a trick to specificity. It can't work.

whats your solution to bypass language? I do see the point that its a lossy compression medium but I also dont see how we can directly hook up our latent spaces

Internally neural assemblies ie neural syntax. Externally action-glyphs as spatial syntax.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#256

I've used a lot of social networking systems over the years based on a lot of technologies. I deeply understand the nostalgia for blogs and RSS—I had a blog for many years and have used an RSS reader continuously since probably 2002. I still enjoy reading blogs to this day. The problem with blogs, though, is that there is no great solution to limit the visibility to certain audiences. It really limits the types of th…

> there is no great solution to limit the visibility to certain audiences There's an important sense in which you are very wrong here because nothing on the internet is actually hidden. Everyone can see everything regardless of the visibility you think you've put on something. But there's another sense here where audiences do tend to self select into groups and do tend to see and (crucially) engage with things in nic…

> There's an important sense in which you are very wrong here because nothing on the internet is actually hidden. Everyone can see everything

I'm impressed with how confidently you disbelieve in the field of computer security.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, obviously, ads were the norm back in the day. The author had to be wearing several rose tinted glasses when writing that. But the author isn't entirely wrong. There were/are a lot of websites that simply did not run ads. Hosted not for money, but "for love of the game". This is something that was lost with the shift to exclusively platform-based hosting. A facebook page or subreddit simply is never going to be ad…

I may be wearing the same glasses here, but it felt like ads were more like "real ads" back then. Like when walking down a street, you may see some posters advertising something, but they are clearly ads, because they are noisy rectangles bunched up with other noisy rectangles. On the older internet, ads felt more like that, and seemed to stay in the corner away from the content. However, on the modern internet, ads…

I miss being able to hit the Esc key and all the animations on the page stopped.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#258
post #201

What gets a bit tiring with these nostalgia posts is that it never talks about what the web should be in practice, how we achieve it and most crucially: how do we incorporate modern web tech into it? On top of this we also have to be honest about what is a good old web value and what is pure nostalgia.

Nostalgia makes everything look better than it was. The reason the internet worked then was because it excluded most people and the few people that were on it had a lot in common (like being young and early adopters of tech stuff and into a lot of immature crap). Holding up a mirror to myself here. The point is that this never scaled and it started to break down almost immediately as more people started showing up. T…

You're right, issue imo. With the web is that once 1 competitor gains traction then everyone else folds over time.

I remember gametrailers.com, quirky little site for hosting game related content, it folded once YouTube was the platform for commercial video uploading.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#259
I wonder why some people that are aware of how detrimental social media are blame all the evil on "algorithms" instead of just… ceasing to use social media at all? Seriously, you are not FORCED to use social media unless it's a part of your job (and even then nobody can make you use them in your free time). Portaying yourself as a martyr who's helpless when trying to escape from all of these vile big companies when doing nothing to get yourself out of this is hilarious. Gizmondo also has written about it: https://gizmodo.com/the-gizmodo-guide-to-stopping-algorithms...

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#260
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is crazy how much was lost when Apple killed Flash. Absolutely miss Newgrounds. It's still around of course, I'm reflecting more on the vibes when it was in its heyday. Unbelievable the games people were making with Flash back then and how it spawned the careers of a ton of indie darlings. Also, not Flash at all, but does anyone remember Exit Mundi? Absolute gold. Honestly, I kind of look back on blogging u…

Newgrounds was incredible! At the time, games (of any quality) for free was a biiiiig deal. It was even more amazing that you didn't need to wait hours to download and install them. I agree w/ your take on blogging... kind of a bland "one-stop-shop" for everything a person thinks of rather than an experience tailored to a specific interest. I used to make Dragonball Z fan sites mostly... even within a single domain I…

One of my fondest memories of the early Web was getting awards on Newgrounds for my animations(I had one for 250k views. Pretty sure I got into the top ten at one point) , and logging in to read and respond to comments, and to see that view counter tick up and up!
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