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> Most websites were written with html, so they were all unique. Every single website on the internet always was, is and will be HTML (with various kinds of XM

> Most websites were written with html, so they were all unique. Every single website on the internet always was, is and will be HTML (with various kinds of XML/SVG markup sometimes). People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible. I don't see why I should feel nostalgia for an Internet plagued by `<marquee>`s, poorly-laid out flashing gifs and bright yellow text on a white background.

Latty 9y ago
I saw a lot of people trying to avoid HTML in their websites in the past. The flash ones are the obvious example, but I once had the pleasure of an entire site that looked like any other, except it took forever to load and links worked weirdly. That was because the entire site was an image map over a giant .bmp for each page.
- fiala__ 9y ago
  Oh yes, totally forgot about flash and `<map>`s – but one could argue even those were originally designed to solve the problems of 'vanilla' HTML. They of course failed and HTML kind of prevailed, but only by being coupled with a massive set of APIs on the Web Platform. If it wasn't for those JS APIs, we might be stuck with Flash forever.
- donatj 9y ago
  Lol, I remember working in a place where half the devs SWORE Flex was the future of all websites. Really worked out :) I also remember converting a site made entirely of Java applets to html and JavaScript in the early 2000s.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Every single website on the internet always was, is and will be HTML (with various kinds of XML/SVG markup sometimes). People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible. Unstyled HTML (optionally with user style sheets) is more usable and accessible than today's one-size-fits-the-designer design for the kind of content that used to dominate (and is still a large segment of) the web. (We've got better tools for making usable and accessible content, but they are mostly not used for that purpose.) For interactive applications, its a different story.
- fiala__ 9y ago
  Sure, but 100% unstyled HTML was extremely rare even in the 90s. The problem with everyone writing their own crap HTML is that the sites become terrible and unusable, because they lack good design. What platforms like Twitter/FB initially did was just provide a unified, usable interface to a certain kind of information. Compare to MySpace, which collapsed partly because vast amounts of the profile pages were horrible.
  - kps 9y ago
    Browsers should (have) provide(d) good design by default — write simple <p>s and <hN>s and get beautiful presentation.
    - lmm 9y ago
      Yep. The original Bootstrap is a bug report against browsers - its defaults are what the browser should have been doing with unstyled pages all along.
  - lucaspiller 9y ago
    I still (I’m in my twenties) remember building buttons and titles from images. Not really useable unless you are using the resolution the page was designed for, and don’t care about responsiveness or using a screen reader.
superkuh 9y ago
It doesn't count when you use a javascript to generate the html. Just look at a site like NASA.gov. Without JS enabled it's just a black, blank page.
cm2187 9y ago
Websites used to do something that completely disappeared: not using javascript to fuck with the behaviour of the browser. You used to be able to scroll down and the page would scroll down. Right click on a link and see your contextual menu. Copy or paste something and it would actually copy and paste. Half of the sites today break the browser in one way or another.
- aembleton 9y ago
  Really, I remember plenty of sites in the 90s that would change the colour of your scroll bar and override your right click to tell you how everything is copyrighted.
boomlinde 9y ago
> People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible. Then gradually forgot about it? These days we have our WingDings (FontAwesome), popups ("please subscribe to our newsletter" modals), best viewed in Netscape Navigator 4 ("you are using an outdated browser"), best viewed in 800x600 ("please rotate your device"), auto-playing General MIDI music (auto-playing videos), slow load times (not due to a 28.8k modems, but bloat) and other ridiculous practices that don't really have any 1998 equivalents (hijacking scrolling, pop-in-pop-out menus, hijacking the browser history or giant banners that follow you around as you scroll (without using frames, so good practice!)). Often for no good reason. Where we had <marquee> we now have pop-in chat bots, subscription reminders, social media sharing links using a third of the screen, nonsensical page transitions etc. It's all exploiting what could be very useful technology, and I'm not saying it's much better or much worse, but at least in the 90s the regression you'd experience by not running any scripts was that there wouldn't be any asterisk snowflakes falling around christmas, not that the plain text article you were about to read suddenly became unreadable or unnavigable. It seems the lessons consistently learned from the past are the most trivial and are ignorant of the cause of the original criticisms. Don't use tables for layout (instead implement your convoluted page layout using <div> pyramids and CSS hacks!), don't use frames (use "position: fixed;" to waste screen real estate instead, and use JS to break navigation!) Web people were for a brief moment enthused with the idea of proper human- and machine readable content markup respecting established standards. But we're not there any more if we ever were, developers preferring to serve the most simple content using 500k of JavaScript and 200k of CSS browser workarounds over plain (X)HTML with simple styling.
- HelloNurse 9y ago
  Sophisticated technology allows bigger mistakes, but the most important difference between 1998 annoyances and 2017 annoyances is malice and submission to external interests becoming standards and replacing, to a large extent, innocent carelessness and ignorance. For example, a self-hosted banner ad was an abuse of client bandwidth and an issue between webmasters and their audience, while a modern banner ad from Google is an attack on user privacy that a Google serf who wants a little money perpetrates against another Google serf who wants convenient "services" for the benefit of their common master.

Latty 9y ago

I saw a lot of people trying to avoid HTML in their websites in the past. The flash ones are the obvious example, but I once had the pleasure of an entire site that looked like any other, except it took forever to load and links worked weirdly. That was because the entire site was an image map over a giant .bmp for each page.

fiala__ 9y ago
Oh yes, totally forgot about flash and `<map>`s – but one could argue even those were originally designed to solve the problems of 'vanilla' HTML. They of course failed and HTML kind of prevailed, but only by being coupled with a massive set of APIs on the Web Platform. If it wasn't for those JS APIs, we might be stuck with Flash forever.
donatj 9y ago
Lol, I remember working in a place where half the devs SWORE Flex was the future of all websites. Really worked out :) I also remember converting a site made entirely of Java applets to html and JavaScript in the early 2000s.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> Every single website on the internet always was, is and will be HTML (with various kinds of XML/SVG markup sometimes). People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible. Unstyled HTML (optionally with user style sheets) is more usable and accessible than today's one-size-fits-the-designer design for the kind of content that used to dominate (and is still a large segment of) the web. (We've got better tools for making usable and accessible content, but they are mostly not used for that purpose.) For interactive applications, its a different story.

fiala__ 9y ago
Sure, but 100% unstyled HTML was extremely rare even in the 90s. The problem with everyone writing their own crap HTML is that the sites become terrible and unusable, because they lack good design. What platforms like Twitter/FB initially did was just provide a unified, usable interface to a certain kind of information. Compare to MySpace, which collapsed partly because vast amounts of the profile pages were horrible.
- kps 9y ago
  Browsers should (have) provide(d) good design by default — write simple <p>s and <hN>s and get beautiful presentation.
  - lmm 9y ago
    Yep. The original Bootstrap is a bug report against browsers - its defaults are what the browser should have been doing with unstyled pages all along.
- lucaspiller 9y ago
  I still (I’m in my twenties) remember building buttons and titles from images. Not really useable unless you are using the resolution the page was designed for, and don’t care about responsiveness or using a screen reader.

superkuh 9y ago

It doesn't count when you use a javascript to generate the html. Just look at a site like NASA.gov. Without JS enabled it's just a black, blank page.

cm2187 9y ago

Websites used to do something that completely disappeared: not using javascript to fuck with the behaviour of the browser. You used to be able to scroll down and the page would scroll down. Right click on a link and see your contextual menu. Copy or paste something and it would actually copy and paste. Half of the sites today break the browser in one way or another.

aembleton 9y ago
Really, I remember plenty of sites in the 90s that would change the colour of your scroll bar and override your right click to tell you how everything is copyrighted.

boomlinde 9y ago

> People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible. Then gradually forgot about it? These days we have our WingDings (FontAwesome), popups ("please subscribe to our newsletter" modals), best viewed in Netscape Navigator 4 ("you are using an outdated browser"), best viewed in 800x600 ("please rotate your device"), auto-playing General MIDI music (auto-playing videos), slow load times (not due to a 28.8k modems, but bloat) and other ridiculous practices that don't really have any 1998 equivalents (hijacking scrolling, pop-in-pop-out menus, hijacking the browser history or giant banners that follow you around as you scroll (without using frames, so good practice!)). Often for no good reason. Where we had <marquee> we now have pop-in chat bots, subscription reminders, social media sharing links using a third of the screen, nonsensical page transitions etc. It's all exploiting what could be very useful technology, and I'm not saying it's much better or much worse, but at least in the 90s the regression you'd experience by not running any scripts was that there wouldn't be any asterisk snowflakes falling around christmas, not that the plain text article you were about to read suddenly became unreadable or unnavigable. It seems the lessons consistently learned from the past are the most trivial and are ignorant of the cause of the original criticisms. Don't use tables for layout (instead implement your convoluted page layout using <div> pyramids and CSS hacks!), don't use frames (use "position: fixed;" to waste screen real estate instead, and use JS to break navigation!) Web people were for a brief moment enthused with the idea of proper human- and machine readable content markup respecting established standards. But we're not there any more if we ever were, developers preferring to serve the most simple content using 500k of JavaScript and 200k of CSS browser workarounds over plain (X)HTML with simple styling.

HelloNurse 9y ago
Sophisticated technology allows bigger mistakes, but the most important difference between 1998 annoyances and 2017 annoyances is malice and submission to external interests becoming standards and replacing, to a large extent, innocent carelessness and ignorance. For example, a self-hosted banner ad was an abuse of client bandwidth and an issue between webmasters and their audience, while a modern banner ad from Google is an attack on user privacy that a Google serf who wants a little money perpetrates against another Google serf who wants convenient "services" for the benefit of their common master.