14 ms·

FrontPage: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

276 points by pmlnr 6y ago

ricardo81 6y ago
Ex-Frontpage user, the CSS purists of the time (well, the high and mighty ones) would definitely groan at the mention of it. One nice feature of it, "Frontpage Includes", Googlebot had no problem crawling and indexing them, it was effectively like client side SSIs.
johnchristopher 6y ago
Thread from a few days ago: [Frontpage: The Good, Bad and Ugly](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25135058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25135058)
- pmlnr 6y ago
  Huh. I searched for the url before I posted. Interesting. There is a '//' in the previous URL, which is probably why I wasn't able to find it.
  - johnchristopher 6y ago
    Yeah, I noticed too. Weird how your “more-correct” URL isn't the one used in the previous submission. If I may, how did you end up on that article ? I like to notice patterns in post submissions and I wonder what led two different people to post the same content in a short window of time.
    - pmlnr 6y ago
      I followed the link from the #indieweb IRC channel: https://chat.indieweb.org/2020-11-26#t1606385718847500 https://chat.indieweb.org/2020-11-26#t1606385718847500
    - InvisibleUp 6y ago
      There was a decent amount of buzz on Twitter today and yesterday at https://twitter.com/tomayac/status/1331728820622290944 https://twitter.com/tomayac/status/1331728820622290944, which is probably related.
deleted 6y ago
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homero 6y ago
FrontPage wasn't exactly easy to use and needed special hosting. These days people have things like WordPress and Wix that are very easy. Anything that needs hosting is going to be hard to use for the regular person.
- kgwgk 6y ago
  > FrontPage wasn't exactly easy to use and needed special hosting And WordPress is easy to use and doesn't need special hosting? If I remember correctly, FrontPage-generated sites (not using server extensions) could be just uploaded by FTP to any server.
  - homero 6y ago
    Hosted WordPress is point and click
    - kgwgk 6y ago
      Hosted FrontPage also simplified quite a bit the hosting issues with FrontPage.
- detaro 6y ago
  It depended, didn't it? Fairly sure FrontPage could produce HTML to simply upload to any webspace if you didn't use fancy dynamic features.
  - mobilio 6y ago
    FrontPage have built-in FTP publishing.
- kebman 6y ago
  I used FrontPage when I worked for KulturNett. Those were the days!1 xD
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
FrontPage was a nightmare. I still wake up screaming... I do see some pretty good stuff, from Wix. The new static generators create great sites, but they are way too technical for most users. Wix and Weebly are -sort of- like that. I am not a fan of sitebuilders in WordPress. I think they are just reincarnations of FrontPage. I've had to fix a couple of borked sitebuilder sites, and the "fix" was a complete, top-to-bottom rewrite, without the sitebuilder.
- nkozyra 6y ago
  > FrontPage was a nightmare. They all were. HTML was so limited that producing it visually from a WYSIWYG editor was guaranteed to be totally wrong or exceedingly verbose. With flex and grid I imagine creating such an editor is easier today, but I also imagine those consumers are happy to work off of templates and people who work on front and know HTML and spend most of their time building react components.
  - tasogare 6y ago
    HTML was never the problem. It is simple enough to be taught to non technical people. The issue is styling it, making it looks beautiful. And this is where the truth appears: HTML was not designed for building magazin-like pages but hypertext paper books. The very recent introduction of CSS grid shows it. If HTML could be used as a collection of widget akin to Windows Forms, with an easy grid system (somewhat like XAML), there building an UI page creator would be easy, and user could edit the output unlike with the current tech.
    - greggman3 6y ago
      Windows Forms (AFAIK) are not designed to handle multitude of screen formats. HTML/CSS is.
    - svrtknst 6y ago
      What functionality is missing, in your mind, from Sqaurespace, Webflow, and Wix in order to classify them as UI page creators?
manceraio 6y ago
I remember creating my first website using Microsoft Word. That was something.
- kristopolous 6y ago
  You can still open websites with word processors. I'm always amazed libreoffice doesn't just pack up and call it quits when you ask it to open something like reddit or news.google.com. Just type in the full URL with the protocol in the file open dialog and it will put in a noble but ultimately futile effort.
Hnrobert42 6y ago
The absence of creative personal sites is less about the lack of FrontPage than the abundance of outlets like Facebook, Medium, or Tumblr. Before, if you wanted to say something, you had to create your own site, with all the work that entailed. Now you just have to create an account.
- 101008 6y ago
  I agree. Months (or years ago), when influencers started to populate the internet, I often asked myself "What's their website?" after visiting their Instagram/Twitter/YouTube profile. The truth is, they don't need a website anymore. I am not talking only about teens influencers. Does a restaurant need a website, or a presence on Instagram/Facebook/{delivery app} is enough? I think the later. Sadly we have evolved into this.
  - quaintdev 6y ago
    Remember there use to be celebrity websites, fans use to create websites for their favourite celebs? Not anymore. Now you only see celebrity profiles and bunch of fanpages posting same content all over again.
    - jeanlucas 6y ago
      Yet, you have full blown communities with people creating art for their role models / artists. Take like pewdiepie and his subreddit, the creations there are nothing more than amazing, from video to even handcrafted art. Several artists have fun communities like this and they can interact with them directly.
      - rm445 6y ago
        Great point. Most people can create an old-school website with a little effort using few or basic tools, but creating something that can host a community is/was much harder. phpbb was about the limit. It's almost an inversion - instead of many community sites, there are many users together on a smaller number of community groups, which are generally built on social platforms such as reddit and Facebook which make it easy to create them. It's not necessarily a bad thing, except that the most invested people in the communities don't have ownership of the platform or the data, so the communities that matter to them are vulnerable to any arbitrary changes in what the platform owners choose to do.
room271 6y ago
Squarespace is pretty good for this to be honest.
- prepend 6y ago
  Squarespace is a monthly fee, forever. I would love to buy a tool that lets me generate the static html that squarespace does and then add that into my $20/year for as many web sites as I want to host hoster. I kind of long for Frontpage because as nasty as it was, you could at least host wherever you want, archive for decades, and was much cheaper in the long run.
  - marc_io 6y ago
    > I would love to buy a tool that lets me generate the static html that squarespace does. Some options are: Bootstrap Studio, CoffeeCup Site Designer and Blocksapp. They have shortcomings, but all of them allow to export a complete HTML site.
tiborsaas 6y ago
WebFlow is something like this. It's basically a Photoshop quality UI on top of the CSS specification with one click static site generation and CMS features.
- marc_io 6y ago
  Webflow is great, but it's quite expensive to host a simple static website there. They used to allow exporting a website on the free plan, but that's gone now. There are other Webflow-ish options that doesn't require to keep a subscription, like CoffeCup Site Designer, Bootstrap Studio and Blocs app.
badsectoracula 6y ago
I do not have the version of FrontPage shown in the screenshots, but one that was included with Visual Studio 6 which is a bit older - however it doesn't look really that different. And TBH i cannot see that ease of use. To me FrontPage looks weird and "disconnected" - the editor even is a separate program - and the hierarchy it makes feels unintuitive. I've used simpler programs. FrontPage Express is basically the editor (though i think it is actually a separate program that uses the same name but i'm not 100% sure) so it doesn't handle a full site, but for very simple stuff it is fine (e.g. [0]) Adobe Page-Mill is another alternative from the time that has some form of site support. I actually use that sometimes for very simple pages - and it also happens to create very clean code (e.g. [1]). IMO iWeb is by far the simplest and easiest website builder i've used. I haven't used anything that approaches it - other builders, even some that claim to be alternatives, do not have the full WYSIWYG element (ie. you're not editing articles inside the page itself but you use a separate editor). Its biggest issue was that it created pages that were a bit "heavy" (...though nowadays i've seen much heavier sites) and that the themes were almost hardcoded (there were 3rd party themes but the program never seemed to be designed to allow that). I didn't use it much myself, though i have an old page made with it [2] (note that the links do not work). Two other programs that i found easy to use though both were too "raw", with very blatant missing features and bugs are WebsitePainter and RocketCake by the developer of the Irrlicht (and later CopperCube) 3D game engine. RocketCake is basically WebsitePainter but with a more restrained editor for making "responsive" sites. Both can be found at [3] and [4], though i only played around with them a bit. I wanted to buy WebsitePainter, but it was too buggy and the author seemed to be focused more or RocketCake, which i didn't like as much, so i never used any of these for anything i actually uploaded anywhere. For a more "modern" take, one very easy tool i found is Publii [5]. This is a bit more restricted in that it is mainly for blog and blog-like stuff (it says it is a CMS but realistically, this feels like how people used blogs years ago instead of CMSs because blogs were popular). TBH i am not a big fan of its output or theming since i find both practically impossible to customize, but it is easy to use and does provide a WYSIWYG editor (for content, you still need to build the site to see how it'd look in a browser). I've used it for [6] but only because i haven't found anything simpler that still provides WYSIWYG editing and graphical site management. As a sidenote, i see most technical people complaining about the code these tools produced, but for me that is completely missing the point - one would use such a tool so they do not have to mess with the code at all. The produced code doesn't matter (and never mattered to me when judging these programs), it is how the final result looks and behaves in a browser that matters. [0] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/gopher/ http://runtimeterror.com/tools/gopher/ [1] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/bugs/ http://runtimeterror.com/tools/bugs/ [2] http://runtimeterror.com/games/nikwideluxe/old/ http://runtimeterror.com/games/nikwideluxe/old/ [3] https://www.ambiera.com/websitepainter/index.html https://www.ambiera.com/websitepainter/index.html [4] https://www.ambiera.com/rocketcake/index.html https://www.ambiera.com/rocketcake/index.html [5] https://getpublii.com/ https://getpublii.com/ [6] http://runtimeterror.com/devlog/ http://runtimeterror.com/devlog/
meibo 6y ago
I really enjoy that some of these UI patterns from the 2002 app are still common and found in modern Microsoft apps like Visual Studio. Really shows that some things just work the way they are, and don't need a fancy metro/modern rework.
deleted 6y ago
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kolyaio 6y ago
What about Elementor ? Isn’t it basically self-hosted Wix / Squarespace ?
jhunter1016 6y ago
FrontPage was the reason I eventually got into technology and software development. No joke. I took a whole class one semester my first year of college on learning FrontPage. I never really liked the WYSIWYG aspect of it but I understood its power. I was more interested in what happened underneath. Took me more than a decade to eventually learn to code after that, but FrontPage was definitely one of my first catalysts.
ForHackernews 6y ago
WebFlow? https://webflow.com/ https://webflow.com/
coreymaass 6y ago
There were two parts to this. Something to "design" (build) websites, and somewhere to host it that wasn't tied to a grid. I learned to build web pages in Netscape. It came with a free html editor. And then I hosted on Geocities and Xoom for free.
emptyparadise 6y ago
I miss simpler and more visual tools. Things you use not to create a billion dollar startup but a personal website. Not a complex web application but a little flash game.
diego_moita 6y ago
No, not exactly. "Html for common folk" is just a particular instance of "programming for common folk". There isn't one solution for it, there should be many different solutions. It's been a long time we want to make programming simple. And we've tried a bazilion solutions already: easier languages (e.g.: Basic), specific purpose languages (e.g.: Cobol, R, Logo), visual programming (e.g: LabView, Scratch, Lego Mindstorms), dozens of IDE's and CASE systems, programming courses for everyone, specific purpose tools (Access, Excel), etc... So far, the one solution that I've seem coming close to success is teaching Python to kids in schools. That might be the best approach: make a simpler solution for a simpler problem and make education a little smarter. Now, regarding grown-ups, just forget them. They're a lost cause, like teaching new tricks to an old dog. In general, grown-ups are allergic to learning, they think they know everything.
- slumdev 6y ago
  > "Html for common folk" is just a particular instance of "programming for common folk". Only sort of. "Html for common folk", with good tooling and strong templates, is more like "paint by numbers--on the internet". The barriers to entry at lower. The cost of failure is lower. And nobody building their own "Magic the Gathering webring" is trying to take your job.
dalbasal 6y ago
Fun fact: I believe Berkshire Hathaway's website is a frontpage site from back in the day. I kind of imagine an old pentium multimedia PC that a secretary boots once per quarter to update it. It's much better than most holding companies' sites. Anyway... I feel like this article answers its own question at the start... "many corporations such as the Dow Jones, Bloomberg, Apple, etc. were sinking millions into building their own, completely incompatible dial-in Internet services." "They" eventually succeeded, by using the www as a platform 10 years later rather than outcompeting it in 1995. Frontpage, Dreamweaver and such are tools. The internet-era equivalents (youtube, FB, IG, etc.) aren't tools. FB is a "platform." More comparable to the WWW itself than to frontpage. You don't need tools to post on FB, so no frontpage. In the abstract, a FB-like platform does a similar job to a Frontpage-like tool. Publish stuff online. The FB-like platform is a 1000X better business proposition. A FB doesn't have to charge. It can attract users with access to other users. No hosting/files/responsibility. Advertising is worth more than software licenses, etc. So the real question is "why did the www not succeed competitively against FB/Youtube/Etc?" Why don't we do what we do online via www and other open standards/protocols instead of through platforms like FB? OTOH, the WWW obviously did succeed. We all use it every day, but with a third party platform like FB between us and other people. I also think it's remarkable that the www exists at all. No one owns it. It's not property, doesn't have a share price... Quite unusual. Tim Berners Lee is highly regarded. Zuck is one of the most powerful and wealthy people on earth. He made many other people very wealthy. Tim too, but more indirectly. It's remarkable that a Tim can ever beat a Zuck. ... But history proves they can.
- tyingq 6y ago
  "Fun fact: I believe Berkshire Hathaway's website is a frontpage site from back in the day." Sillier than that even. From https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/subs/sublinks.html https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/subs/sublinks.html <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 15"> Some other pages on the site: <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Adobe PageMill 2.0 Win"> <meta NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Microsoft FrontPage 3.0"> Seems like they tried all the cool WYSIWYG tools.
  - 6y ago
the_other 6y ago
I didn't read the article, so feel free to downvote me for talking over the author... A "modern Frontpage" may help, but these days it seems: - creators (including your mum on Facebook) don't want to worry about design, only content - creators want to see feedback from the widest range of people possible as soon as possible, so it feels like conversation - consumers (who are the same people) want to see updates from all their friends, family and the brands they follow right there alongside one another and the feedback to their own stuff So to "reclaim the web" you ALSO need a decentralised commenting system that doesn't require any investment on the part of the user. We have ActivityPub and WebMentions now, but they all require accounts, hosting and management... and they don't come with original content creation. If you put every creator in their own silo (under their own domain name, say), they won't feel so connected, unless that domain also provides near-instant access to the feeds from all their contacts. Facebook and Insta give you a feed of your whole village plus the folks from the village over that you like, instantly. I'm sure the IndieWeb crew do feel connected, but how much effort have they all made to join that party? LOADS, compared with your mum on Facebook. So sure, modern Frontpage, but also easy RSS/Atom + WebMentions + ActivityPub (or equivalent). Personally, I really like Scuttlebutt for this. It has all this stuff, and is offline-first, and will work with interplanetary travel, and you can build calendars and events and stuff on top of it. But it's yet another protocol (and a complex one at that), and getting into the network is a big hurdle still.
- Grumbledour 6y ago
  But isn't scuttlebutt User centric vs. content centric? So I will only easily find content from people I already know? And I guess I can find new people if they are somehow connected to me, but can I search just for content on the "whole" network? Does this really provide a network effect like medium or facebook, or google search, who offer a large existing network for discovery?
  - the_other 6y ago
    Last time I used it: yes-ish. "Tags" are public and posts can be set public (perhaps scoped to the server you're connected to. I don't recall). You can tag bits of content pretty easily (IIRC you prepend a # to any word you like). You then explore the contents of tags like channels. Public posts with tags then show up under those tags. The SSB/Patchwork creators were discussing a while ago that the network was actually content-centric. They described it as "islands of content" around which people navigated. I'm not gonna try to defend that, only to repeat it. Anyway... I think this is distracting from the main point. It doesn't _really_ matter if SSB wins out over HTML+CSS+JS+HTTP+RSS+ActivityPub+WebMentions or not. What matters is encouraging people to leave social media walled gardens by giving them tools and reasons to do so. Or, at the very least, somehow giving the content they create an easy means of escape, and bullying the gardens to open windows onto the wider world that don't involve one-way tactics like OpenGraph.
Traubenfuchs 6y ago
Who is WE? We software/web/website developers as opposed to common folk? Then we don't need this, as it would take our jobs away... Anything else like doctors saying "I want patients to operate on themselves." or "I want patients to vaccinate themselves.". What is it about the software world that created this notion of giving everything away?
- koluna 6y ago
  I am just going to assume that this is a troll comment due to the sheer ignorance of the statement made. But let’s assume it’s not. First of all, if someone with FrontPage can take your job away, you probably have bigger problems to solve involving the qualifications required for engineering. Second - you can’t compare surgery to website building. Putting together some CSS and HTML is nowhere near as complex as operating on a human being. Case in point - most of us were doing it since the MySpace days or earlier. I don’t know any 12 year olds who were doing surgeries at that time. Lastly - what’s with this scarcity mentality? Just because someone has the skills and ability to do something does not preclude you from doing the same thing. Should we ban books and tutorials because god forbid it might teach others to do the jobs we do?
motohagiography 6y ago
Culturally, Frontpage was an internet gentrification tool, which is part of what seems to be every social cycle.
alpineidyll3 6y ago
I think we instead need a simple hosting solution wrapped into your phone plan or internet service like it was way back when. It is the hosting upkeep that killed old internet.
keybits 6y ago
A good modern open source alternative is GrapesJS https://grapesjs.com/ https://grapesjs.com/
macspoofing 6y ago
This is the quintessential example of solving a legal, cultural and regulatory problem with a technical solution. Take the example of social media space, companies like Google/YouTube, Twitter, Facebook were wholly uninterested in policing political speech but they were forced to do so by political activists and Democrats and self-serving mainstream outlets (self-serving because when social media de-platforms, or demonetizes thousands of dinky little conservative or progressive outfits, they automatically raise traffic to conglomerate news. Similarly when Twitter banned political adverts, where do you think political adverts dollars went to?). The crypto community is another community that suffers from this delusion. They think that they can build a technical platform to get around AML laws and regulations. Sure. My good friend worked in the San Fran ICO space and through her I met a ton of crypto people and they were all deluded like this (one of them though he could create a mesh network with drones to get around government control of the internet). Their perspectives were endearing and I appreciate their existence ... but delusional. What do you think you're going to solve by introducing yet another platform (centralized or decentralized)? You think you're going to be left alone from those in positions of power (whether it be the mainstream media who want to reassert their traditional gatekeeping or governments and their regulatory bodies)?
- jMyles 6y ago
  > What do you think you're going to solve by introducing yet another platform (centralized or decentralized)? You think you're going to be left alone from those in positions of power (whether it be the mainstream media or government bodies)? The idea is to envision an internet where there is no specific target to leave alone or not leave alone. If publishing and consuming content are low-friction events, and censoring that content is impossible, then the internet will have achieved a substantial milestone in solving the legal, cultural and regulatory problems you correctly identify as underlying causes. Is it a complete solution? No, of course not. But it's worth the time and effort of our species, and is an important part of facilitating the emergence of ever more genuine human rights in the information age.
  - macspoofing 6y ago
    >If publishing and consuming content are low-friction events, and censoring that content is impossible I no longer believe that. Your page is going to be hosted somewhere. Some registrar will need to maintain your domain. Your DNS records will be registered by someone. You're going to be interacting with payment processors. You're going to buying power from some utility company. Your spouse may be working in a brick-and-mortar location. All of those (and more) are vectors for attack for censors whether they be government or activists. They just need to label your speech as dangerous or evil or something ridiculous and publicly shame you, your spouse, your spouse's employer and anyone that does business with you to see how little protection a new technical platform gives you. We've gotten away with this up to now because of the meteoric rise of the internet, but it's been figured out now.
WClayFerguson 6y ago
Here's my own little offering: https://quanta.wiki https://quanta.wiki I'm working on adding ActivityPub protocol which will enable Mastodon/Pleroma (i.e. the Fediverse) to it. But that platform is more about content than pretty styling.
est 6y ago
I think we need Macromedia Flash more. The animation creativity authoring tool, not the plugin. Drag drop shapes, curves and vectors, editable timelines, and streamable format. Fuck the handwritten svg css bullshit.
- SaxoAnglo 6y ago
  Macromedia Flash was so intuitive, you’d get someone designing and animating things in a couple of hours, contrast that with Adobe Illustrator, where you’d spend a couple of hours telling someone how to draw a circle then they would forget how to access the right menu to join two circles and get stuck while the person on Flash was creating complex shapes that morphed...
deleted 6y ago
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acomjean 6y ago
What about wordpress. It’s weird,it’s somewhat clunky, but it’s easy to set up and put content out. It’s got plugins for everything which is a blessing and a curse. The problem is you require a theme to start and choosing one makes is hard.
- marc_io 6y ago
  This is beginning to change with the new Gutenberg editor and it's Full Site Editing, which is basically a site builder.
- coreymaass 6y ago
  Not necessarily. I start most of my sites with a blank theme and use Beaver Builder to lay things out.
FiddlerClamp 6y ago
Kompozer (http://kompozer.sourceforge.net/ http://kompozer.sourceforge.net/) is what I recommend for creating simple pages or making quick updates.
monssoen 6y ago
I remember asking my dad "can you get me Frontpage, I'd like to create a webpage". He gave me a book on html/css instead and it defined my career.
nbzso 6y ago
Tag: Controversial comment. I am glad for social platforms. They are bottomless pit. In my simple logic when something has low entry barrier and high friction the efficiency of information flow is lowered and result is meaningless noise. People will start personal blogs again for logical reasons. Give it time.
cdnsteve 6y ago
I don't see Frontpage coming back anytime soon. The space is now filled with all in one marketing platforms for businesses. Hubspot, Mailchimp, etc all now allow you to build websites. Creating your site is only one small piece of the puzzle, hosting, email, security and all the other stuff that's being pilled on top of the growing complexity these days. I see platforms as enabling more people to build more, not less. After all, content is what matters most and what drives visitors and value to a site.
Edmond 6y ago
As others have noted, the issue isn't a lack of ways to build your own website, it is the capture of the web by the likes of facebook, google, apple. It feels like a lifetime ago but people forget that one of the things that made myspace so appealing was the ability to "pimp" one's profile page. It was an aesthetic and security disaster but it was also AMAZING. People who wouldn't know what HTML meant if their lives depended on it were willing to learn the basics in order to personalize their profiles. Then facebook happened. Even facebook at first was receptive to the idea of some degree of personalizing with facebook apps, but as they grew bigger and powerful it became obvious that total control was the best for their bottom line. Now people have full blown computers in their pockets all the time and all they can think of doing with them is scrolling down and clicking "like" button. This is great for our "AI" revolution because user interaction/engagement with computers has been dumbed down to its stupidest form thus by comparison the "AI" seems very smart.
- InvisibleUp 6y ago
  Hi, author here. You might enjoy this other article I wrote on this subject: http://invisibleup.com/articles/31/ http://invisibleup.com/articles/31/ It discusses how most people's preferred social spaces recently have moved online into centralized silos, and the effects that has.
  - fbelzile 6y ago
    You're a very good writer. Thank you for this :) If you had a mailing list, I'd sign up!
    - InvisibleUp 6y ago
      I don't, but my website has an RSS feed you can subscribe to.
- rimliu 6y ago
  How did Apple captured the web?
annoyingnoob 6y ago
You can find a lot of that functionality in Sharepoint today. Sharepoint still aims to have non-programmers build useful web pages. Where I work most folks prefer something like Confluence. Of course non of that is aimed at home users making personal web sites.
edwinyzh 6y ago
The goal's not completely achieved yet, but my project's goal is to turn Microsoft Word into a WordPress like site builder for ordinary users. Here is a quick GIF demo: https://docxmanager.com/features/website-generator.html https://docxmanager.com/features/website-generator.html
marc_io 6y ago
> If I wanted to do that on my hypothetical WordPress site, I'd be out of luck. Well, they are working on a new feature that will (hopefully) change that. It's called Full Site Editing (FSE), and will basically transform the WordPress editor into a complete website builder that, considering the WordPress's market share, may become a thing. It's arriving next year. Ref: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/20791 https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/20791
- pmlnr 6y ago
  WordPress needs setup, maintenance, monthly fee. Sites I used to make with FrontPage ended up being static, no maintenance, on a free - usually ISP - provider. That is the big difference.
  - marc_io 6y ago
    You can easily export your website to a free static hosting using with a free plugin, after creating it on your desktop computer. No online PHP hosting required.
    - detaro 6y ago
      "easily" as in "an average user can do this (and discover instructions how to) without too much difficulty"?
      - marc_io 6y ago
        An average user can do this, for sure. But, yea, some sort of instruction is necessary, as it is not something that the platform itself offers by default. For example: the user needs to be aware of this possibility to begin with and also need to know which plugin to install, even it isn't difficult to work with. In addition, as the site will no longer be dynamic, some adjustments must be made, such as disabling comments - or adding an alternative like Disqus.
        6y ago
akrymski 6y ago
There are two potential paths: 1. Creating web-pages is like creating music, we should create tools that make it as easy as possible for anyone to create them 2. Creating web-pages is engineering, like building a house or a car. We don't want anyone without qualifications being able to create these, given their increasing complexity.
- cpill 6y ago
  yeah as there are two main applications of the web: static content delivery, like a billboard and; web applications which are replacements of traditional desktop applications. for the first it's "content is king" and the second UX is king
beambot 6y ago
Makes me nostalgic for the days of Hypercard...
Angostura 6y ago
I used to rather like iWeb that Apple produced. It's spiritual successor seems to be https://sparkleapp.com https://sparkleapp.com
pmlnr 6y ago
Who the heck changed the title and why?! Yes, I know that is the original, and I changed it on purpose, with a line from the conclusions. Please change it back to what it was: "We need a FrontPage that lets common folks retake the internet with creativity"
oliwarner 6y ago
It seems that everybody understands that Facebook/Twitter/etc have to change or go away in order for this to happen. I'm personally in favour of making social networks just things for people who know each other talk to each other. Maybe a physical proximity thing too. That's a crushing blow to free speech but I think this experiment has clearly shown what happens when you encourage idiots (of all political views!) to mix with like-minded simpletons. They don't reason with each other, they degrade into lynch mobs, and they're scarily easy to manipulate. So yes, when —not if— the revolution comes, it'll be nice to see independent thought being fostered out onto the wild internet with Frontpage 2030, and I won't get some algorithm mixing "POTATOES ARE RACIST TRACKING BEACONS" posts in with updates from my family.
crx07 6y ago
Notably absent from this analysis is a new tool called Nicepage. Took me years to find anything like it. https://nicepage.com/ https://nicepage.com/

276 points by pmlnr 6y ago

Ex-Frontpage user, the CSS purists of the time (well, the high and mighty ones) would definitely groan at the mention of it. One nice feature of it, "Frontpage Includes", Googlebot had no problem crawling and indexing them, it was effectively like client side SSIs.

johnchristopher 6y ago

Thread from a few days ago: [Frontpage: The Good, Bad and Ugly](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25135058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25135058)

pmlnr 6y ago
Huh. I searched for the url before I posted. Interesting. There is a '//' in the previous URL, which is probably why I wasn't able to find it.
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  Yeah, I noticed too. Weird how your “more-correct” URL isn't the one used in the previous submission. If I may, how did you end up on that article ? I like to notice patterns in post submissions and I wonder what led two different people to post the same content in a short window of time.
  - pmlnr 6y ago
    I followed the link from the #indieweb IRC channel: https://chat.indieweb.org/2020-11-26#t1606385718847500 https://chat.indieweb.org/2020-11-26#t1606385718847500
  - InvisibleUp 6y ago
    There was a decent amount of buzz on Twitter today and yesterday at https://twitter.com/tomayac/status/1331728820622290944 https://twitter.com/tomayac/status/1331728820622290944, which is probably related.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

homero 6y ago

FrontPage wasn't exactly easy to use and needed special hosting. These days people have things like WordPress and Wix that are very easy. Anything that needs hosting is going to be hard to use for the regular person.

kgwgk 6y ago
> FrontPage wasn't exactly easy to use and needed special hosting And WordPress is easy to use and doesn't need special hosting? If I remember correctly, FrontPage-generated sites (not using server extensions) could be just uploaded by FTP to any server.
- homero 6y ago
  Hosted WordPress is point and click
  - kgwgk 6y ago
    Hosted FrontPage also simplified quite a bit the hosting issues with FrontPage.
detaro 6y ago
It depended, didn't it? Fairly sure FrontPage could produce HTML to simply upload to any webspace if you didn't use fancy dynamic features.
- mobilio 6y ago
  FrontPage have built-in FTP publishing.
kebman 6y ago
I used FrontPage when I worked for KulturNett. Those were the days!1 xD

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

FrontPage was a nightmare. I still wake up screaming... I do see some pretty good stuff, from Wix. The new static generators create great sites, but they are way too technical for most users. Wix and Weebly are -sort of- like that. I am not a fan of sitebuilders in WordPress. I think they are just reincarnations of FrontPage. I've had to fix a couple of borked sitebuilder sites, and the "fix" was a complete, top-to-bottom rewrite, without the sitebuilder.

nkozyra 6y ago
> FrontPage was a nightmare. They all were. HTML was so limited that producing it visually from a WYSIWYG editor was guaranteed to be totally wrong or exceedingly verbose. With flex and grid I imagine creating such an editor is easier today, but I also imagine those consumers are happy to work off of templates and people who work on front and know HTML and spend most of their time building react components.
- tasogare 6y ago
  HTML was never the problem. It is simple enough to be taught to non technical people. The issue is styling it, making it looks beautiful. And this is where the truth appears: HTML was not designed for building magazin-like pages but hypertext paper books. The very recent introduction of CSS grid shows it. If HTML could be used as a collection of widget akin to Windows Forms, with an easy grid system (somewhat like XAML), there building an UI page creator would be easy, and user could edit the output unlike with the current tech.
  - greggman3 6y ago
    Windows Forms (AFAIK) are not designed to handle multitude of screen formats. HTML/CSS is.
  - svrtknst 6y ago
    What functionality is missing, in your mind, from Sqaurespace, Webflow, and Wix in order to classify them as UI page creators?

manceraio 6y ago

I remember creating my first website using Microsoft Word. That was something.

kristopolous 6y ago
You can still open websites with word processors. I'm always amazed libreoffice doesn't just pack up and call it quits when you ask it to open something like reddit or news.google.com. Just type in the full URL with the protocol in the file open dialog and it will put in a noble but ultimately futile effort.

Hnrobert42 6y ago

The absence of creative personal sites is less about the lack of FrontPage than the abundance of outlets like Facebook, Medium, or Tumblr. Before, if you wanted to say something, you had to create your own site, with all the work that entailed. Now you just have to create an account.

101008 6y ago
I agree. Months (or years ago), when influencers started to populate the internet, I often asked myself "What's their website?" after visiting their Instagram/Twitter/YouTube profile. The truth is, they don't need a website anymore. I am not talking only about teens influencers. Does a restaurant need a website, or a presence on Instagram/Facebook/{delivery app} is enough? I think the later. Sadly we have evolved into this.
- quaintdev 6y ago
  Remember there use to be celebrity websites, fans use to create websites for their favourite celebs? Not anymore. Now you only see celebrity profiles and bunch of fanpages posting same content all over again.
  - jeanlucas 6y ago
    Yet, you have full blown communities with people creating art for their role models / artists. Take like pewdiepie and his subreddit, the creations there are nothing more than amazing, from video to even handcrafted art. Several artists have fun communities like this and they can interact with them directly.
    - rm445 6y ago
      Great point. Most people can create an old-school website with a little effort using few or basic tools, but creating something that can host a community is/was much harder. phpbb was about the limit. It's almost an inversion - instead of many community sites, there are many users together on a smaller number of community groups, which are generally built on social platforms such as reddit and Facebook which make it easy to create them. It's not necessarily a bad thing, except that the most invested people in the communities don't have ownership of the platform or the data, so the communities that matter to them are vulnerable to any arbitrary changes in what the platform owners choose to do.

room271 6y ago

Squarespace is pretty good for this to be honest.

prepend 6y ago
Squarespace is a monthly fee, forever. I would love to buy a tool that lets me generate the static html that squarespace does and then add that into my $20/year for as many web sites as I want to host hoster. I kind of long for Frontpage because as nasty as it was, you could at least host wherever you want, archive for decades, and was much cheaper in the long run.
- marc_io 6y ago
  > I would love to buy a tool that lets me generate the static html that squarespace does. Some options are: Bootstrap Studio, CoffeeCup Site Designer and Blocksapp. They have shortcomings, but all of them allow to export a complete HTML site.

tiborsaas 6y ago

WebFlow is something like this. It's basically a Photoshop quality UI on top of the CSS specification with one click static site generation and CMS features.

marc_io 6y ago
Webflow is great, but it's quite expensive to host a simple static website there. They used to allow exporting a website on the free plan, but that's gone now. There are other Webflow-ish options that doesn't require to keep a subscription, like CoffeCup Site Designer, Bootstrap Studio and Blocs app.

badsectoracula 6y ago

I do not have the version of FrontPage shown in the screenshots, but one that was included with Visual Studio 6 which is a bit older - however it doesn't look really that different. And TBH i cannot see that ease of use. To me FrontPage looks weird and "disconnected" - the editor even is a separate program - and the hierarchy it makes feels unintuitive. I've used simpler programs. FrontPage Express is basically the editor (though i think it is actually a separate program that uses the same name but i'm not 100% sure) so it doesn't handle a full site, but for very simple stuff it is fine (e.g. [0]) Adobe Page-Mill is another alternative from the time that has some form of site support. I actually use that sometimes for very simple pages - and it also happens to create very clean code (e.g. [1]). IMO iWeb is by far the simplest and easiest website builder i've used. I haven't used anything that approaches it - other builders, even some that claim to be alternatives, do not have the full WYSIWYG element (ie. you're not editing articles inside the page itself but you use a separate editor). Its biggest issue was that it created pages that were a bit "heavy" (...though nowadays i've seen much heavier sites) and that the themes were almost hardcoded (there were 3rd party themes but the program never seemed to be designed to allow that). I didn't use it much myself, though i have an old page made with it [2] (note that the links do not work). Two other programs that i found easy to use though both were too "raw", with very blatant missing features and bugs are WebsitePainter and RocketCake by the developer of the Irrlicht (and later CopperCube) 3D game engine. RocketCake is basically WebsitePainter but with a more restrained editor for making "responsive" sites. Both can be found at [3] and [4], though i only played around with them a bit. I wanted to buy WebsitePainter, but it was too buggy and the author seemed to be focused more or RocketCake, which i didn't like as much, so i never used any of these for anything i actually uploaded anywhere. For a more "modern" take, one very easy tool i found is Publii [5]. This is a bit more restricted in that it is mainly for blog and blog-like stuff (it says it is a CMS but realistically, this feels like how people used blogs years ago instead of CMSs because blogs were popular). TBH i am not a big fan of its output or theming since i find both practically impossible to customize, but it is easy to use and does provide a WYSIWYG editor (for content, you still need to build the site to see how it'd look in a browser). I've used it for [6] but only because i haven't found anything simpler that still provides WYSIWYG editing and graphical site management. As a sidenote, i see most technical people complaining about the code these tools produced, but for me that is completely missing the point - one would use such a tool so they do not have to mess with the code at all. The produced code doesn't matter (and never mattered to me when judging these programs), it is how the final result looks and behaves in a browser that matters. [0] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/gopher/ http://runtimeterror.com/tools/gopher/ [1] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/bugs/ http://runtimeterror.com/tools/bugs/ [2] http://runtimeterror.com/games/nikwideluxe/old/ http://runtimeterror.com/games/nikwideluxe/old/ [3] https://www.ambiera.com/websitepainter/index.html https://www.ambiera.com/websitepainter/index.html [4] https://www.ambiera.com/rocketcake/index.html https://www.ambiera.com/rocketcake/index.html [5] https://getpublii.com/ https://getpublii.com/ [6] http://runtimeterror.com/devlog/ http://runtimeterror.com/devlog/

meibo 6y ago

I really enjoy that some of these UI patterns from the 2002 app are still common and found in modern Microsoft apps like Visual Studio. Really shows that some things just work the way they are, and don't need a fancy metro/modern rework.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kolyaio 6y ago

What about Elementor ? Isn’t it basically self-hosted Wix / Squarespace ?

jhunter1016 6y ago

FrontPage was the reason I eventually got into technology and software development. No joke. I took a whole class one semester my first year of college on learning FrontPage. I never really liked the WYSIWYG aspect of it but I understood its power. I was more interested in what happened underneath. Took me more than a decade to eventually learn to code after that, but FrontPage was definitely one of my first catalysts.

ForHackernews 6y ago

WebFlow? https://webflow.com/ https://webflow.com/

coreymaass 6y ago

There were two parts to this. Something to "design" (build) websites, and somewhere to host it that wasn't tied to a grid. I learned to build web pages in Netscape. It came with a free html editor. And then I hosted on Geocities and Xoom for free.

emptyparadise 6y ago

I miss simpler and more visual tools. Things you use not to create a billion dollar startup but a personal website. Not a complex web application but a little flash game.

diego_moita 6y ago

No, not exactly. "Html for common folk" is just a particular instance of "programming for common folk". There isn't one solution for it, there should be many different solutions. It's been a long time we want to make programming simple. And we've tried a bazilion solutions already: easier languages (e.g.: Basic), specific purpose languages (e.g.: Cobol, R, Logo), visual programming (e.g: LabView, Scratch, Lego Mindstorms), dozens of IDE's and CASE systems, programming courses for everyone, specific purpose tools (Access, Excel), etc... So far, the one solution that I've seem coming close to success is teaching Python to kids in schools. That might be the best approach: make a simpler solution for a simpler problem and make education a little smarter. Now, regarding grown-ups, just forget them. They're a lost cause, like teaching new tricks to an old dog. In general, grown-ups are allergic to learning, they think they know everything.

slumdev 6y ago
> "Html for common folk" is just a particular instance of "programming for common folk". Only sort of. "Html for common folk", with good tooling and strong templates, is more like "paint by numbers--on the internet". The barriers to entry at lower. The cost of failure is lower. And nobody building their own "Magic the Gathering webring" is trying to take your job.

dalbasal 6y ago

Fun fact: I believe Berkshire Hathaway's website is a frontpage site from back in the day. I kind of imagine an old pentium multimedia PC that a secretary boots once per quarter to update it. It's much better than most holding companies' sites. Anyway... I feel like this article answers its own question at the start... "many corporations such as the Dow Jones, Bloomberg, Apple, etc. were sinking millions into building their own, completely incompatible dial-in Internet services." "They" eventually succeeded, by using the www as a platform 10 years later rather than outcompeting it in 1995. Frontpage, Dreamweaver and such are tools. The internet-era equivalents (youtube, FB, IG, etc.) aren't tools. FB is a "platform." More comparable to the WWW itself than to frontpage. You don't need tools to post on FB, so no frontpage. In the abstract, a FB-like platform does a similar job to a Frontpage-like tool. Publish stuff online. The FB-like platform is a 1000X better business proposition. A FB doesn't have to charge. It can attract users with access to other users. No hosting/files/responsibility. Advertising is worth more than software licenses, etc. So the real question is "why did the www not succeed competitively against FB/Youtube/Etc?" Why don't we do what we do online via www and other open standards/protocols instead of through platforms like FB? OTOH, the WWW obviously did succeed. We all use it every day, but with a third party platform like FB between us and other people. I also think it's remarkable that the www exists at all. No one owns it. It's not property, doesn't have a share price... Quite unusual. Tim Berners Lee is highly regarded. Zuck is one of the most powerful and wealthy people on earth. He made many other people very wealthy. Tim too, but more indirectly. It's remarkable that a Tim can ever beat a Zuck. ... But history proves they can.

tyingq 6y ago
"Fun fact: I believe Berkshire Hathaway's website is a frontpage site from back in the day." Sillier than that even. From https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/subs/sublinks.html https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/subs/sublinks.html <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 15"> Some other pages on the site: <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Adobe PageMill 2.0 Win"> <meta NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Microsoft FrontPage 3.0"> Seems like they tried all the cool WYSIWYG tools.
- 6y ago

the_other 6y ago

I didn't read the article, so feel free to downvote me for talking over the author... A "modern Frontpage" may help, but these days it seems: - creators (including your mum on Facebook) don't want to worry about design, only content - creators want to see feedback from the widest range of people possible as soon as possible, so it feels like conversation - consumers (who are the same people) want to see updates from all their friends, family and the brands they follow right there alongside one another and the feedback to their own stuff So to "reclaim the web" you ALSO need a decentralised commenting system that doesn't require any investment on the part of the user. We have ActivityPub and WebMentions now, but they all require accounts, hosting and management... and they don't come with original content creation. If you put every creator in their own silo (under their own domain name, say), they won't feel so connected, unless that domain also provides near-instant access to the feeds from all their contacts. Facebook and Insta give you a feed of your whole village plus the folks from the village over that you like, instantly. I'm sure the IndieWeb crew do feel connected, but how much effort have they all made to join that party? LOADS, compared with your mum on Facebook. So sure, modern Frontpage, but also easy RSS/Atom + WebMentions + ActivityPub (or equivalent). Personally, I really like Scuttlebutt for this. It has all this stuff, and is offline-first, and will work with interplanetary travel, and you can build calendars and events and stuff on top of it. But it's yet another protocol (and a complex one at that), and getting into the network is a big hurdle still.

Grumbledour 6y ago
But isn't scuttlebutt User centric vs. content centric? So I will only easily find content from people I already know? And I guess I can find new people if they are somehow connected to me, but can I search just for content on the "whole" network? Does this really provide a network effect like medium or facebook, or google search, who offer a large existing network for discovery?
- the_other 6y ago
  Last time I used it: yes-ish. "Tags" are public and posts can be set public (perhaps scoped to the server you're connected to. I don't recall). You can tag bits of content pretty easily (IIRC you prepend a # to any word you like). You then explore the contents of tags like channels. Public posts with tags then show up under those tags. The SSB/Patchwork creators were discussing a while ago that the network was actually content-centric. They described it as "islands of content" around which people navigated. I'm not gonna try to defend that, only to repeat it. Anyway... I think this is distracting from the main point. It doesn't _really_ matter if SSB wins out over HTML+CSS+JS+HTTP+RSS+ActivityPub+WebMentions or not. What matters is encouraging people to leave social media walled gardens by giving them tools and reasons to do so. Or, at the very least, somehow giving the content they create an easy means of escape, and bullying the gardens to open windows onto the wider world that don't involve one-way tactics like OpenGraph.

Traubenfuchs 6y ago

Who is WE? We software/web/website developers as opposed to common folk? Then we don't need this, as it would take our jobs away... Anything else like doctors saying "I want patients to operate on themselves." or "I want patients to vaccinate themselves.". What is it about the software world that created this notion of giving everything away?

koluna 6y ago
I am just going to assume that this is a troll comment due to the sheer ignorance of the statement made. But let’s assume it’s not. First of all, if someone with FrontPage can take your job away, you probably have bigger problems to solve involving the qualifications required for engineering. Second - you can’t compare surgery to website building. Putting together some CSS and HTML is nowhere near as complex as operating on a human being. Case in point - most of us were doing it since the MySpace days or earlier. I don’t know any 12 year olds who were doing surgeries at that time. Lastly - what’s with this scarcity mentality? Just because someone has the skills and ability to do something does not preclude you from doing the same thing. Should we ban books and tutorials because god forbid it might teach others to do the jobs we do?

motohagiography 6y ago

Culturally, Frontpage was an internet gentrification tool, which is part of what seems to be every social cycle.

alpineidyll3 6y ago

I think we instead need a simple hosting solution wrapped into your phone plan or internet service like it was way back when. It is the hosting upkeep that killed old internet.

keybits 6y ago

A good modern open source alternative is GrapesJS https://grapesjs.com/ https://grapesjs.com/

macspoofing 6y ago

This is the quintessential example of solving a legal, cultural and regulatory problem with a technical solution. Take the example of social media space, companies like Google/YouTube, Twitter, Facebook were wholly uninterested in policing political speech but they were forced to do so by political activists and Democrats and self-serving mainstream outlets (self-serving because when social media de-platforms, or demonetizes thousands of dinky little conservative or progressive outfits, they automatically raise traffic to conglomerate news. Similarly when Twitter banned political adverts, where do you think political adverts dollars went to?). The crypto community is another community that suffers from this delusion. They think that they can build a technical platform to get around AML laws and regulations. Sure. My good friend worked in the San Fran ICO space and through her I met a ton of crypto people and they were all deluded like this (one of them though he could create a mesh network with drones to get around government control of the internet). Their perspectives were endearing and I appreciate their existence ... but delusional. What do you think you're going to solve by introducing yet another platform (centralized or decentralized)? You think you're going to be left alone from those in positions of power (whether it be the mainstream media who want to reassert their traditional gatekeeping or governments and their regulatory bodies)?

jMyles 6y ago
> What do you think you're going to solve by introducing yet another platform (centralized or decentralized)? You think you're going to be left alone from those in positions of power (whether it be the mainstream media or government bodies)? The idea is to envision an internet where there is no specific target to leave alone or not leave alone. If publishing and consuming content are low-friction events, and censoring that content is impossible, then the internet will have achieved a substantial milestone in solving the legal, cultural and regulatory problems you correctly identify as underlying causes. Is it a complete solution? No, of course not. But it's worth the time and effort of our species, and is an important part of facilitating the emergence of ever more genuine human rights in the information age.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >If publishing and consuming content are low-friction events, and censoring that content is impossible I no longer believe that. Your page is going to be hosted somewhere. Some registrar will need to maintain your domain. Your DNS records will be registered by someone. You're going to be interacting with payment processors. You're going to buying power from some utility company. Your spouse may be working in a brick-and-mortar location. All of those (and more) are vectors for attack for censors whether they be government or activists. They just need to label your speech as dangerous or evil or something ridiculous and publicly shame you, your spouse, your spouse's employer and anyone that does business with you to see how little protection a new technical platform gives you. We've gotten away with this up to now because of the meteoric rise of the internet, but it's been figured out now.

WClayFerguson 6y ago

Here's my own little offering: https://quanta.wiki https://quanta.wiki I'm working on adding ActivityPub protocol which will enable Mastodon/Pleroma (i.e. the Fediverse) to it. But that platform is more about content than pretty styling.

est 6y ago

I think we need Macromedia Flash more. The animation creativity authoring tool, not the plugin. Drag drop shapes, curves and vectors, editable timelines, and streamable format. Fuck the handwritten svg css bullshit.

SaxoAnglo 6y ago
Macromedia Flash was so intuitive, you’d get someone designing and animating things in a couple of hours, contrast that with Adobe Illustrator, where you’d spend a couple of hours telling someone how to draw a circle then they would forget how to access the right menu to join two circles and get stuck while the person on Flash was creating complex shapes that morphed...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

acomjean 6y ago

What about wordpress. It’s weird,it’s somewhat clunky, but it’s easy to set up and put content out. It’s got plugins for everything which is a blessing and a curse. The problem is you require a theme to start and choosing one makes is hard.

marc_io 6y ago
This is beginning to change with the new Gutenberg editor and it's Full Site Editing, which is basically a site builder.
coreymaass 6y ago
Not necessarily. I start most of my sites with a blank theme and use Beaver Builder to lay things out.

FiddlerClamp 6y ago

Kompozer (http://kompozer.sourceforge.net/ http://kompozer.sourceforge.net/) is what I recommend for creating simple pages or making quick updates.

monssoen 6y ago

I remember asking my dad "can you get me Frontpage, I'd like to create a webpage". He gave me a book on html/css instead and it defined my career.

nbzso 6y ago

Tag: Controversial comment. I am glad for social platforms. They are bottomless pit. In my simple logic when something has low entry barrier and high friction the efficiency of information flow is lowered and result is meaningless noise. People will start personal blogs again for logical reasons. Give it time.

cdnsteve 6y ago

I don't see Frontpage coming back anytime soon. The space is now filled with all in one marketing platforms for businesses. Hubspot, Mailchimp, etc all now allow you to build websites. Creating your site is only one small piece of the puzzle, hosting, email, security and all the other stuff that's being pilled on top of the growing complexity these days. I see platforms as enabling more people to build more, not less. After all, content is what matters most and what drives visitors and value to a site.

Edmond 6y ago

As others have noted, the issue isn't a lack of ways to build your own website, it is the capture of the web by the likes of facebook, google, apple. It feels like a lifetime ago but people forget that one of the things that made myspace so appealing was the ability to "pimp" one's profile page. It was an aesthetic and security disaster but it was also AMAZING. People who wouldn't know what HTML meant if their lives depended on it were willing to learn the basics in order to personalize their profiles. Then facebook happened. Even facebook at first was receptive to the idea of some degree of personalizing with facebook apps, but as they grew bigger and powerful it became obvious that total control was the best for their bottom line. Now people have full blown computers in their pockets all the time and all they can think of doing with them is scrolling down and clicking "like" button. This is great for our "AI" revolution because user interaction/engagement with computers has been dumbed down to its stupidest form thus by comparison the "AI" seems very smart.

InvisibleUp 6y ago
Hi, author here. You might enjoy this other article I wrote on this subject: http://invisibleup.com/articles/31/ http://invisibleup.com/articles/31/ It discusses how most people's preferred social spaces recently have moved online into centralized silos, and the effects that has.
- fbelzile 6y ago
  You're a very good writer. Thank you for this :) If you had a mailing list, I'd sign up!
  - InvisibleUp 6y ago
    I don't, but my website has an RSS feed you can subscribe to.
rimliu 6y ago
How did Apple captured the web?

annoyingnoob 6y ago

You can find a lot of that functionality in Sharepoint today. Sharepoint still aims to have non-programmers build useful web pages. Where I work most folks prefer something like Confluence. Of course non of that is aimed at home users making personal web sites.

edwinyzh 6y ago

The goal's not completely achieved yet, but my project's goal is to turn Microsoft Word into a WordPress like site builder for ordinary users. Here is a quick GIF demo: https://docxmanager.com/features/website-generator.html https://docxmanager.com/features/website-generator.html

marc_io 6y ago

> If I wanted to do that on my hypothetical WordPress site, I'd be out of luck. Well, they are working on a new feature that will (hopefully) change that. It's called Full Site Editing (FSE), and will basically transform the WordPress editor into a complete website builder that, considering the WordPress's market share, may become a thing. It's arriving next year. Ref: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/20791 https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/20791

pmlnr 6y ago
WordPress needs setup, maintenance, monthly fee. Sites I used to make with FrontPage ended up being static, no maintenance, on a free - usually ISP - provider. That is the big difference.
- marc_io 6y ago
  You can easily export your website to a free static hosting using with a free plugin, after creating it on your desktop computer. No online PHP hosting required.
  - detaro 6y ago
    "easily" as in "an average user can do this (and discover instructions how to) without too much difficulty"?
    - marc_io 6y ago
      An average user can do this, for sure. But, yea, some sort of instruction is necessary, as it is not something that the platform itself offers by default. For example: the user needs to be aware of this possibility to begin with and also need to know which plugin to install, even it isn't difficult to work with. In addition, as the site will no longer be dynamic, some adjustments must be made, such as disabling comments - or adding an alternative like Disqus.
      - 6y ago

akrymski 6y ago

There are two potential paths: 1. Creating web-pages is like creating music, we should create tools that make it as easy as possible for anyone to create them 2. Creating web-pages is engineering, like building a house or a car. We don't want anyone without qualifications being able to create these, given their increasing complexity.

cpill 6y ago
yeah as there are two main applications of the web: static content delivery, like a billboard and; web applications which are replacements of traditional desktop applications. for the first it's "content is king" and the second UX is king

beambot 6y ago

Makes me nostalgic for the days of Hypercard...

Angostura 6y ago

I used to rather like iWeb that Apple produced. It's spiritual successor seems to be https://sparkleapp.com https://sparkleapp.com

pmlnr 6y ago

Who the heck changed the title and why?! Yes, I know that is the original, and I changed it on purpose, with a line from the conclusions. Please change it back to what it was: "We need a FrontPage that lets common folks retake the internet with creativity"

oliwarner 6y ago

It seems that everybody understands that Facebook/Twitter/etc have to change or go away in order for this to happen. I'm personally in favour of making social networks just things for people who know each other talk to each other. Maybe a physical proximity thing too. That's a crushing blow to free speech but I think this experiment has clearly shown what happens when you encourage idiots (of all political views!) to mix with like-minded simpletons. They don't reason with each other, they degrade into lynch mobs, and they're scarily easy to manipulate. So yes, when —not if— the revolution comes, it'll be nice to see independent thought being fostered out onto the wild internet with Frontpage 2030, and I won't get some algorithm mixing "POTATOES ARE RACIST TRACKING BEACONS" posts in with updates from my family.

crx07 6y ago

Notably absent from this analysis is a new tool called Nicepage. Took me years to find anything like it. https://nicepage.com/ https://nicepage.com/