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18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

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Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#381

Post by scarface74 »

dahauns wrote: post #379
scarface74 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You call the Carbon API that existed from 2001-2018 “short lived”? The entire Carbon API was used to port software like PhotoShop and Office. Carbon was a port of enough of the Classic API to port major important programs. AppleScript is still built into the current version of OS X. It was introduced in 1993-94 And seeing that 10.1 was PPC only, do you expect them to keep a PPC emulator around? Can you run PPC based…

Sounds to me more like the ported programs were short lived - and IMO, in that they are not entirely wrong. Sure, Carbon and Rosetta certainly were no mean feat, and the drastic PPC/x86 break is something Microsoft never really had to deal with (heh, the biggest problem trying to run a PPC/MIPS/Alpha based NT application today is actually finding one :) ). But Apple never went to the same lengths as Microsoft regardi…

Carbon was declared obsolete in 2012 but wasn’t discontinued until 2019.

Porting from PPC to x86 was relatively easy. But you’re also forgetting about the first transition - from 68K to PPC.

Can you run the PPC version of any Windows NT apps?

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#382

Post by zladuric »

dmje wrote: post #366

As I spent half a day trying to wrangle my way through some sass grunt compiler frontend bullshit just trying to update the colour of some links on a client website, I find myself nodding sagely again. In the early days you could view source, see what was going on, copy and recreate someone else’s site, learn a whole bunch of new stuff and actually get shit done. Now, it’s all JavaScript bullshit and 100k lines of cs…

I'm not sure a FrontPage site would be much better. It's also a big mess of generated markup you'd have to go through manually, if you didn't have the proper FP version.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#383

Post by throwaway286 »

geocrasher wrote: post #90

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…

Hmm, I wonder if certain javascript based site generators will still be around in 20 years..

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#384

Post by solinent »

geocrasher wrote: post #90

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…

Static HTML is also very secure. My personal sites are always static, it keeps server costs low and everything gets cached.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#385

Post by scarface74 »

jsgo wrote: post #380
scarface74 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, what exactly did you say they refuted anything I said? The Carbon API was 32 bit only and was supported until the latest release of MacOS. Do you realize how many deprecated end of life frameworks that Microsoft has been lugging around for decades? So should Apple have kept support for 68K software in 2019? Also, do you realize that for all intents and purposes the entire .Net Framework is deprecated and EOL exce…

I've only heard complaints from Silverlight and Windows Phone/Mobile developers anecdotally. From a web perspective (and my experience), .NET Framework 2/4 -> Core is actually not a big changeover outside of the views (probably better if you switched to MVC). The Windows Phone apps I built are dead now, but that isn't a matter of APIs no longer being supported, but an entire platform going under. As a macOS user, I h…

The entire ASP.Net Core and Entity Framework architecture was changed and is not compatible. Not to mention all of the legacy third party .Net Framework only third party packages that don’t work.

Microsoft also completely abandoned Windows CE/Compact Framework while there were plenty of companies that had deployed thousands of $1200-$2000 ruggedized devices for field services work.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#386

Post by trilliumbaker »

bluGill wrote: post #234
untog wrote: post #99

Earlier 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…

Google controls the major web engine. I don't trust google to not deprecate parts of html over time because the new shiny is "better". I would rather maintain markdown generators which I can update to change the markup to whatever the latest google insists needs to work instead of rewriting all my documents. I'm currently tasked with writing a UI for a machine that has a 25 year expected lifespan before wear means it…

Google wields too much power. To an extent, they can dictate to website owners what HTML is allowed and not allowed thanks to their dominance in search. This is compounded by the fact that their browser marketshare via Chrome and now Microsoft Edge basically allows them to do what they want with HTML.

Matters are even worse. Last year, the W3C became the "yes-man" of Google. They decided to stop developing the HTML standards and just start rubber stamping whatever WHATWG produces. WHATWG is run by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla. And who has the most power in that relationship? Yep, Google.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#387

Post by trilliumbaker »

untog wrote: post #316
bluGill wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google controls the major web engine. I don't trust google to not deprecate parts of html over time because the new shiny is "better". I would rather maintain markdown generators which I can update to change the markup to whatever the latest google insists needs to work instead of rewriting all my documents. I'm currently tasked with writing a UI for a machine that has a 25 year expected lifespan before wear means it…

Even if Google did do that (which they’ve shown no signs of, and they are still far from a browser monopoly when you look at iPhone etc) it wouldn’t stop HTML from being read. Translating from HTML -> GoogleHTML wouldn’t be meaningfully different to translating it from Markdown.

It could be argued that AMP was that attempt, and the only reason AMP gained tractions was Google started using it in the carousel of their SERPs.

While Safari, when mobile is included, has ~17% of the market, that's not enough when you combine Google's browser share along with their search engine share.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#388

Post by dwheeler »

smush wrote: post #335
dwheeler wrote: post #186

My 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…

No kidding. Already, I've found some interesting articles to read. I'm taking a look at https://dwheeler.com/essays/easy-cross-platform-gui.html , which has references to XULRunner etc. which since 2009 have fallen out of favor. Would you continue to recommend those wanting to invest in (for the 80% of use cases) wxWidgets for FLOSS cross-platform GUI apps? BoaConstructor et. al look interesting. Thanks for taking th…

A lot of that stuff is overtaken by events, but I clearly say that the essay was written in 2009. Nevertheless, if you wanted to see what I wrote in 2009, there it is. It hasn't disappeared from The Ether, there's a disturbingly large amount of information that was written only a few years ago and has totally disappeared. One of the reasons that much information has disappeared is because the website can no longer stay running. If your website is designed to last, then the information is more likely to stay available. Yes, I know it's more complicated than that. But it's a start.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#389

Post by rootusrootus »

zamalek wrote: post #357
cptskippy wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're drawing an equivalence between 5 and 25 year old software? Microsoft Windows 10 is able to run software that predates all of Apple's supported platforms.

There's always a person who is happy to explain how Apple bests any competitor you could mention at any metric you could imagine.

That is fair, though, because it is equally likely to find someone that will never give Apple credit for a single thing.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#390

Post by Ahwleung »

scarface74 wrote: post #378
zamalek wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's always a person who is happy to explain how Apple bests any competitor you could mention at any metric you could imagine.

So if Apple kept “25 years” of backwards compatibility, should they have been better off bundling a 68K and PPC emulator? Why stop there? They should have kept compatibility with the Apple //e and also bundled a 68K emulator? Someone else was complaining that they didn’t keep FireWire. Should modern Macs come with ADB ports?

Obviously not, but that doesn't prove that there isn't value to having backwards compatibility. Sometimes you just want something to run and not have to touch or change it for a long time.

A 20-year old machine that's critical to a factory can run off a serial cable plugged in to an expansion card running software written in the 90's that will still run on Windows 10. Nobody in their right mind would decide to write that same software on a Mac.

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