Modern websites are mostly made with tools like Wix. We have higher standards for security, and the tools like Wix are actually available.
Any time I spend making a website is time I don't spend doing something worth making a website about.
The content and the people were the good part of the old internet, along with the non-endless scrolling UI and forums with signatures that didn't treat people as content machines, and the lack of the dreaded over scroll gestures I can't turn off.
The simple tech available at the time did make things like algorithmic curation harder, but it's not like we can't use modern stacks and JS libs and such to make the same kind of content we used to have.
Yes, and this is a terrible idea because you more than double your workload for all updates and invariably you stop updating one.
Unfortunately the new solution is a native mobile app written in a totally different language that is otehrwise designed to look and act exactly the same as the webpage.
Unfortunately the new solution is a native mobile app written in a totally different language
You mean a "native" app that just hosts another chromium instance with a slightly different html page and JavaScript that runs so poorly that it makes your phone heat up?
I was thinking Flutter. Nothing like having to clone your webpage in Flutter.
Also, I'm with you on the "javascript that runs so poorly". You'd think a language that out-benchmarks most general purpose compiled languages on both memory and cpu usage could get enough respect to write it carefully.
JavaScript is a prime example of why I still like C so much, lol - JS takes away the need to worry about memory management lest you crash something, and makes it technically more accessible as a language to write with not needing to know pointers and whatever, but if you don't already know how pointers work, JavaScript is far, far more difficult to write efficiently, not knowing what the "black box" is actually doing below the surface.
JavaScript is far, far more difficult to write efficiently, not knowing what the "black box" is actually doing below the surface
I'm an old-school dev. But I work with a lot of younger javascript devs who learn to write efficiently just fine without knowing C and C++ like we had to.
I'm really not quite sure what you think you're responding to. You quoted the line I quoted from somebody else, and then gave a reply that doesn't seem sensical in response to the previous person OR to me.
What does watching sites on your 4K monitor have to do with maintaining multiple codebases?
Yes, and this is a terrible idea because you more than double your workload for all updates and invariably you stop updating one.
It's actually less than double if you decouple the backend from the frontend, because then you have the backend only once.
Or we can use .webp images and shrink the file size far more while retaining quality.
That wasn't an option back then. But it's amusing that you mention it because it has only been baseline available since September 2020, is not that widely used compared to PNG and JPEG, and it's already being superseeded by AVIF. Oh and there is obviously already a competing standard with AVIF named JPEG XL. I think I just leave this here.
It's actually less than double if you decouple the backend from the frontend
Sure. But the noodle shop or car mechanic who had their website created in 2008 probably didn't have the foresight to do this. I'd have a hard time telling them I'd like to spend tons of their money creating a modular system instead of responsive design, and even harder telling a large company to do this. Like I said, a lot of modern web design is overengineered, but a lot of it exists for a good reason.
That wasn't an option back then.
I bring it up because it's an option now, while the article is still talking about JPEGs. And I agree that it's a bad idea to chase the latest and greatest. WEBP has been a widely available option since 2020, but I only switched my PNGs and JPEGs to WEBP in the last couple of years.
Maybe I missed it before or maybe they added this after it was posted to Reddit:
This website is a trip down memory lane. I'm not trying to tell you to stop modern web development.
Even the [motherfuckingwebsite.com][https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/] website has a disclaimer at the bottom, but a lot people do push the "we should design websites like we did in the 90s" line with a straight face. (And I think the MF website's disclaimer is one of those "I was being ironic, this is satire" excuses to have their cake and eat it too.)
This actually proves my point: Whenever I want to post more than one image to a Reddit post, I have to switch to new style reddit. Because Reddit (thankfully) keeps the old style around, but they aren't backporting new features to it. Reddit has two websites and they only update one of them, like I said.
Anyone else remember this from back in the day? I'd log into FB or MySpace and start reading down my wall until I started recognizing posts from the last time I logged in. That was when I knew I was done on FB or MS, I was caught up. Now it's all a feed that is designed to keep user's engaged.
One can still use it purely for communication, but one must be aware of the endless scrolling and at least know that they could maybe use that energy for something more productive (resting is included in being productive).
In psychology class we talked about B. F. Skinner's operant conditioning experiments. If you put a pigeon in a box and teach it to peck a button x times for food, the pigeon will peck however many times it needs to in order to feel full and stop.
If you make that button dispense food after a random number of pecks, however, the pigeon will peck almost non-stop, because it has no idea when the next pellet of food is going to come out.
We are the pigeons now. In between the ads and the AI generated slop and the internet drama are morsels of content we enjoy - a hobby group post or an insightful article or maybe your acquaintance getting engaged. It makes you feel good, so you keep scrolling, because maybe the next one is just around the corner
I remember, endless scrolling sucks and I wish we'd all agree to go back. I signed up for a channel on Patreon a while back (Astrogoblin) and I've been working my way through their old videos. They only go back to around the beginning of 2024, but there are a lot of them, even when using the filters. I hate having to endlessly scroll to find what I'm looking for, or keep a page open and hogging memory for weeks.
My head-canon is that real users dont really post that much, so the platforms have to fill the wall with crap. Its not neceserrily to increase engagment, but to not keep engagment at the same level it was before.
My head-canon is that real users dont really post that much, so the platforms have to fill the wall with crap.
LinkedIn is completely dead. I installed the Chome Extension LinkOff and set it to only show posts from my 500+ [direct] connections. My feed was completely dead, except the weekly "I've been laid off..." posts.
Dropped Facebook a long time ago, and thought LinkedIn had at least a shred of hope for being useful. Now I've dropped LinkedIn. Best decision I ever made. So manybetterwebsites exist to search for jobs these days.
There's the 90-9-1 rule. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a general rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an Internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk. Variants include the 1–9–90 rule (sometimes 90–9–1 principle or the 89:10:1 ratio), which states that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only consume content, 9% of the participants change or update content, and 1% of the participants add content.
And yes, its been studied and holds out fairly well.
You can see it with YouTube and the "like, comment, subscribe" in trying to get the 10% to engage more (this isn't a creator driven thing but rather that YouTube encourages creators to try to get more casual commenters to participate through the Algorithm).
It could be a variation of this rule but another thing I noticed is that on average each next level of interaction filters out 90% of the level above it. 1M people watched the video, 100k put a like on it, (you'd be lucky if) 10k left a comment, that sort of deal.
It's had the opposite effect on me, but I guess I'm not the target audience for it. I don't even go on the Facebook feed anymore. I want it to show what my friends are doing, and I only see that once every 12 posts. The rest is just slop I have zero interest in.
I have the messenger so I can talk to my family, but that's it.
None of these social networks would ever have pulled in billions of users if they started off operating how they are now.
It's not just nostalgia, the early, organic days of Facebook, instagram, etc. were fun. But then they captured their users and our enjoyment wasn't enough.
Anyone else remember this from back in the day? I'd log into FB or MySpace and start reading down my wall until I started recognizing posts from the last time I logged in.
I do this with reddit. I wrote a userscript that can hide posts on mass. This forces the site to give you new content. Hide items long enough and eventually it gives up and just tells you there's nothing to show because their post lookup function has a timeout you will eventually reach because it has to go back so much.
The early solution to mobile devices was a completely separate website, optimized for small screens. People would be redirected based on the user agent string.
SSI, you forgot SSI. And CGI. And perl. And Dreamweaver. And no, "websites" were never simple unless you wanted to make a static homepage - they were more complicated because you didn't have frameworks and platforms. The only things you had were FTP access to your hosting directory and the nearest bookstore where you could maybe get books on perl or javascript.
Yeaaah some of these articles give a strong "old man yelling at cloud" vibe. I read some of the linked articles and man, I want my 2 hours back.
People who yearn for "simple websites" probably never had to implement anything more complex than uploading a file, but I get it, it's hard to retain perspective when you're an overpaid ex-webdev turned wannabe industry influencer who writes blogs for a living.
The first true way to replace long polling are websockets. HTTP 2 and 3 have the ability to push events to the client without waiting for a client request in what is known as "server push" but I've never seen it in the wild.
I started Web development in 1994, with NCSA Mosaic, as a means to display a user's manual for a software suite on a UNIX box. I continued with HTML 1.1, the Netscape era, the dark ages of Internet Explorer 6, the JavaScript renaissance (yay jQuery and AJAX), and into the era of frameworks like Vue and Angular. I was proficient with ColdFusion, Classic ASP, ASP.NET, and PHP.
I stopped about 5 years ago. I do mostly backend stuff now. I don't miss Web development, because it strikes me as over-complicated and a massive pain in the ass to achieve a consistent look and feel across a gazillion resolutions.
It was (mostly) fun while it lasted, but I don't want to go back. There are horrible corporate actors in the space and a glut of "solutions" that aren't as flexible as their creators claim. I feel as if the magic is gone.
I recently had to fight to use a native time input, because another team at the company is busy reinventing all of our basic components in some insanely complex JS stack, and apparently they never heard of generics, dependency inversion, or extensibility. It's a nightmare.
The thing for me is that I did some web development from 2005 - 2008 and then did zero web development until 2020. The biggest change is that everything is now a <div> with a class. Yes, I know that putting everything in a table was a bad idea even back in 2005 but it's just crazy how much more difficult it is to keep track of tags if you are hand coding everything.
The funny thing is, it doesn't even has to be this way. In the web standard they added a provision that made custom elements officially valid, as long as they have a dash in their name. So instead of <div class="row"><div class="col-md-6">...</div></div> we could just do <grid-row><col-md-6>...</col-md-6></grid-row>, you can also give them a custom JS implementation to change their behavior.
A few default elements have also been defined like
The whole "semantic web" is gone. The default elements are semantic, and all of the other examples are just non-semantic crap. I'm not saying your giving of examples is crap, but that the examples themselves are crap ;-)
That has sadly been the case for a while. It’s not something that just happened in the last half decade. It’s a result of “well, if it works it works, shippit, people have powerful enough devices on their lap or pocket so no one is going to care, and if it doesn’t impact seo or google analytics, move on to next problem, oh look let’s create a whole new framework”.
Yeah, its sadly the reason why my current website is "outdated" and "simple"; it works for 99.9% of my users and most people don't care about the cool new features / fads from the last 10+ years. Oddly enough, the #1 complaint is that the website is "too fast" and wonder if their input actually got saved or not.
reminds me of how vacuum makers made quiet vacuums but people hated them because they couldn't tell if they were on/working, so all vacuums are loud now.
That’s… almost like an unintentionally funny and jarring. It’s essentially complaining that a website works too well because they’ve become accustomed to bad UX, like complaining about too many FPS in a video game. You’d think that’s something to be praised for lol
I somewhat understand the complaint because it's one thing if you are browsing a static website that the pages load instantly; its another thing to type in information in to a form and the next page shows up near instantly. The common response was "did it save everything I typed in?". One fix would be to add a little green bar on top of the page with the header "input saved" or something like that. I just have been to lazy to do that.
"Yes, this is satire / I'm not actually saying your shitty site should look like this."
The coward, lol.
Imo, more sites should look like that. Look how fast it loads! And no buttons that you miss or accidentally click because a bunch of page elements lazy loaded and randomly shifted them around right as you tried to click.
I get nostalgic from sites like this. For some reason I prefer them a lot more than all these fancy blogs with the popups and trending colors.
I also use old Reddit. In new tools I'm using and stuff for work I like the most advanced stuff. But when it comes to personal stuff. Give me this old Reddit with the UX noone understand around me, only I get it and love it
I don't have sources readily available, but I remember threaded forums being really hard for people to parse. They were used to just reading top to bottom, like in newspaper articles or books. The idea that you pay attention to indentation to see what something is in response to was unintuitive. (Maybe it still is.)
Here on r/programming, we probably have no problem with the concept.
We could start by having an ironclad indicator what kind of device we are serving. Why is this not a thing? If there only were a method for that. We could call it user agent string.
Back in the Dreamweaver/Frontpage times those devices didn't exist. Responsive design was merely adapting to slightly smaller or larger resolutions than the default you used. Things like adapting for touch controls were years away.
PDAs in the 90s often had no online connectivity. Some devices could (barely) send faxes and use very rudimentary services over cellular. For all practical purposes the modern concept of a smartphone did not exist in the 90s.
Even once mobile devices gained more online connectivity it wasn't until 2007 or so until mobile browsers were barely that. They had almost zero support for JavaScript and CSS. The low resolution screens, anemic cellular bandwidth, and overall bad hardware performance did these browsers no favors. Remote rendering browsers like Opera Mini were a poor imitation of the desktop web.
In the 90s a "responsive" design was one where the left aligned table layout maxed out at a little over 600 pixels so the whole page fit into a browser windows without scrolling horizontally.
The first truly incredible website I can remember was Google Maps. There wasn't anything even close to that complex on the client at the time. I remember I thought, damn, they have some javascript wizards working there.
>You're experiencing it right now. This website is looped through a RS-232 serial connection at 56k baud rate (actually a little bit extra to handle protocol overhead). I disabled the server cache so you can experience the scrollbar shrinking as content slowly loads in.
EternityForest@reddit
Modern websites are mostly made with tools like Wix. We have higher standards for security, and the tools like Wix are actually available.
Any time I spend making a website is time I don't spend doing something worth making a website about.
The content and the people were the good part of the old internet, along with the non-endless scrolling UI and forums with signatures that didn't treat people as content machines, and the lack of the dreaded over scroll gestures I can't turn off.
The simple tech available at the time did make things like algorithmic curation harder, but it's not like we can't use modern stacks and JS libs and such to make the same kind of content we used to have.
AlSweigart@reddit
Nostalgia is a disease.
Yes, and this is a terrible idea because you more than double your workload for all updates and invariably you stop updating one.
I agree that a lot of the web right now is overcomplicated garbage, but some of the stuff we did back then needs to stay in the past.
Or we can use .webp images and shrink the file size far more while retaining quality.
novagenesis@reddit
Unfortunately the new solution is a native mobile app written in a totally different language that is otehrwise designed to look and act exactly the same as the webpage.
Tasgall@reddit
You mean a "native" app that just hosts another chromium instance with a slightly different html page and JavaScript that runs so poorly that it makes your phone heat up?
novagenesis@reddit
I was thinking Flutter. Nothing like having to clone your webpage in Flutter.
Also, I'm with you on the "javascript that runs so poorly". You'd think a language that out-benchmarks most general purpose compiled languages on both memory and cpu usage could get enough respect to write it carefully.
Tasgall@reddit
JavaScript is a prime example of why I still like C so much, lol - JS takes away the need to worry about memory management lest you crash something, and makes it technically more accessible as a language to write with not needing to know pointers and whatever, but if you don't already know how pointers work, JavaScript is far, far more difficult to write efficiently, not knowing what the "black box" is actually doing below the surface.
novagenesis@reddit
I'm an old-school dev. But I work with a lot of younger javascript devs who learn to write efficiently just fine without knowing C and C++ like we had to.
ziplock9000@reddit
>Yes, and this is a terrible idea because you more than double your workload for all updates and invariably you stop updating one.
I disagree, The amount of websites I watch on my 4K monitor that exist as a thin stripe in the middle is crazy
novagenesis@reddit
I'm really not quite sure what you think you're responding to. You quoted the line I quoted from somebody else, and then gave a reply that doesn't seem sensical in response to the previous person OR to me.
What does watching sites on your 4K monitor have to do with maintaining multiple codebases?
AyrA_ch@reddit (OP)
It's actually less than double if you decouple the backend from the frontend, because then you have the backend only once.
That wasn't an option back then. But it's amusing that you mention it because it has only been baseline available since September 2020, is not that widely used compared to PNG and JPEG, and it's already being superseeded by AVIF. Oh and there is obviously already a competing standard with AVIF named JPEG XL. I think I just leave this here.
AlSweigart@reddit
Sure. But the noodle shop or car mechanic who had their website created in 2008 probably didn't have the foresight to do this. I'd have a hard time telling them I'd like to spend tons of their money creating a modular system instead of responsive design, and even harder telling a large company to do this. Like I said, a lot of modern web design is overengineered, but a lot of it exists for a good reason.
I bring it up because it's an option now, while the article is still talking about JPEGs. And I agree that it's a bad idea to chase the latest and greatest. WEBP has been a widely available option since 2020, but I only switched my PNGs and JPEGs to WEBP in the last couple of years.
Maybe I missed it before or maybe they added this after it was posted to Reddit:
Even the [motherfuckingwebsite.com][https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/] website has a disclaimer at the bottom, but a lot people do push the "we should design websites like we did in the 90s" line with a straight face. (And I think the MF website's disclaimer is one of those "I was being ironic, this is satire" excuses to have their cake and eat it too.)
josefx@reddit
Sometimes that makes it better. This comment was posted from old.reddit.com .
AlSweigart@reddit
This actually proves my point: Whenever I want to post more than one image to a Reddit post, I have to switch to new style reddit. Because Reddit (thankfully) keeps the old style around, but they aren't backporting new features to it. Reddit has two websites and they only update one of them, like I said.
Felladrin@reddit
Surprised no one mentioned https://makefrontendshitagain.party!
tolley@reddit
Anyone else remember this from back in the day? I'd log into FB or MySpace and start reading down my wall until I started recognizing posts from the last time I logged in. That was when I knew I was done on FB or MS, I was caught up. Now it's all a feed that is designed to keep user's engaged.
One can still use it purely for communication, but one must be aware of the endless scrolling and at least know that they could maybe use that energy for something more productive (resting is included in being productive).
eveningcandles@reddit
I had forgotten this completely. Jesus christ. We used to be bored so easily by the existing social media that we had to hunt for content elsewhere.
Brostafarian@reddit
In psychology class we talked about B. F. Skinner's operant conditioning experiments. If you put a pigeon in a box and teach it to peck a button x times for food, the pigeon will peck however many times it needs to in order to feel full and stop.
If you make that button dispense food after a random number of pecks, however, the pigeon will peck almost non-stop, because it has no idea when the next pellet of food is going to come out.
We are the pigeons now. In between the ads and the AI generated slop and the internet drama are morsels of content we enjoy - a hobby group post or an insightful article or maybe your acquaintance getting engaged. It makes you feel good, so you keep scrolling, because maybe the next one is just around the corner
makos124@reddit
Good video on the topic of smartphones being Skinner boxes
Brostafarian@reddit
oh god is this the milk lady
Kok_Nikol@reddit
I am the pigeon...
hkric41six@reddit
The internet has truly failed society..
stianhoiland@reddit
This is me and my predicament.
phil_davis@reddit
I remember, endless scrolling sucks and I wish we'd all agree to go back. I signed up for a channel on Patreon a while back (Astrogoblin) and I've been working my way through their old videos. They only go back to around the beginning of 2024, but there are a lot of them, even when using the filters. I hate having to endlessly scroll to find what I'm looking for, or keep a page open and hogging memory for weeks.
Macluawn@reddit
My head-canon is that real users dont really post that much, so the platforms have to fill the wall with crap. Its not neceserrily to increase engagment, but to not keep engagment at the same level it was before.
Kok_Nikol@reddit
That's why reddit was so good before!
Also I think it's important that it has a downvote button!!!
agumonkey@reddit
a self inflated industry to keep the dream going
Redneckia@reddit
Also known as a bubble, a big, old, precarious bubble
agumonkey@reddit
tulip were prettier as a bubble
UnluckyPenguin@reddit
LinkedIn is completely dead. I installed the Chome Extension LinkOff and set it to only show posts from my 500+ [direct] connections. My feed was completely dead, except the weekly "I've been laid off..." posts.
Dropped Facebook a long time ago, and thought LinkedIn had at least a shred of hope for being useful. Now I've dropped LinkedIn. Best decision I ever made. So many better websites exist to search for jobs these days.
shagieIsMe@reddit
There's the 90-9-1 rule. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
And yes, its been studied and holds out fairly well.
You can see it with YouTube and the "like, comment, subscribe" in trying to get the 10% to engage more (this isn't a creator driven thing but rather that YouTube encourages creators to try to get more casual commenters to participate through the Algorithm).
AntiProtonBoy@reddit
The inverse tracks well with my own behaviour. 99% of the time I consume content, only 1% of the time I create something.
Deiskos@reddit
It could be a variation of this rule but another thing I noticed is that on average each next level of interaction filters out 90% of the level above it. 1M people watched the video, 100k put a like on it, (you'd be lucky if) 10k left a comment, that sort of deal.
archiminos@reddit
It's had the opposite effect on me, but I guess I'm not the target audience for it. I don't even go on the Facebook feed anymore. I want it to show what my friends are doing, and I only see that once every 12 posts. The rest is just slop I have zero interest in.
I have the messenger so I can talk to my family, but that's it.
PurpleYoshiEgg@reddit
This is pretty much what I do on tumblr nowadays.
prisencotech@reddit
None of these social networks would ever have pulled in billions of users if they started off operating how they are now.
It's not just nostalgia, the early, organic days of Facebook, instagram, etc. were fun. But then they captured their users and our enjoyment wasn't enough.
Nicksaurus@reddit
I use bluesky like this now
AyrA_ch@reddit (OP)
I do this with reddit. I wrote a userscript that can hide posts on mass. This forces the site to give you new content. Hide items long enough and eventually it gives up and just tells you there's nothing to show because their post lookup function has a timeout you will eventually reach because it has to go back so much.
modernkennnern@reddit
Same. To be fair, I only follow neovim, so that list is not particularly extensive
Svorky@reddit
On the plus side it's very easy to get caught up because there is two actual people left who post anything.
SanityInAnarchy@reddit
Hi! I'm a server!
robot_54@reddit
Ironically, XKCD doesn't auto redirect to their mobile site. Here you go.
https://m.xkcd.com/869
zam0th@reddit
SSI, you forgot SSI. And CGI. And perl. And Dreamweaver. And no, "websites" were never simple unless you wanted to make a static homepage - they were more complicated because you didn't have frameworks and platforms. The only things you had were FTP access to your hosting directory and the nearest bookstore where you could maybe get books on perl or javascript.
Consistent-Hat-8008@reddit
Yeaaah some of these articles give a strong "old man yelling at cloud" vibe. I read some of the linked articles and man, I want my 2 hours back.
People who yearn for "simple websites" probably never had to implement anything more complex than uploading a file, but I get it, it's hard to retain perspective when you're an overpaid ex-webdev turned wannabe industry influencer who writes blogs for a living.
nyrangers30@reddit
What? You’ve never seen that in the wild?
Aside from that, great article.
killinhimer@reddit
SSE is for losers apparently.
TheRealDrSarcasmo@reddit
I started Web development in 1994, with NCSA Mosaic, as a means to display a user's manual for a software suite on a UNIX box. I continued with HTML 1.1, the Netscape era, the dark ages of Internet Explorer 6, the JavaScript renaissance (yay jQuery and AJAX), and into the era of frameworks like Vue and Angular. I was proficient with ColdFusion, Classic ASP, ASP.NET, and PHP.
I stopped about 5 years ago. I do mostly backend stuff now. I don't miss Web development, because it strikes me as over-complicated and a massive pain in the ass to achieve a consistent look and feel across a gazillion resolutions.
It was (mostly) fun while it lasted, but I don't want to go back. There are horrible corporate actors in the space and a glut of "solutions" that aren't as flexible as their creators claim. I feel as if the magic is gone.
DavidJCobb@reddit
They've turned it all into a market for lemons, aye.
Consistent-Hat-8008@reddit
I recently had to fight to use a native time input, because another team at the company is busy reinventing all of our basic components in some insanely complex JS stack, and apparently they never heard of generics, dependency inversion, or extensibility. It's a nightmare.
DesiOtaku@reddit
Obligatory This is a motherfucking website.
The thing for me is that I did some web development from 2005 - 2008 and then did zero web development until 2020. The biggest change is that everything is now a
<div>with a class. Yes, I know that putting everything in a table was a bad idea even back in 2005 but it's just crazy how much more difficult it is to keep track of tags if you are hand coding everything.Consistent-Hat-8008@reddit
Don't forget 700 fingerprinting scripts that misidentify you as a bot because you're using have an ad blocker.
AyrA_ch@reddit (OP)
The funny thing is, it doesn't even has to be this way. In the web standard they added a provision that made custom elements officially valid, as long as they have a dash in their name. So instead of
<div class="row"><div class="col-md-6">...</div></div>we could just do<grid-row><col-md-6>...</col-md-6></grid-row>, you can also give them a custom JS implementation to change their behavior.A few default elements have also been defined like
balthisar@reddit
The whole "semantic web" is gone. The default elements are semantic, and all of the other examples are just non-semantic crap. I'm not saying your giving of examples is crap, but that the examples themselves are crap ;-)
Kok_Nikol@reddit
I read an article about that today! It tries to solve the problem:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2022/12/19/progress-on-the-block-protocol/
tl;dr an easy way to add semantic data when making web content - https://blockprotocol.org/
idebugthusiexist@reddit
That has sadly been the case for a while. It’s not something that just happened in the last half decade. It’s a result of “well, if it works it works, shippit, people have powerful enough devices on their lap or pocket so no one is going to care, and if it doesn’t impact seo or google analytics, move on to next problem, oh look let’s create a whole new framework”.
DesiOtaku@reddit
Yeah, its sadly the reason why my current website is "outdated" and "simple"; it works for 99.9% of my users and most people don't care about the cool new features / fads from the last 10+ years. Oddly enough, the #1 complaint is that the website is "too fast" and wonder if their input actually got saved or not.
pheonixblade9@reddit
reminds me of how vacuum makers made quiet vacuums but people hated them because they couldn't tell if they were on/working, so all vacuums are loud now.
idebugthusiexist@reddit
That’s… almost like an unintentionally funny and jarring. It’s essentially complaining that a website works too well because they’ve become accustomed to bad UX, like complaining about too many FPS in a video game. You’d think that’s something to be praised for lol
DesiOtaku@reddit
I somewhat understand the complaint because it's one thing if you are browsing a static website that the pages load instantly; its another thing to type in information in to a form and the next page shows up near instantly. The common response was "did it save everything I typed in?". One fix would be to add a little green bar on top of the page with the header "input saved" or something like that. I just have been to lazy to do that.
idebugthusiexist@reddit
Oh, ya, if it’s a static form. Maybe a simple solution is to add a sleep timer ^_^
Tasgall@reddit
"Yes, this is satire / I'm not actually saying your shitty site should look like this."
The coward, lol.
Imo, more sites should look like that. Look how fast it loads! And no buttons that you miss or accidentally click because a bunch of page elements lazy loaded and randomly shifted them around right as you tried to click.
It's perfect.
remy_porter@reddit
Bring back gopher.
__konrad@reddit
More importantly, it would take more RAM to store the uncompressed image data...
levodelellis@reddit
I had comments on my old website, he's my current project
ha5zak@reddit
This is the way.
zazzersmel@reddit
imo websites should either be plaintext or a bunch of 3d bullshit. no in between.
AlSweigart@reddit
I like the chaos energy of this attitude. I upvote your comment, my good chum.
poewetha@reddit
I get nostalgic from sites like this. For some reason I prefer them a lot more than all these fancy blogs with the popups and trending colors.
I also use old Reddit. In new tools I'm using and stuff for work I like the most advanced stuff. But when it comes to personal stuff. Give me this old Reddit with the UX noone understand around me, only I get it and love it
AyrA_ch@reddit (OP)
The old reddit design has this thing where there's a steep learning curve but once you get it, it outperforms the new design.
Deiskos@reddit
Steep learning curve? What's there to learn? Well, except Markdown I guess.
AlSweigart@reddit
I don't have sources readily available, but I remember threaded forums being really hard for people to parse. They were used to just reading top to bottom, like in newspaper articles or books. The idea that you pay attention to indentation to see what something is in response to was unintuitive. (Maybe it still is.)
Here on r/programming, we probably have no problem with the concept.
Kok_Nikol@reddit
It's more usable than the new site.
archiminos@reddit
What's steep about it? New reddit is a masterclass in how NOT to design a website.
Kyupiiii@reddit
Regarding fancy blogs, I have an irrational hatred for hero images, especially when it is AI generated. Just give me the text on a plain site.
Tasgall@reddit
Anyone whose website has one of those popups that appear when you move your mouse up to close the tab is my mortal enemy by default.
SarahEpsteinKellen@reddit
WTF ? 😱😱😱
AyrA_ch@reddit (OP)
<!-- Didn't knew you could stack them, did you? -->Kok_Nikol@reddit
This was my reaction as well!
scorcher24@reddit
We could start by having an ironclad indicator what kind of device we are serving. Why is this not a thing? If there only were a method for that. We could call it user agent string.
Trang0ul@reddit
Speaking of Space Jam, it's here: https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
enderfx@reddit
I read this on my phone and the experience sucks. We didnt think about responsive in Dreamweaver/Frontpage, did we? 🗿
AyrA_ch@reddit (OP)
Back in the Dreamweaver/Frontpage times those devices didn't exist. Responsive design was merely adapting to slightly smaller or larger resolutions than the default you used. Things like adapting for touch controls were years away.
enderfx@reddit
What do you mean didnt exist?!
Didnt you have a Palm / PDA? Because I absolutely did not.
giantsparklerobot@reddit
PDAs in the 90s often had no online connectivity. Some devices could (barely) send faxes and use very rudimentary services over cellular. For all practical purposes the modern concept of a smartphone did not exist in the 90s.
Even once mobile devices gained more online connectivity it wasn't until 2007 or so until mobile browsers were barely that. They had almost zero support for JavaScript and CSS. The low resolution screens, anemic cellular bandwidth, and overall bad hardware performance did these browsers no favors. Remote rendering browsers like Opera Mini were a poor imitation of the desktop web.
In the 90s a "responsive" design was one where the left aligned table layout maxed out at a little over 600 pixels so the whole page fit into a browser windows without scrolling horizontally.
enderfx@reddit
Dude dont take the joke to Jupiter. I just said it looks like shit on mobile and im joking around. Take your wikipedia home
rjcarr@reddit
The first truly incredible website I can remember was Google Maps. There wasn't anything even close to that complex on the client at the time. I remember I thought, damn, they have some javascript wizards working there.
Maykey@reddit
Some still are
For comparison each time I see pytorch forum in google, I look for other page: modern forums with their dot-dot-dot-dot opening animation suck.
(This message was sent from old reddit layout)
bzbub2@reddit
>You're experiencing it right now. This website is looped through a RS-232 serial connection at 56k baud rate (actually a little bit extra to handle protocol overhead). I disabled the server cache so you can experience the scrollbar shrinking as content slowly loads in.
amazing
Afro_Samurai@reddit
Still loads faster then a lot of media-heavy pages.
BetaRhoOmega@reddit
This and the progressive scan image loading made me smile. What a cool web page.
This also reminds me I really need to get around to playing Hypno Space Outlaw.
UXUIDD@reddit
i havent seen anything about
shevy-java@reddit
I used the crimsoneditor!
Shame it died. Would have been nice to evolve it naturally.
Simple editors such as gedit are ok but they don't seem to have improved that much in the last +25 years.
damageinc86@reddit
did anyone ever visit absurd.org back in the day? that was a magical html journey.
Worth_Trust_3825@reddit
it's absurd that you can purchase this with 10 easy installments over klarna
damageinc86@reddit
No,...i mean the original absurd.org website from the 90s.