6 ms·

People don't care about 10 years from now or edge case users. It matters how it looks today and that it drives engagement and profit now. People aren't making t

People don't care about 10 years from now or edge case users. It matters how it looks today and that it drives engagement and profit now. People aren't making their websites for eternity. It's like lamenting that the billboards on the street are not archived or the menu card of the kebab shop is not available as it was 10 years ago. The web is there to provide functionality and satisfy business needs. It's usually not the hobbyists who pack their sites with all the modern fancy js.

austincheney 6y ago
Corporate user facing websites are created for 3-5 year time horizon with sunset at 8 years. The primary reason is because most developers in the corporate space cannot write original code. They are dependent upon large frameworks that have a limited lifespan. Maintenance is hard when your site is littered with code you never wrote and never understood beyond the API.
damagednoob 6y ago
I think this is a bit of a false analogy. It's not just billboards and menus that need to be archived but also newspapers. Maybe a right-leaning news site gets archived (for lack of JS) and a left-leaning one doesn't. I would certainly want to see what both sides were writing about at the same time.
tartoran 6y ago
Fair enough. How about documents? Would anyone be able to access ebooks in 50 years from now? How about 1000? We have very old books that are still ‘functioning’ and the problem posed is that technology is becoming more complex and more fleeting at the same time. When it comes to billboards and menus, absolutely nobody gives a damn but when it comes to internet, a lot of knowledge of the time gets lost as it can’t be archived properly and while it’s not the biggest problem it still sucks
- andersforsgren 6y ago
  > Would anyone be able to access ebooks in 50 years from now? Access as in the original manuscript of the book is still around somewhere in a readable format so new ebooks can be published in whatever format is in demand then? I certainly hope so. But should ebooks sold now be readable by anyone in 50 years? I don't think many people worry about that, nor should they. Archiving should be for persistence, so done in some format we can be absolutely sure we can read (such as plain text). Distribution should be for convenience, i.e. likely whatever proprietary format users want.
fao_ 6y ago
> The web is there to provide functionality and satisfy business needs. lol Remember when the web was for people to communicate? Not just to 'satisfy business needs'?
- ben_w 6y ago
  I don’t remember any such time, and I had a 14.4k modem.
- arcturus17 6y ago
  I actually don’t, my family got on the web circa 1996 and within a year or two we were buying books on Barnes & Noble and having them shipped to Spain. What are you referring to?
  - edoceo 6y ago
    Pre-ecommerce Internet. (Aka: the good ol' days)
  - kortilla 6y ago
    The reason for purchasing an internet connection was not to shop back then. You may have purchased some books but the majority of online activity had no apparent business purpose.
  - CaptArmchair 6y ago
    The original intention of the Web - as devised by Tim Berners Lee - was to share documents in a research context. The idea of a URI or URL was to uniquely identify documents, but also to link them as hypertext. So you could jump from document to document. Then Netscape came. They were the first having a primitive idea of the potential of the Web beyond simply linking pages. The Dotcom bubble of 1999 and the first boom of e-commerce was exactly because in the few years preceding, everyone was scrambling to get dominate this Web thing. This included Microsoft, Sun and so on. Now, nothing of this is new. The entire idea of "Rich Web Applications" is as old as the Web. Silverlight, Java Web Applets, Flash,... They were all about this idea of building applications that could be loaded - and more importantly: controlled - via the Web. Over the past 15 years, Google succeeded in dominating the browser market, and building a set of API's that made it easy to build such Rich We Applications without needing extra plugins or 3rd party sandboxes. You can just do it using Javscript, HTML and CSS. And while that's not a bad thing in itself, the problem is that an entire generation of engineers has created an entire layer of abstractions on top of the browser engine in order to reinvent the exact same things which already existed back in the '90s. Only now, instead of running separate native programs and applications, everything is now corralled into a single browser environment... which tends to be entirely controlled by Google, if you use anything powered by Chromium. And this often includes how simple text documents are consumed. The text you get doesn't arrive as a HTML body in a HTTP request, it arrives as a chunk - or chunks - of JSON and needs to get parsed and assembled by layers of javascript until the assembled code can be fed to a browser engine... which will parse that once again in order to paint it on the browser canvas. None of that is truly necessary when it comes to plain text. Heck, none of that is even necessary to render a single image on the browser canvas. Plenty of major, highly visible, high traffic outlets like newspapers or media use these layers of complexity to publish text. Why? Because it gives them control over your experience and what you can do with the content e.g. paywalls, DRM, advertising, intricate metrics,... Now, plenty of the Web still offers plain HTML and CSS, just like 20 years ago. And that's awesome. But that's a long tail of websites which largely remains in the dark since the vast majority of Internet users have been corralled into a set of centralized services that tend to promote links to these highly visible outlets through their recommendation engines.
pmlnr 6y ago
> People don't care about 10 years from now But they really effing should. 10 years is not a long time at all. > it's usually not the hobbyists who pack their sites with all the modern fancy js. BS. News outlets, Google Anything, Facebook itself, etc., are usually way worse.
- pachico 6y ago
  10 years, at least in the industries related to internet, is an eternity.
shadowgovt 6y ago
Precisely. In 10 years, most of the data on the web is outdated and useless to everyone but historians.
- Ma8ee 6y ago
  Yes, most of it. But there’s definitely content that still is talked about and referenced many years later. Joel Spolsky’s Things You Should Never Do was written in the year 2000 and sometimes comes up in discussions at HN. Imagine if Brooks No Silver Bullet would have been published on some now defunct blog site.
s17n 6y ago
The billboards on the street or the menu card of the kebab shop are actually great examples of things that would be worth archiving. The stuff that isn't worth archiving is things like the current ordering of items in my facebook feed, the current search results for a given term, etc.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  I think we worry too much about hoarding information. It's ephemeral, mostly garbage. Yeah it's kinda cool to see old items from hundred of years ago, but we will leave plenty of stuff either way. But forgetting is part of moving forward. The next generations will have enough to deal with regarding their times than to dive into minute details of the past. Same about worrying about personal photos. I don't have many photos about the youth of my grandparents. And none about my great grandparents. But that's okay. I don't want to be defined by them, and I don't want my great grandkids to know tiny details of my life. Legends and stories are just the right amount to know. It's a feature that the past decays not a bug.
rdiddly 6y ago
Right! What is life even for, other than satisfying business needs? Ho ho I jest. But yeah I'm a person, and a member of {people}, and I for one have very little interest in satisfying business needs. So which internet should I use? Your billboard/menu analogy is actually a pretty good one. Those things can safely be considered crap for anyone whose interests don't align with said business, as js;dr kind of implies. Especially if the billboard has a camera mounted in it or the menu records your conversation while you're holding it, type of thing.

austincheney 6y ago

Corporate user facing websites are created for 3-5 year time horizon with sunset at 8 years. The primary reason is because most developers in the corporate space cannot write original code. They are dependent upon large frameworks that have a limited lifespan. Maintenance is hard when your site is littered with code you never wrote and never understood beyond the API.

damagednoob 6y ago

I think this is a bit of a false analogy. It's not just billboards and menus that need to be archived but also newspapers. Maybe a right-leaning news site gets archived (for lack of JS) and a left-leaning one doesn't. I would certainly want to see what both sides were writing about at the same time.

tartoran 6y ago

Fair enough. How about documents? Would anyone be able to access ebooks in 50 years from now? How about 1000? We have very old books that are still ‘functioning’ and the problem posed is that technology is becoming more complex and more fleeting at the same time. When it comes to billboards and menus, absolutely nobody gives a damn but when it comes to internet, a lot of knowledge of the time gets lost as it can’t be archived properly and while it’s not the biggest problem it still sucks

andersforsgren 6y ago
> Would anyone be able to access ebooks in 50 years from now? Access as in the original manuscript of the book is still around somewhere in a readable format so new ebooks can be published in whatever format is in demand then? I certainly hope so. But should ebooks sold now be readable by anyone in 50 years? I don't think many people worry about that, nor should they. Archiving should be for persistence, so done in some format we can be absolutely sure we can read (such as plain text). Distribution should be for convenience, i.e. likely whatever proprietary format users want.

fao_ 6y ago

> The web is there to provide functionality and satisfy business needs. lol Remember when the web was for people to communicate? Not just to 'satisfy business needs'?

ben_w 6y ago
I don’t remember any such time, and I had a 14.4k modem.
arcturus17 6y ago
I actually don’t, my family got on the web circa 1996 and within a year or two we were buying books on Barnes & Noble and having them shipped to Spain. What are you referring to?
- edoceo 6y ago
  Pre-ecommerce Internet. (Aka: the good ol' days)
- kortilla 6y ago
  The reason for purchasing an internet connection was not to shop back then. You may have purchased some books but the majority of online activity had no apparent business purpose.
- CaptArmchair 6y ago
  The original intention of the Web - as devised by Tim Berners Lee - was to share documents in a research context. The idea of a URI or URL was to uniquely identify documents, but also to link them as hypertext. So you could jump from document to document. Then Netscape came. They were the first having a primitive idea of the potential of the Web beyond simply linking pages. The Dotcom bubble of 1999 and the first boom of e-commerce was exactly because in the few years preceding, everyone was scrambling to get dominate this Web thing. This included Microsoft, Sun and so on. Now, nothing of this is new. The entire idea of "Rich Web Applications" is as old as the Web. Silverlight, Java Web Applets, Flash,... They were all about this idea of building applications that could be loaded - and more importantly: controlled - via the Web. Over the past 15 years, Google succeeded in dominating the browser market, and building a set of API's that made it easy to build such Rich We Applications without needing extra plugins or 3rd party sandboxes. You can just do it using Javscript, HTML and CSS. And while that's not a bad thing in itself, the problem is that an entire generation of engineers has created an entire layer of abstractions on top of the browser engine in order to reinvent the exact same things which already existed back in the '90s. Only now, instead of running separate native programs and applications, everything is now corralled into a single browser environment... which tends to be entirely controlled by Google, if you use anything powered by Chromium. And this often includes how simple text documents are consumed. The text you get doesn't arrive as a HTML body in a HTTP request, it arrives as a chunk - or chunks - of JSON and needs to get parsed and assembled by layers of javascript until the assembled code can be fed to a browser engine... which will parse that once again in order to paint it on the browser canvas. None of that is truly necessary when it comes to plain text. Heck, none of that is even necessary to render a single image on the browser canvas. Plenty of major, highly visible, high traffic outlets like newspapers or media use these layers of complexity to publish text. Why? Because it gives them control over your experience and what you can do with the content e.g. paywalls, DRM, advertising, intricate metrics,... Now, plenty of the Web still offers plain HTML and CSS, just like 20 years ago. And that's awesome. But that's a long tail of websites which largely remains in the dark since the vast majority of Internet users have been corralled into a set of centralized services that tend to promote links to these highly visible outlets through their recommendation engines.

pmlnr 6y ago

> People don't care about 10 years from now But they really effing should. 10 years is not a long time at all. > it's usually not the hobbyists who pack their sites with all the modern fancy js. BS. News outlets, Google Anything, Facebook itself, etc., are usually way worse.

pachico 6y ago
10 years, at least in the industries related to internet, is an eternity.

shadowgovt 6y ago

Precisely. In 10 years, most of the data on the web is outdated and useless to everyone but historians.

Ma8ee 6y ago
Yes, most of it. But there’s definitely content that still is talked about and referenced many years later. Joel Spolsky’s Things You Should Never Do was written in the year 2000 and sometimes comes up in discussions at HN. Imagine if Brooks No Silver Bullet would have been published on some now defunct blog site.

s17n 6y ago

The billboards on the street or the menu card of the kebab shop are actually great examples of things that would be worth archiving. The stuff that isn't worth archiving is things like the current ordering of items in my facebook feed, the current search results for a given term, etc.

bonoboTP 6y ago
I think we worry too much about hoarding information. It's ephemeral, mostly garbage. Yeah it's kinda cool to see old items from hundred of years ago, but we will leave plenty of stuff either way. But forgetting is part of moving forward. The next generations will have enough to deal with regarding their times than to dive into minute details of the past. Same about worrying about personal photos. I don't have many photos about the youth of my grandparents. And none about my great grandparents. But that's okay. I don't want to be defined by them, and I don't want my great grandkids to know tiny details of my life. Legends and stories are just the right amount to know. It's a feature that the past decays not a bug.

rdiddly 6y ago

Right! What is life even for, other than satisfying business needs? Ho ho I jest. But yeah I'm a person, and a member of {people}, and I for one have very little interest in satisfying business needs. So which internet should I use? Your billboard/menu analogy is actually a pretty good one. Those things can safely be considered crap for anyone whose interests don't align with said business, as js;dr kind of implies. Especially if the billboard has a camera mounted in it or the menu records your conversation while you're holding it, type of thing.