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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 wil

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 before. 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. Looks like Web 1.0 got something right after all :)

est31 7y ago
Fortunately there are plenty of static site generators. Frontpage is out of support and likely the currently popular generators will meet their end one day as well. But even then you can still run them in the future, and their output should not have any major issues (unlike a CMS which might get hacked if it's not kept up to date).
danielbarla 7y ago
> If you want something to last, don't base it on something that won't last. and > 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. While simplicity is a great way to future proof things, I'm not convinced that this argument in general would work nearly as well without the benefit of hindsight. One could be forgiven for confusing it with "guess the future correctly". Plenty of relatively safe bets from 10, 20, 30 years ago haven't panned out that well. It's an interesting line of thinking though: exactly what properties of HTML make it so long lived?
- untog 7y ago
  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 think this example is necessarily bulletproof: it requires a working copy of Frontpage. If Microsoft behaved more like Apple it might have been deprecated away long ago!
  - btrettel 7y ago
    This is one reason why the static site generator I use for my personal website uses HTML rather than something like Markdown. I don't think Markdown is going anyway, incidentally, or that it would be hard to process on my own if I needed to. But the HTML I use is simple enough and Markdown only decreases the probability the site will last a long time.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      Markdown and/or markdown processors are known to change. Since there's no single Markdown spec, determining just how a page will render, or what will break, is a bit of a crapshoot. And since Markdown treats nonparsable markup as ... plain text, you don't even get errors or other indicators of failure. You've got to view and validate the output manually or by some other means. With formal tag-based markup languages (HTML, SGML, LaTeX, DocBook, etc.) you've at least got 1) an actual markup spec and 2) something that will or won't validate (though whether or not the processor actually gives a damn about that is another question, hello, HTML, I'm looking at your "The Web is an error condition": https://deirdre.net/programming-sucks-why-i-quit/ https://deirdre.net/programming-sucks-why-i-quit/) I can't find the post at the moment, but someone recently wrote a cogent rant on the fact that a change in their hosting provider (GitHub via a static site generator IIRC) had swapped out markdown processors, with changed behaviours, rendering (literally) all their previously-authored content broken. Which is indead a pain. I personally like Markdown, and find it hugely convenient. For major projects though, I suspect what I'll end up doing is starting in Markdown, and eventually switching to a more stable markup format, which probably means LaTeX (HTML has ... proved less robustly stable over the 25+ years I've worked with it). Though for simple-to-modestly-complex documents, Markdown is generally satisfactory, stable, and close enough to unadorned ASCII that fixing what breaks is not a horribly complicated task. Up to modest levels of scale, at least.
      - btrettel 7y ago
        I appreciate your reply. Seems Markdown is more complex than I recognized and this just makes me want to avoid it more. If you do find the rant you mentioned, let me know. > HTML has ... proved less robustly stable over the 25+ years I've worked with it The first website I made in 2002 still views fine in a modern browser. I didn't do anything fancy, though. I would be interested in what has been unstable as it might give me ideas on what to avoid in HTML. I don't find HTML to be that much harder than plain text or Markdown so I think I'll keep using it for smaller projects. LaTeX is worth considering as well, particularly given that I will have math on some of my webpages. One issue is that the stability of LaTeX depends strongly on which packages you use. I need to take a closer look at the health of every package I use. I think avoiding external dependencies is easier with HTML.
- 8lall0 7y ago
  I think that the right way to rephrase that is "use the right tool for the right job". How many blogs are powered by wordpress? How many of them can be replaced with a static gen? HTML has a lot of garbage, but at least it's very hard to break it.
  - stevenicr 7y ago
    Your comment merges well with one slightly above from TheFlyingFish, It's that browsers pretty good at displaying stuff even when html is not to spec. and really it's that everyone uses browsers that still display text and such on the screen even if it's broken in several places. This could change if google decided to stop showing pages with broken html - like them killing flash big cuts at a time. I have turned several worpress based sites into static html with one of the static html making plugins - and that turned those tools into the right ones for those jobs. I think most WP sites can be converted and be just fine, most people don't add new posts to them regularly from what I've seen.
- theandrewbailey 7y ago
  > It's an interesting line of thinking though: exactly what properties of HTML make it so long lived? I've thought about this on and off for a few years. Here's what I've come up with: 1. Popularity. You can't really display anything in a web browser without it, blank pages with one AJAX script notwithstanding. 2. Ease of use. Open a text editor, type some markup, save the file with .html, and open in a browser. When you're done, transfer to a server to show the world. That's a pretty straightforward process. 3. Well-defined, open standard. Every important piece of the web is defined, from the markup to the protocol to transfer it. I think that reasonably bug-free implementations of those standards help.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    I'd argue your #3 is wide of the mark. It's not that there's a well-defined open standard. It's that browsers will eat any old crap that's thrown at them and turn it into something plausible, if not precisely what the author intended or reader really wants. Yes, there's a standard, and yes it's open. It's observed far more in the breach, as a few minutes with a validator on well-known sites will demonstrate. Your comment alone (prior to my response to it) returns: Tidy found 21 warnings and 0 errors!
    - TheFlyingFish 7y ago
      >It's that browsers will eat any old crap that's thrown at them and turn it into something plausible, if not precisely what the author intended or reader really wants. Reminds me of the fairly prescient "In Praise of Evolvable Systems" essay from 1996: https://web.archive.org/web/20190409041249/http://www.shirky.com/writings/evolve.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190409041249/http://www.shirky...
    - benibela 7y ago
      Even worse, the browsers could not handle standard html. HTML was based on SGML and it has all the nice SGML features. Something like <title/Hello World/ was valid HTML afair. But then the browser never implemented it properly, so html5 just describes the behaviour of the browsers.
- bitexploder 7y ago
  My text files still work. I have MUD design documents from when I was in high school (mid to late 90s). Org mode and Markdown are kind of eternal formats. Even if all the tooling dies, they still look decent. Basic HTML still works well enough as well. You can write a parser for XML pretty easily. HTML can also be processed and rendered trivially. I think we could collectively find some other technologies that are likely to be around in another 20 years. The simpler the file format the more likely it is to be around :) edit: A few more popped into my head. CSV. SQL schema + Data dumps (text format). The common theme to everything here is plain text. SQLite, although binary, is probably close to eternal. Git is eternal enough (recent HN post showed even POSIX shell is good enough to write a basic git client). JSON is easy to write a parser for as well. YAML.
- _jal 7y ago
  It is exactly the "guess the future" problem that static sites avoid. The vast bulk of software goes unsupported in less than 25 years. If you want to depend on something that long, you can guess which package will survive that long, or you can store your data in formats that the widest array of tooling supports. If you drop into a coma after uploading your static HTML and wake up in 25 years, you might have to use whatever fills the text-manipulation-scripting niche then to beat it into the right shape to import into whatever kids these days are using. If you used Wordpress, well, maybe it takes over the world, maybe it ends up a Wikipedia entry. (Putting aside, of course, that your site began hosting cryptominers a week after you slipped into that coma because you missed an update.)
- bentcorner 7y ago
  > exactly what properties of HTML make it so long lived? I think we're thinking about this backwards. It's not anything inherent to HTML that make it long lived, it's that the code to parse static HTML is simple, it's more or less standardized and has stuck around for a long time.
Aperocky 7y ago
Use static HTML and javascript, I don't think they'll break js compatibility in a long long time, ES3 is still well supported and it's out in 1999.
geocrasher 7y ago
I think I should have said "don't base it on something that CAN'T last". This requires no future knowledge. We know that a WordPress version and its supported PHP will be obsolete.
- tasuki 7y ago
  I've been running a WordPress blog since early 2006 with very little maintenance. I'm sure it's all outdated again, but still appears to work.
  - giantrobot 7y ago
    If you haven't been keeping the WP back end up to date it's not functionality that's a problem it is security. Unpatched WordPress installs account for a huge portion of malware distribution. There's a number of exploits that allow attackers to upload files to your server. So they upload malicious payloads that exploits then download to infected systems.
    - jimhi 7y ago
      Most of those exploits are from plugins. If they aren’t using those they can also change the default login url. Also Wordpress lets you export and reimport to current versions without coding. I think it’s one the best future proof platforms, most of the web still runs on it.
      - giantrobot 7y ago
        Many WordPress exploits are in plug-ins but there's still plenty in the base install (over multiple versions). Also suggesting that "most of the web" runs on WordPress is a bit absurd. WordPress accounts for a huge portion of spam-y SEO blogs and other outright noise on the web. It's popular no doubt but definitely not most of the web. It's popularity and porous security is a big problem as it's such a huge malware delivery vector. Everything from worm payloads to JavaScript crypto miners is served up from millions of exploited WordPress installs.
paganel 7y ago
It also helps if you self-host, I have personally self-hosted a subversion repository with my own projects using Trac [1] for 10 years now. [1] https://trac.edgewall.org/ https://trac.edgewall.org/
- user5994461 7y ago
  Trac has been end of life for some time. It doesn't run on python 3. There are open bug tickets about it that have been stale for years. Maybe it will be upgraded now that python 2 is officially dead, but given it wasn't so far and there was no effort in that direction, I wouldn't bet on it.
  - jahlove 7y ago
    Is "EOL" the right term? They released a new version 2 days ago: https://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracChangeLog https://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracChangeLog
    - user5994461 7y ago
      I find it odd too that they did some minor releases, yet python 3 was not on the radar. End of life is correct. It is end of life since it doesn't run on current platforms. I am not sure if the latest distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat) have all removed python 2 packages. If not, it will be gone with the next major release. You're going to be in trouble to run software with no available interpreter, plus all the libraries in use are effectively abandoned.
      - jahlove 7y ago
        > I am not sure if the latest distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat) have all removed python 2 packages. If not, it will be gone with the next major release Red Hat has not. Ubuntu has not in its most recent stable release. Debian "unstable" is still using Python 2, so I don't think your statement holds up. https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=redhat https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=redhat https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=ubuntu https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=ubuntu https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=debian https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=debian Also, Trac developers ave been making progress on Python3 as recently as 8 days ago: https://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/12130 https://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/12130
LeftCorner 7y ago
I been using ColdFusion for over 20 years. The HTML it creates can be as simple or complex as the developer intends. The output can last decades without updating, I don't understand your comparison.
- mi100hael 7y ago
  The issue isn't the HTML it renders, it's finding a hosting provider that supports running it server-side. Of course you could run it yourself, but maintaining a server for a basic blog or personal site arguably exits the realm of "simple."
  - blacksmith_tb 7y ago
    For a blog or personal site (that didn't have any functionality that really needed a back end) I suppose you could just scrape the generated pages and push them up to any host, but CF seems like a fairly awkward static site generator compared to the usual suspects like Jekyll, Hugo, etc.
- nonamenoslogan 7y ago
  I recently changed jobs to a shop with 15-20 year old ColdFusion+SQL instances that were originally HP3000 Image Databases and COBOL screens. At first I laughed, now after a couple years, I agree ColdFusion is pretty robust and its HTML isn't bad at all. Its easy to do fairly complex forms, file operations, email generation, document generation, database in-out things, and it just keeps running and running. Its easy to read and understand and even though we're using MX-era code, the server still installs and runs on recent (Ubuntu 16.04LTS) Linux with no issues.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  They weren't talking about the output. They were talking about availability of hosting.
angrygoat 7y ago
Back in 2001 I redid the UWA computer club website (https://ucc.asn.au/ https://ucc.asn.au/) using XSLT with a custom doctype ('grahame'). In the early 2000s XML was the cool shiny thing. They're still using it, in fact I found out recently that someone wrote a Markdown to 'doctype grahame' converter to 'modernise' the site. I guess what I actually built back then was an early static site generator, but it's still kind of cool they're using it 19 years later, hacky as it was / is :)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- bjoli 7y ago
  I still use my old XML doctype with xslt to produce some websites I maintain. Whenever, if ever, xslt is removed from browsers, converting it to a static site generator will be easy. I regret nothing. Editing simple xml using Emacs is a breeze.
- tcgv 7y ago
  Last time I worked with XSLT was in 2014, redesigning a major Brazilian airline reservation and ticketing system. At the time their passenger service system (Navitaire New Skies [1]) had already switched their white label front-end app from a home grown XSLT web framework to ASP .NET MVC 5, but the company I was working for wasn't particularly interested in paying the (higher) fee for using the "new" front-end framework. [1] https://www.navitaire.com/new-skies-reservation-system https://www.navitaire.com/new-skies-reservation-system
ath92 7y ago
While this website still works fine, the actual HTML that Frontpage generated isn't exactly easy to maintain if Frontpage stops working for whatever reason. The author of this website is basically stuck using whatever version of Frontpage supports the markup of his website. And I bet there have been plenty of people who used <some other WYSIWYG webpage editor> who are no longer able to maintain their website because their editor no longer runs on their system.
- bjornjajajaja 7y ago
  Microsoft has been fairly good at allowing older binaries to run on newer systems. Apple is pretty annoying in this regard. There’s a lot of software that doesn’t work on versions maybe only 5 years old. A lot of software doesn’t need to change to be honest. Microsoft word for example. Word processing: you sit down and type stuff, maybe change the font once or twice. I guess the collaborative features are nice being able to edit the same document with others. It would be fun to use an older machine and see how productive you can be with the old software too !
  - joking 7y ago
    Been hit with that, I needed to run chromium v49 to be able to remote debug some TVs with old opera tv sdks, the version I had stoped working, and several versions that I tried crashed when using the chromium devtools. I ended having to use a windows virtual machine
  - scarface74 7y ago
    You haven’t tried to run 16 bit software on 64 bit Windows have you?
    - ajross 7y ago
      True enough. Though to be fair the last new version of a Win16 OS shipped 26 years ago, and Win32 became the standard API in consumer products 24 years ago. There are degrees of worry here. Software of the vintage you're talking about was contemporary with System 7, and the closest ancestor to current OS X was called "NextStep 3.3". The point upthread was that genuinely useful stuff gets retired just a few years after release in the Apple world, and I think that's broadly true. It's true with hardware too -- professional audio people are stuck with truckloads of firewire hardware that they can't use with their new laptops, for example.
GuyPostington 7y ago
This is the internet as I remember it.
- m3andros 7y ago
  Alas, we're not spring chickens anymore... But isn't nostalgia a great feeling? (Frontpage was my very first introduction to a WYSIWYG editor.)
  - GuyPostington 7y ago
    :)
OpticalTransmit 7y ago
There is an obscure search engine called wiby.me that only indexes pages like what is posted here. I used to design websites in the late 90's, and very much miss the simple HTML pages of yore.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Thanks for that suggestion. I'm glad it's a three-day weekend!
achairapart 7y ago
Good Practice: Use the least powerful language suitable for expressing information, constraints or programs on the World Wide Web.[0] [0]: https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/leastPower.html https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/leastPower.html
ekianjo 7y ago
> Can you imagine running the same WordPress version for 25 years? If you keep active on your Wordpress install, the regular updates will be no issue for you and will (almost) never break your website. Not sure why you would expect a regular Wordpress user to run the initial install without recommended/mandatory upgrades over a long period of time.
typescriptfan1 7y ago
My olde PHP sites are still running just fine.
- mad182 7y ago
  I have couple of sites I built in 2005 with plain procedural php and they are still running absolutely fine today on php 7.4 with no major rewrites.
every 7y ago
Followed to its logical if not very practical conclusion, we all wind up on gopher...
Someone 7y ago
Or use free/open software, preferably popular free/open software that runs on a popular OS. Even if the OS and software effectively die, you still would be able to run the latest version in a VM or in emulation.
wolco 7y ago
I have been running an older wordpress that I hacked up nicely. If you keep php below 5.5 no problems. Even the old mysql vs sqli still works great.
rwbt 7y ago
> If you want something to last, don't base it on something that won't last. Sounds similar to the Lindy Effect.[0] [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
scarface74 7y ago
You realize that you’re talking about a FrontPage site. The very definition of building something on a technology that won’t last.
- kome 7y ago
  but look at the code... are modern website really better? i think that FrontPage did an awesome job there.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    There were all sorts of FrontPage server side extensions to IIS that you could use to support your site if I am not mistaken.
    - int_19h 7y ago
      FPSE was mostly about publishing; think a proprietary version of WebDAV. So it was used by FrontPage itself, but not by the HTML produced by it.
asdfman123 7y ago
> Looks like Web 1.0 got something right after all :) The secret is creating a standard early on that thousands of different pieces of software depend on, so that changing it would expensive and require a phenomenal amount of decentralized coordination. Don't worry about making it good -- just make it good enough that people won't want to tear their hair out and unanimously agree to never touch it again. Make the short term cost of applying hacks on top of it low, and the cost of throwing everything out high.
khana 7y ago
Yeah now to tell the Chrome devs to put their coding hands behind their back.
Florin_Andrei 7y ago
> If you want something to last, don't base it on something that won't last. The ancient Egyptians knew something about this.
kelnos 7y ago
I don't think this is really unique to Web 1.0; certainly something that still works from the Web 1.0 days seems "impressive" just because of the passage of time, but there's probably some element of survivorship bias there. You mention ColdFusion as an example, but this guy's site is made using FrontPage. He didn't know in 2001 that he'd still be able to run FrontPage in 2020. He made a bet, and it paid off. Other people made similar bets, on other technologies, and unfortunately got it wrong. My personal website uses Jekyll, and while there's always the possibility it would become abandoned and stop working (I've definitely found someupgrades to be a pain, and ruby tooling in general doesn't help either), I'll always have the simple, readable markdown files the site is based on. While this wouldn't be an option for a non-technical website author, if I really had to, I'm sure I could write a simple markdown->html renderer over a weekend (or a converter to transform it into the future format-du-jour).
grecy 7y ago
I've been using my Wordpress site for 12 years now. Sure I upgrade versions from time to time, but the original post is still there and works perfectly. It's had around 8 million page views in that time.
boublepop 7y ago
> build a static HTML page. No way in hell today’s HTML will survive 25 years now that google owns it, browsers will literally crash due to lack of user tracking. Best just host a static txt file.
- type0 7y ago
  Nah, the next iteration would be called GHTML, it will include fact checking by Google AI and Google Analytics by default, all for free. Everyone will use it otherwise Chrome will give you strange security errors and after all you wouldn't want to use the web that is full of fake news and other content that can be offensive to someone. /s
throwaway286 7y ago
Hmm, I wonder if certain javascript based site generators will still be around in 20 years..
solinent 7y ago
Static HTML is also very secure. My personal sites are always static, it keeps server costs low and everything gets cached.
forgotmypw77 7y ago
this is why perl, txt, and static html are the top-level languages and formats for my project. with some tweaking, it can be viewed in just about any browser, down to ie3, lynx, mosaic, netscape, and opera3.
tylerjwilk00 7y ago
To be fair keeping around an old runtime of FrontPage isn't much different than keep around an old runtime of PHP.
edwinyzh 7y ago
What you said made me glad that I've just developed DocxManager (https://docxmanager.com https://docxmanager.com) - its concept is like WordPress (document-focused editor, themes and templates) but it generates standard html/css/js, and use Word as the document editor.

est31 7y ago

Fortunately there are plenty of static site generators. Frontpage is out of support and likely the currently popular generators will meet their end one day as well. But even then you can still run them in the future, and their output should not have any major issues (unlike a CMS which might get hacked if it's not kept up to date).

danielbarla 7y ago

> If you want something to last, don't base it on something that won't last. and > 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. While simplicity is a great way to future proof things, I'm not convinced that this argument in general would work nearly as well without the benefit of hindsight. One could be forgiven for confusing it with "guess the future correctly". Plenty of relatively safe bets from 10, 20, 30 years ago haven't panned out that well. It's an interesting line of thinking though: exactly what properties of HTML make it so long lived?

untog 7y ago
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 think this example is necessarily bulletproof: it requires a working copy of Frontpage. If Microsoft behaved more like Apple it might have been deprecated away long ago!
- btrettel 7y ago
  This is one reason why the static site generator I use for my personal website uses HTML rather than something like Markdown. I don't think Markdown is going anyway, incidentally, or that it would be hard to process on my own if I needed to. But the HTML I use is simple enough and Markdown only decreases the probability the site will last a long time.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Markdown and/or markdown processors are known to change. Since there's no single Markdown spec, determining just how a page will render, or what will break, is a bit of a crapshoot. And since Markdown treats nonparsable markup as ... plain text, you don't even get errors or other indicators of failure. You've got to view and validate the output manually or by some other means. With formal tag-based markup languages (HTML, SGML, LaTeX, DocBook, etc.) you've at least got 1) an actual markup spec and 2) something that will or won't validate (though whether or not the processor actually gives a damn about that is another question, hello, HTML, I'm looking at your "The Web is an error condition": https://deirdre.net/programming-sucks-why-i-quit/ https://deirdre.net/programming-sucks-why-i-quit/) I can't find the post at the moment, but someone recently wrote a cogent rant on the fact that a change in their hosting provider (GitHub via a static site generator IIRC) had swapped out markdown processors, with changed behaviours, rendering (literally) all their previously-authored content broken. Which is indead a pain. I personally like Markdown, and find it hugely convenient. For major projects though, I suspect what I'll end up doing is starting in Markdown, and eventually switching to a more stable markup format, which probably means LaTeX (HTML has ... proved less robustly stable over the 25+ years I've worked with it). Though for simple-to-modestly-complex documents, Markdown is generally satisfactory, stable, and close enough to unadorned ASCII that fixing what breaks is not a horribly complicated task. Up to modest levels of scale, at least.
    - btrettel 7y ago
      I appreciate your reply. Seems Markdown is more complex than I recognized and this just makes me want to avoid it more. If you do find the rant you mentioned, let me know. > HTML has ... proved less robustly stable over the 25+ years I've worked with it The first website I made in 2002 still views fine in a modern browser. I didn't do anything fancy, though. I would be interested in what has been unstable as it might give me ideas on what to avoid in HTML. I don't find HTML to be that much harder than plain text or Markdown so I think I'll keep using it for smaller projects. LaTeX is worth considering as well, particularly given that I will have math on some of my webpages. One issue is that the stability of LaTeX depends strongly on which packages you use. I need to take a closer look at the health of every package I use. I think avoiding external dependencies is easier with HTML.
8lall0 7y ago
I think that the right way to rephrase that is "use the right tool for the right job". How many blogs are powered by wordpress? How many of them can be replaced with a static gen? HTML has a lot of garbage, but at least it's very hard to break it.
- stevenicr 7y ago
  Your comment merges well with one slightly above from TheFlyingFish, It's that browsers pretty good at displaying stuff even when html is not to spec. and really it's that everyone uses browsers that still display text and such on the screen even if it's broken in several places. This could change if google decided to stop showing pages with broken html - like them killing flash big cuts at a time. I have turned several worpress based sites into static html with one of the static html making plugins - and that turned those tools into the right ones for those jobs. I think most WP sites can be converted and be just fine, most people don't add new posts to them regularly from what I've seen.
theandrewbailey 7y ago
> It's an interesting line of thinking though: exactly what properties of HTML make it so long lived? I've thought about this on and off for a few years. Here's what I've come up with: 1. Popularity. You can't really display anything in a web browser without it, blank pages with one AJAX script notwithstanding. 2. Ease of use. Open a text editor, type some markup, save the file with .html, and open in a browser. When you're done, transfer to a server to show the world. That's a pretty straightforward process. 3. Well-defined, open standard. Every important piece of the web is defined, from the markup to the protocol to transfer it. I think that reasonably bug-free implementations of those standards help.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  I'd argue your #3 is wide of the mark. It's not that there's a well-defined open standard. It's that browsers will eat any old crap that's thrown at them and turn it into something plausible, if not precisely what the author intended or reader really wants. Yes, there's a standard, and yes it's open. It's observed far more in the breach, as a few minutes with a validator on well-known sites will demonstrate. Your comment alone (prior to my response to it) returns: Tidy found 21 warnings and 0 errors!
  - TheFlyingFish 7y ago
    >It's that browsers will eat any old crap that's thrown at them and turn it into something plausible, if not precisely what the author intended or reader really wants. Reminds me of the fairly prescient "In Praise of Evolvable Systems" essay from 1996: https://web.archive.org/web/20190409041249/http://www.shirky.com/writings/evolve.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190409041249/http://www.shirky...
  - benibela 7y ago
    Even worse, the browsers could not handle standard html. HTML was based on SGML and it has all the nice SGML features. Something like <title/Hello World/ was valid HTML afair. But then the browser never implemented it properly, so html5 just describes the behaviour of the browsers.
bitexploder 7y ago
My text files still work. I have MUD design documents from when I was in high school (mid to late 90s). Org mode and Markdown are kind of eternal formats. Even if all the tooling dies, they still look decent. Basic HTML still works well enough as well. You can write a parser for XML pretty easily. HTML can also be processed and rendered trivially. I think we could collectively find some other technologies that are likely to be around in another 20 years. The simpler the file format the more likely it is to be around :) edit: A few more popped into my head. CSV. SQL schema + Data dumps (text format). The common theme to everything here is plain text. SQLite, although binary, is probably close to eternal. Git is eternal enough (recent HN post showed even POSIX shell is good enough to write a basic git client). JSON is easy to write a parser for as well. YAML.
_jal 7y ago
It is exactly the "guess the future" problem that static sites avoid. The vast bulk of software goes unsupported in less than 25 years. If you want to depend on something that long, you can guess which package will survive that long, or you can store your data in formats that the widest array of tooling supports. If you drop into a coma after uploading your static HTML and wake up in 25 years, you might have to use whatever fills the text-manipulation-scripting niche then to beat it into the right shape to import into whatever kids these days are using. If you used Wordpress, well, maybe it takes over the world, maybe it ends up a Wikipedia entry. (Putting aside, of course, that your site began hosting cryptominers a week after you slipped into that coma because you missed an update.)
bentcorner 7y ago
> exactly what properties of HTML make it so long lived? I think we're thinking about this backwards. It's not anything inherent to HTML that make it long lived, it's that the code to parse static HTML is simple, it's more or less standardized and has stuck around for a long time.

Aperocky 7y ago

Use static HTML and javascript, I don't think they'll break js compatibility in a long long time, ES3 is still well supported and it's out in 1999.

geocrasher 7y ago

I think I should have said "don't base it on something that CAN'T last". This requires no future knowledge. We know that a WordPress version and its supported PHP will be obsolete.

tasuki 7y ago
I've been running a WordPress blog since early 2006 with very little maintenance. I'm sure it's all outdated again, but still appears to work.
- giantrobot 7y ago
  If you haven't been keeping the WP back end up to date it's not functionality that's a problem it is security. Unpatched WordPress installs account for a huge portion of malware distribution. There's a number of exploits that allow attackers to upload files to your server. So they upload malicious payloads that exploits then download to infected systems.
  - jimhi 7y ago
    Most of those exploits are from plugins. If they aren’t using those they can also change the default login url. Also Wordpress lets you export and reimport to current versions without coding. I think it’s one the best future proof platforms, most of the web still runs on it.
    - giantrobot 7y ago
      Many WordPress exploits are in plug-ins but there's still plenty in the base install (over multiple versions). Also suggesting that "most of the web" runs on WordPress is a bit absurd. WordPress accounts for a huge portion of spam-y SEO blogs and other outright noise on the web. It's popular no doubt but definitely not most of the web. It's popularity and porous security is a big problem as it's such a huge malware delivery vector. Everything from worm payloads to JavaScript crypto miners is served up from millions of exploited WordPress installs.

paganel 7y ago

It also helps if you self-host, I have personally self-hosted a subversion repository with my own projects using Trac [1] for 10 years now. [1] https://trac.edgewall.org/ https://trac.edgewall.org/

user5994461 7y ago
Trac has been end of life for some time. It doesn't run on python 3. There are open bug tickets about it that have been stale for years. Maybe it will be upgraded now that python 2 is officially dead, but given it wasn't so far and there was no effort in that direction, I wouldn't bet on it.
- jahlove 7y ago
  Is "EOL" the right term? They released a new version 2 days ago: https://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracChangeLog https://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracChangeLog
  - user5994461 7y ago
    I find it odd too that they did some minor releases, yet python 3 was not on the radar. End of life is correct. It is end of life since it doesn't run on current platforms. I am not sure if the latest distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat) have all removed python 2 packages. If not, it will be gone with the next major release. You're going to be in trouble to run software with no available interpreter, plus all the libraries in use are effectively abandoned.
    - jahlove 7y ago
      > I am not sure if the latest distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat) have all removed python 2 packages. If not, it will be gone with the next major release Red Hat has not. Ubuntu has not in its most recent stable release. Debian "unstable" is still using Python 2, so I don't think your statement holds up. https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=redhat https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=redhat https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=ubuntu https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=ubuntu https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=debian https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=debian Also, Trac developers ave been making progress on Python3 as recently as 8 days ago: https://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/12130 https://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/12130

LeftCorner 7y ago

I been using ColdFusion for over 20 years. The HTML it creates can be as simple or complex as the developer intends. The output can last decades without updating, I don't understand your comparison.

mi100hael 7y ago
The issue isn't the HTML it renders, it's finding a hosting provider that supports running it server-side. Of course you could run it yourself, but maintaining a server for a basic blog or personal site arguably exits the realm of "simple."
- blacksmith_tb 7y ago
  For a blog or personal site (that didn't have any functionality that really needed a back end) I suppose you could just scrape the generated pages and push them up to any host, but CF seems like a fairly awkward static site generator compared to the usual suspects like Jekyll, Hugo, etc.
nonamenoslogan 7y ago
I recently changed jobs to a shop with 15-20 year old ColdFusion+SQL instances that were originally HP3000 Image Databases and COBOL screens. At first I laughed, now after a couple years, I agree ColdFusion is pretty robust and its HTML isn't bad at all. Its easy to do fairly complex forms, file operations, email generation, document generation, database in-out things, and it just keeps running and running. Its easy to read and understand and even though we're using MX-era code, the server still installs and runs on recent (Ubuntu 16.04LTS) Linux with no issues.
bdcravens 7y ago
They weren't talking about the output. They were talking about availability of hosting.

angrygoat 7y ago

Back in 2001 I redid the UWA computer club website (https://ucc.asn.au/ https://ucc.asn.au/) using XSLT with a custom doctype ('grahame'). In the early 2000s XML was the cool shiny thing. They're still using it, in fact I found out recently that someone wrote a Markdown to 'doctype grahame' converter to 'modernise' the site. I guess what I actually built back then was an early static site generator, but it's still kind of cool they're using it 19 years later, hacky as it was / is :)

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
bjoli 7y ago
I still use my old XML doctype with xslt to produce some websites I maintain. Whenever, if ever, xslt is removed from browsers, converting it to a static site generator will be easy. I regret nothing. Editing simple xml using Emacs is a breeze.
tcgv 7y ago
Last time I worked with XSLT was in 2014, redesigning a major Brazilian airline reservation and ticketing system. At the time their passenger service system (Navitaire New Skies [1]) had already switched their white label front-end app from a home grown XSLT web framework to ASP .NET MVC 5, but the company I was working for wasn't particularly interested in paying the (higher) fee for using the "new" front-end framework. [1] https://www.navitaire.com/new-skies-reservation-system https://www.navitaire.com/new-skies-reservation-system

ath92 7y ago

While this website still works fine, the actual HTML that Frontpage generated isn't exactly easy to maintain if Frontpage stops working for whatever reason. The author of this website is basically stuck using whatever version of Frontpage supports the markup of his website. And I bet there have been plenty of people who used <some other WYSIWYG webpage editor> who are no longer able to maintain their website because their editor no longer runs on their system.

bjornjajajaja 7y ago
Microsoft has been fairly good at allowing older binaries to run on newer systems. Apple is pretty annoying in this regard. There’s a lot of software that doesn’t work on versions maybe only 5 years old. A lot of software doesn’t need to change to be honest. Microsoft word for example. Word processing: you sit down and type stuff, maybe change the font once or twice. I guess the collaborative features are nice being able to edit the same document with others. It would be fun to use an older machine and see how productive you can be with the old software too !
- joking 7y ago
  Been hit with that, I needed to run chromium v49 to be able to remote debug some TVs with old opera tv sdks, the version I had stoped working, and several versions that I tried crashed when using the chromium devtools. I ended having to use a windows virtual machine
- scarface74 7y ago
  You haven’t tried to run 16 bit software on 64 bit Windows have you?
  - ajross 7y ago
    True enough. Though to be fair the last new version of a Win16 OS shipped 26 years ago, and Win32 became the standard API in consumer products 24 years ago. There are degrees of worry here. Software of the vintage you're talking about was contemporary with System 7, and the closest ancestor to current OS X was called "NextStep 3.3". The point upthread was that genuinely useful stuff gets retired just a few years after release in the Apple world, and I think that's broadly true. It's true with hardware too -- professional audio people are stuck with truckloads of firewire hardware that they can't use with their new laptops, for example.

GuyPostington 7y ago

This is the internet as I remember it.

m3andros 7y ago
Alas, we're not spring chickens anymore... But isn't nostalgia a great feeling? (Frontpage was my very first introduction to a WYSIWYG editor.)
- GuyPostington 7y ago
  :)

OpticalTransmit 7y ago

There is an obscure search engine called wiby.me that only indexes pages like what is posted here. I used to design websites in the late 90's, and very much miss the simple HTML pages of yore.

reaperducer 7y ago
Thanks for that suggestion. I'm glad it's a three-day weekend!

achairapart 7y ago

Good Practice: Use the least powerful language suitable for expressing information, constraints or programs on the World Wide Web.[0] [0]: https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/leastPower.html https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/leastPower.html

ekianjo 7y ago

> Can you imagine running the same WordPress version for 25 years? If you keep active on your Wordpress install, the regular updates will be no issue for you and will (almost) never break your website. Not sure why you would expect a regular Wordpress user to run the initial install without recommended/mandatory upgrades over a long period of time.

typescriptfan1 7y ago

My olde PHP sites are still running just fine.

mad182 7y ago
I have couple of sites I built in 2005 with plain procedural php and they are still running absolutely fine today on php 7.4 with no major rewrites.

every 7y ago

Followed to its logical if not very practical conclusion, we all wind up on gopher...

Someone 7y ago

Or use free/open software, preferably popular free/open software that runs on a popular OS. Even if the OS and software effectively die, you still would be able to run the latest version in a VM or in emulation.

wolco 7y ago

I have been running an older wordpress that I hacked up nicely. If you keep php below 5.5 no problems. Even the old mysql vs sqli still works great.

rwbt 7y ago

> If you want something to last, don't base it on something that won't last. Sounds similar to the Lindy Effect.[0] [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

scarface74 7y ago

You realize that you’re talking about a FrontPage site. The very definition of building something on a technology that won’t last.

kome 7y ago
but look at the code... are modern website really better? i think that FrontPage did an awesome job there.
- scarface74 7y ago
  There were all sorts of FrontPage server side extensions to IIS that you could use to support your site if I am not mistaken.
  - int_19h 7y ago
    FPSE was mostly about publishing; think a proprietary version of WebDAV. So it was used by FrontPage itself, but not by the HTML produced by it.

asdfman123 7y ago

> Looks like Web 1.0 got something right after all :) The secret is creating a standard early on that thousands of different pieces of software depend on, so that changing it would expensive and require a phenomenal amount of decentralized coordination. Don't worry about making it good -- just make it good enough that people won't want to tear their hair out and unanimously agree to never touch it again. Make the short term cost of applying hacks on top of it low, and the cost of throwing everything out high.

khana 7y ago

Yeah now to tell the Chrome devs to put their coding hands behind their back.

Florin_Andrei 7y ago

> If you want something to last, don't base it on something that won't last. The ancient Egyptians knew something about this.

kelnos 7y ago

I don't think this is really unique to Web 1.0; certainly something that still works from the Web 1.0 days seems "impressive" just because of the passage of time, but there's probably some element of survivorship bias there. You mention ColdFusion as an example, but this guy's site is made using FrontPage. He didn't know in 2001 that he'd still be able to run FrontPage in 2020. He made a bet, and it paid off. Other people made similar bets, on other technologies, and unfortunately got it wrong. My personal website uses Jekyll, and while there's always the possibility it would become abandoned and stop working (I've definitely found someupgrades to be a pain, and ruby tooling in general doesn't help either), I'll always have the simple, readable markdown files the site is based on. While this wouldn't be an option for a non-technical website author, if I really had to, I'm sure I could write a simple markdown->html renderer over a weekend (or a converter to transform it into the future format-du-jour).

grecy 7y ago

I've been using my Wordpress site for 12 years now. Sure I upgrade versions from time to time, but the original post is still there and works perfectly. It's had around 8 million page views in that time.

boublepop 7y ago

> build a static HTML page. No way in hell today’s HTML will survive 25 years now that google owns it, browsers will literally crash due to lack of user tracking. Best just host a static txt file.

type0 7y ago
Nah, the next iteration would be called GHTML, it will include fact checking by Google AI and Google Analytics by default, all for free. Everyone will use it otherwise Chrome will give you strange security errors and after all you wouldn't want to use the web that is full of fake news and other content that can be offensive to someone. /s

throwaway286 7y ago

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

solinent 7y ago

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

forgotmypw77 7y ago

this is why perl, txt, and static html are the top-level languages and formats for my project. with some tweaking, it can be viewed in just about any browser, down to ie3, lynx, mosaic, netscape, and opera3.

tylerjwilk00 7y ago

To be fair keeping around an old runtime of FrontPage isn't much different than keep around an old runtime of PHP.

edwinyzh 7y ago

What you said made me glad that I've just developed DocxManager (https://docxmanager.com https://docxmanager.com) - its concept is like WordPress (document-focused editor, themes and templates) but it generates standard html/css/js, and use Word as the document editor.