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I miss this era of the Internet. It represents a period of time where average people used the open Web to publish, rather than post on a corporation's platform.
by Legion 9y ago
I miss this era of the Internet. It represents a period of time where average people used the open Web to publish, rather than post on a corporation's platform.
Obviously there's been plenty of development since then that I would not give back, but people favoring publishing their own sites rather than posting on social media is not incompatible with those developments. That part didn't need to be lost.
- TheGRS 9y agoMost who were just tinkering still posted to something like geocities, but I agree that spirit has been lost. What do they do in middle school / high school web development classes these days anyway? Kind of the appeal 20 years ago was that you could learn HTML pretty easily and whip up a simple personal website like this and have fun doing it. It didn't exactly "teach" much, at least in my experience, but it was inspirational in a lot of ways. When I took a class like that we used Dreamweaver (after writing some pages in notepad of course) and later Flash. Never learned Javascript back then, in fact our teacher encouraged us to check it out, but it wasn't part of the curriculum. It was mostly a class for anyone interested in dipping their toe in the web without any prior experience.
- vikiomega9 9y agogeocities simply made it "free" to publish on the web I thought? As opposed to being a platform that enforced complex policies
- TheGRS 9y agoSure, but you still had to host their advertisements. I would consider it a platform, but I also wouldn't compare it to facebook.
- saagarjha 9y agoA lot of web development curriculum these days tends to focus on writing apps with JavaScript, or learning a new library. HTML/CSS is still taught, but I feel the “HTML is not a real language” sort of drives people away.
- rtpg 9y agoA big difficulty is that HTML by itself doesn't give you good ways to define templates so it's a pretty dreadful task. Web components can change that in the future but until that it's pretty normal for developers to opt for tools that allow for creating a HTML fragment and building up HTML in another language. Imagine if we had to do the c calling convention song and dance on every function call...
- Rumudiez 9y agoThere are plenty of simple templating options still out there. Twig, handlebars, and jekyll would all be good introductions in my opinion
- irrational 9y agoThis is something I've struggled with. When I think of introducing people to web development I think about how I got my start - creating a website to display pictures of my newborn daughter in 1997. Only, who would do such a thing these days? People would just post those to Facebook or Instagram. Creating a web app is too much too soon in my opinion. What is a good project that has relevance in 2018, but doesn't require anything more than vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS?
- mmphosis 9y ago> Only, who would do such a thing these days? I would. The corporate sites you mention are cumbersome and detrimental. Yes, creating a web app is too much, and so is a project, in my opinion. A web document is all that might be needed: <html><head><title>website</title></head> <body><img src="newborn.png"></body></html>
- flukus 9y agoIsn't that overkill as well? Not sure on the current state of ftp support but I think firefox still allows ftp browsing. We had protocols and programs dedicated to sharing stuff like this before we put them behind commercial walls.
- heavenlyblue 9y agoA marketing landing page is a good example.
- athenot 9y agoI just stumbled on W3's ActivityPub and hope this takes off. If we can combine the independance of publishing and a way to link stuff together, it might go a long way to reduce our dependency on big platforms. https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
- tomcam 9y ago>a way to link stuff together Maybe... hyperlinks via <a> tags?
- vvillena 9y agoLast I saw, hyperlinks didn't "provide a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and content". Are there any practical applications of this protocol on the wild, or on paper? This server-to-server communication reminds me of email in a good way. It could open a door for websites to talk to each other without Facebook or Twitter chaperoning the whole thing.
- NDICjQ2zlm5vJ6S 9y agoFederated microblogging: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon Distributed video streaming: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
- 9y ago
- eksemplar 9y agoI don’t think fewer people publish on their own sites today. There are just more people on the internet.
- Retric 9y agoGlobally that's probably true, but I doubt it true in the US as I know plenty of people that used to have personal websites that stopped.
- vbezhenar 9y agoAre you sure that they were average people? In my experience, average people only started to publish things on Web after blog platforms enabled them to do so. The only people who published in the web at that time were people with technical background (or people who had enough free time and will to learn). HTML is not easy for someone, who's not computer-savvy and a quest to publish and support your website might frighten experienced software developers even know.
- krisdol 9y agoI call them average. My buddies and I were all starting up our own sites and fan pages about our favorite cartoons using homestead and geocities before we were teens. Didn't know crud about HTML but WYSIWYG editors existed then too.
- ionvoe3w 9y agoI recall kids who weren't computer geniuses would still start websites about their hobbies / interests using geocities or tripod. They have wysiwyg editors that were easy. But of course, just having access to computers and the internet wasn't a given for many families
- vvanders 9y agoYup, Dreamweaver and Frontpage were very much a thing in that era. Plenty of WYSIWYG options existed.
- adventured 9y agoI knew a lot of people in school and work places that were using Netscape's built-in WYSIWYG editor, Composer. They couldn't build a site in raw HTML to save their life otherwise, but they could throw something basic together in Composer. Before that, if I'm not mistaken, Navigator 3 had some kind of simple page editor with it as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer
- 9y ago
- starsinspace 9y agoWhen talking about this, people often like to joke about the webdesign back then. But the personal websites had personality. Facebook profiles feel like government forms to me... "here, fill in this standardized array of fields with your personal data."
- baby 9y agoI need to write a love letter to Flash and how it made every website look like a christmas tree. There was so much life in there, it was a race to dynamism when we didn’t know how to make things dynamic. Now it’s all about flat design and static pages and don’t make the users learn a new UI and use the same CSS framework everybody else is using.
- marban 9y agoI don't miss Flash but the jaw-dropping impression when visiting Gabo for the first time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y-ESJS911c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y-ESJS911c
- brianwawok 9y agoThat was some cutting edge stuff The first 3 times you saw it ;)
- Reedx 9y agoWow, I remember that! I was amazed by it at the time. It was absolutely top notch. But seeing it now has kind of ruined my memory of it, heh. Like replaying a video game from when I was a kid. But it's interesting to see just how much the standard for design has changed in a relatively short time.
- nsgi 9y agoDVD menus are annoying enough when you're trying to watch a film, and they're supposed to be entertaining. Can you imagine if every website was like that?
- Terretta 9y ago> represents a period of time where average people used the open Web to publish Come on, you know publishing can’t work without a paywall or your adblocker turned off, everyone knows that.
- sanderjd 9y agoPublishing can work without those things. What's not clear is that journalism can. It is expensive to groom primary sources and investigate stories. I'm quite happy that at least a few organisations seem to have figured out a model by which they can fund such things. Otherwise it would be very difficult for me to know anything true about the world outside my immediate friends and family.
- gfodor 9y agoI'm optimistic that the move of computing into mixed reality (VR/AR) will be a grand opportunity to re-capture this spirit. But instead of making their own pages, people will be making their own places and things.
- klez 9y agoHeh, I wish. What I see is probably another walled garden.
- _emacsomancer_ 9y agoI still have a site of this sort: a site I used to publish, which I created in the very early 2000s using my 90s html knowledge. It still uses frames.
- StavrosK 9y agoI wasn't going to post this yet, but fuck it: I miss that era too, and I wanted to make it easier for people to publish their websites, so I made this with a friend: https://hearth.eternum.io/ https://hearth.eternum.io/ It gives you a folder, like Dropbox. Drop some files in, and you have your own website (over IPFS). It's still early, but it should work well enough. I'd love to hear some feedback, if anyone tries it.
- indigodaddy 9y agoAny sample sites that are based on/use hearth? Is it like a normal http(s) protocol/type URL?
- StavrosK 9y agoYes, you can access it both over https (through the Eternum gateway) and through IPFS. Here's my personal site: https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/QmRCWYEYU2WvLJBbj54k5p1AFHZ2TefWKDSSgTkLDU4UDY/ https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/QmRCWYEYU2WvLJBbj54k5p1AFHZ2TefW...
- diimdeep 9y agoEveryone is telling us they only platform we ever need, and at same time they all closed platform with their own API and without open protocols like RSS(dead for every big company). There are only 214 million active sites and this number stop growing[1] In contrast there are 2 billion active FB user pages, and 65 million FB business pages and growing.[2] [1] https://twitter.com/andrestaltz/status/969544747374260224/photo/1 https://twitter.com/andrestaltz/status/969544747374260224/ph... [2] https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/facebook-page-statistics/ https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/facebook-page-statis...
- StavrosK 9y agoWhat's the relevance of your comment to mine?
- shakna 9y ago
- farnsworthy 9y agoOr how about: "to publish, rather than promote..."?
- fendmark 9y agoTripod pre-Lycos was an amazing learning space for me in the mid nineties. Domains and hosting were significantly more expensive than they are now (especially for a freshman in high school) and Tripod was an amazing lifeline. Little did I know that my time spent building fan sites for punk rock bands more than 20 years ago would end up having such a significant impact on my career even today. That said, I'm ashamed of all the sites that I built with Image Maps and Frames and glorious tables! It really is sad that the rise of the social media has meant that so many people will not have the opportunity to have this type of experience in learning front end development from the ground up.
- JasonFruit 9y agoMe too! I just went to look for my old Tripod site, and it's still there! http://bratschenspieler.tripod.com/index.htm http://bratschenspieler.tripod.com/index.htm
- gowld 9y agoWhich era was that? Back in the 90s average people did not post anything to the Internet _at all).
- pvelagal 9y agoI miss it too. Also, these sites make me nostalgic and for some reason they look precious.
- chrischen 9y agoI think the main difference was regular people used to write HTML as far as into the myspace days. Now they just share photos and write posts in broken english or within 140 chars.
- zdky 9y agoIt is not lost. There are still plenty of tools that helps individuals publish their own web content, yet most people would simply post on social media now. I think most people only want to get their ideas published. Whether it is in the form of tweets, blogs or their own sites, it does not matter much. If social media were available in this early era, average people wouldn't need to publish their own sites.