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The Return of the 90s Web

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Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#321

Post by pinkfoot »

jasondclinton wrote: post #320
dredmorbius wrote: post #141

Schopenhauer's 19th century essay "On Authorship" has been a personal fave since discovering it last year: Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This…

Yes, the joke is that unemployment benefits are the real Endowment for the Arts. One wonders if we would have a healthier society if those who are capable of creating great art could do so by being freed up from financial constraints.

We would also play better golf. Still keen to subsidise it?

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#322

Post by loco5niner »

kickscondor wrote: post #81
renewiltord wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative to Google for discovery is Reddit. Reddit is the modern web directory: - Directories are Communities defined by their link rules - Human-curated - Easy to start a new one - SSO across all communities - Built-in forum technology - Unified comment technology for every website You can get communities like reddit.com/r/Sizz for instance or larger ones like /r/esp8266 or massive ones like /r/sanfrancisco o…

Except: - Most subreddits are hostile to self-promotion of Web stuff. If you're unknown, you're going to have to be socially involved there enough that people know your name. (Though I agree that small subs like /r/esp8266 are begging for self-made content.) - Related: people don't know your name because it's in small gray text. You're just another comment. - You need upvotes. A personal directory requires only one u…

> Most subreddits are hostile to self-promotion of Web stuff. If you're unknown, you're going to have to be socially involved...

Great! I'm there for the content, and self-promotion is usually the worst content.

I like that HackerNews tags this stuff with ShowHN so I can decide whether I want to look at it or not.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#323

Post by Apofis »

purerandomness wrote: post #5

I recently watched the "Helvetica" documentary that was posted here a few days ago [0], where they briefly mention "Grunge Typography" [1], a seemingly dead-end branch of typography that, for some strange reason, became pretty popular for a short period of time. After some years however, consensus amongst designers formed that what they've created was a pile of illegible garbage, and realized that there was no other…

I actually really like this htmx library on the surface, will give it a spin soon.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#324

Post by folmar »

bartread wrote: post #282
hedora wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably already have m4 on your development machine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_(computer_language)

OK, I'd never heard of this before and now I'm questioning why we have all these JS templating frameworks like Mustache, Pug[1], and the rest. [1] I actually use this one and it's just fine - great, in fact - but seeing M4 does make me feel like a lot of people may have spent a lot of time reinventing a wheel.

The syntax of m4 is unwieldy, a "standard library" would be also needed to make it useful for smaller tasks. How often do you define loops yourself?

Sadly this holds to an unexpected degree for Mustache.

[1] - looks like a DOM AST + Javascript to me, quite unlike template

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#325

Post by dsparkman »

rawoke083600 wrote: post #212
waltbosz wrote: post #21

What I miss most from the early days of the Internet is the content. It was all created with love. My theory is that the high barrier to entry of online publishing kept all but the most determined people from creating content. As a result, the little content that was out there was usually good. With today's monetized blogs, it is often content for content's sake. People don't try, or they write about topics which the…

I think you are right about the "high barrier" being a filter for good work yes ! Also I miss the wide and wonderful design and color scheme of the 90's :) Long before bootstrap or "material design" !

I so agree. I miss good old fashion text based content. Simple, readable, and fast. There was a reason that the default links blue and underlined. Visited links were purple. You could scan an site and quickly determine where you had been before.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#326

Post by simias »

bartread wrote: post #282
hedora wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably already have m4 on your development machine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_(computer_language)

OK, I'd never heard of this before and now I'm questioning why we have all these JS templating frameworks like Mustache, Pug[1], and the rest. [1] I actually use this one and it's just fine - great, in fact - but seeing M4 does make me feel like a lot of people may have spent a lot of time reinventing a wheel.

I actually looked into some of these frameworks (in particular mustache but also a few others) before deciding to use m4. They were all either too complex or too limited (sometimes both!) for my use case.

M4 is old and clunky but it gets the job done without having to install half a trillion Node.js dependencies. I also know that my script will still work just fine 5 years from now (or even 50 years in all likelihood).

That being said, don't trash your favourite JS framework right away, while m4 is perfectly fine for simple tasks I don't even want to imagine the layers of opaque and recursive macros you'd end up having to maintain for any moderately complex project. It's like shell scripts, it's very convenient but it doesn't really scale.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#327

Post by CliffStoll »

badsectoracula wrote: post #179

> Frontpage and Dreamweaver were big in the 90s because of their “What You See Is What You Get” interface. People could set up a website without any coding skills, just by dragging boxes and typing text in them. > > Of course they soon found that there was still source code underneath, you just didn’t see it. And most of the time, that source code was a big heap of auto-generated garbage - it ultimately failed to kee…

I first hardcoded kleinbottle.com with handwritten html; over 20+years, I've gone through several tools. One by one they've evaporated - Home Page, Front Page, GoLive, Dreamweaver 5. I'm now hobbling along with BlueGriffon.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#328

Post by simias »

anderspitman wrote: post #319
bartread wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I'd never heard of this before and now I'm questioning why we have all these JS templating frameworks like Mustache, Pug[1], and the rest. [1] I actually use this one and it's just fine - great, in fact - but seeing M4 does make me feel like a lot of people may have spent a lot of time reinventing a wheel.

I've tried to get into M4 in the past but was always put off by the syntax. Mustache has been my go-to since it's simple and has lots of implementations in different languages. Are there any good reasons to use M4 over Mustache?

The only reason I didn't use Mustache was because it was unnecessarily complicated for my very simple use case. I just needed to effectively include blocks from other files in order to be able to share boilerplate between pages, plus having basic variable substitution for things like the page name. I even considered using the C preprocessor instead!

But I definitely wouldn't recommend using m4 for anything beyond a quick hack, unless you're a m4 wizard (or willing to become one) and you trust that whoever is going to work on the project is going to be one too. It's definitely clunky and not very user friendly.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#329

Post by Nasrudith »

fit2rule wrote: post #238
waltbosz wrote: post #21

What I miss most from the early days of the Internet is the content. It was all created with love. My theory is that the high barrier to entry of online publishing kept all but the most determined people from creating content. As a result, the little content that was out there was usually good. With today's monetized blogs, it is often content for content's sake. People don't try, or they write about topics which the…

>monetized blogs I believe that we have the 'web' today because big decisions were made about how little control the end-user (i.e., consumer) should have over the content made by producers, and that the #1 priority for all technology involved in the web has been to separate producer from consumer as stringently as possible . If we had the ability to safely and easily share a file that we create on our own local comp…

The operating system isn't needed for that at all and blaming the vendors is fundamentally misplaced. That directly sending to other computers via direct IP connections is technically possible if you don't operate any firewalls or similiar to block it. And of course non-fixed and shared IP addresses would complicate the system.

You would find out quickly why you don't actually want that when your own "unisystem" designated port server/client gets hammered with unsolicited requests and exploit attempts. Easy is a matter of interfaces although other design choices would come with costs. Safe however would be far harder. If you set it to a whitelist well you lose discoverability instantly.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#330

Post by y-c-o-m-b »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #86
JohnBooty wrote: post #15

I can't wait for server-side rendering to take its place in the sun again. There are many use cases for which a client-side framework like React is eesential. But I feel the vast majority of use cases on the web would be better off with server-side rendering. And... There are issues of ethics here. You are kidding yourself to an extent when you say that you are building a "client-side web app." It is essentially an a…

The less stuff on the server the better imo. Whenever I can get away with it I use a static site generator or I use vuejs with a json file containing all the data for the site. Being able to just drop a static set of files in to a webserver without any risk of security issues in my code is great. I also hate the tools for backend rendering since if you need any kind of interactivity it becomes so much easier if you h…

> I use vuejs with a json file containing all the data for the site

Seconded. It makes hosting a breeze; especially when you can just throw it on GitHub Pages within minutes. I also like being dependent on only a text editor and a browser ... a combo still performant on just about any device from the last 20 years if not longer. No need to install full-featured IDEs and the various dependencies.

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