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I have friends who set up their own web pages in the late 90s armed with Notepad, free hosting supplied by their ISP, and some online help. No chance at all of

I have friends who set up their own web pages in the late 90s armed with Notepad, free hosting supplied by their ISP, and some online help. No chance at all of most people being able to do that today. Why do you Open Source Evangelists not understand that most humans cannot do this stuff? It's great that you know what a build system and github and dependencies are, but most people don't. And IMO they shouldn't have to.

detaro 5y ago
You can still do all that with any competent shared hosting provider. (I guess "free, supplied by ISP" is rare nowadays, but you'll find other "free at some subdomain" offerings) Just because all these other options exist doesn't mean you need to use them. Plenty people I know still handwrite their HTML. Somehow people got to the point of thinking that the only way to host a website is renting a VPS and setting up everything themselves, and that's just not true. (and even if you do that, there's a range of how complex you need to make it)
542354234235 5y ago
>I have friends who set up their own web pages in the late 90s armed with Notepad, free hosting supplied by their ISP, and some online help. >No chance at all of most people being able to do that today. I used to save my notepad files on a floppy drive. No chance at all of most people being able to do that today. Just because things are different doesn’t mean worse. The exact skills and methods used 20 years ago is not a good metric for something as nebulous as “do things independently online”. The “things” you can do are going to change and evolve.
- friendzis 5y ago
  20 years ago you saved notepad files on a removable media. Today you still do the same. Underlying technology may have changed, but the interface remains the same.
deleted 5y ago
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Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
> I have friends who set up their own web pages in the late 90s armed with Notepad, free hosting supplied by their ISP, and some online help. > No chance at all of most people being able to do that today. What are you talking about? You can still do all that. There's still free hosting available, just not through your ISP. You can still hand-edit HTML with Notepad and publish it to a free web host. > It's great that you know what a build system and github and dependencies are, but most people don't. All the added complexity of web deployments these days is not required for a simple personal web page. You don't need JavaScript, a build system, dependency management, etc. The plain HTML written in 1998 still works today. Even the old HTML frames still work, according to a quick Google, even though they haven't been used by any site in well over 15 years. > And IMO they shouldn't have to. Good, because they don't.
- glenneroo 5y ago
  > You can still hand-edit HTML with Notepad and publish it to a free web host. Exactly. The last website I made for a festival early last year I wrote by hand with Notepad++. It ended up being 14 HTML files (7 files and 2 languages) and a couple CSS files and a lot of reading about current CSS standards. Initially I started with WordPress but couldn't find a decent theme to do the layout we wanted, so I scrapped it after a couple days of trying to bend several themes to my will. Not much different than how I did it in the 90s... except back then I couldn't just DuckDuckGo to find thousands of pages with HTML/CSS help.
roywiggins 5y ago
> No chance at all of most people being able to do that today. https://neocities.org https://neocities.org seems fine for this purpose?

detaro 5y ago

You can still do all that with any competent shared hosting provider. (I guess "free, supplied by ISP" is rare nowadays, but you'll find other "free at some subdomain" offerings) Just because all these other options exist doesn't mean you need to use them. Plenty people I know still handwrite their HTML. Somehow people got to the point of thinking that the only way to host a website is renting a VPS and setting up everything themselves, and that's just not true. (and even if you do that, there's a range of how complex you need to make it)

542354234235 5y ago

>I have friends who set up their own web pages in the late 90s armed with Notepad, free hosting supplied by their ISP, and some online help. >No chance at all of most people being able to do that today. I used to save my notepad files on a floppy drive. No chance at all of most people being able to do that today. Just because things are different doesn’t mean worse. The exact skills and methods used 20 years ago is not a good metric for something as nebulous as “do things independently online”. The “things” you can do are going to change and evolve.

friendzis 5y ago
20 years ago you saved notepad files on a removable media. Today you still do the same. Underlying technology may have changed, but the interface remains the same.

deleted 5y ago

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Sohcahtoa82 5y ago

> I have friends who set up their own web pages in the late 90s armed with Notepad, free hosting supplied by their ISP, and some online help. > No chance at all of most people being able to do that today. What are you talking about? You can still do all that. There's still free hosting available, just not through your ISP. You can still hand-edit HTML with Notepad and publish it to a free web host. > It's great that you know what a build system and github and dependencies are, but most people don't. All the added complexity of web deployments these days is not required for a simple personal web page. You don't need JavaScript, a build system, dependency management, etc. The plain HTML written in 1998 still works today. Even the old HTML frames still work, according to a quick Google, even though they haven't been used by any site in well over 15 years. > And IMO they shouldn't have to. Good, because they don't.

glenneroo 5y ago
> You can still hand-edit HTML with Notepad and publish it to a free web host. Exactly. The last website I made for a festival early last year I wrote by hand with Notepad++. It ended up being 14 HTML files (7 files and 2 languages) and a couple CSS files and a lot of reading about current CSS standards. Initially I started with WordPress but couldn't find a decent theme to do the layout we wanted, so I scrapped it after a couple days of trying to bend several themes to my will. Not much different than how I did it in the 90s... except back then I couldn't just DuckDuckGo to find thousands of pages with HTML/CSS help.

roywiggins 5y ago

> No chance at all of most people being able to do that today. https://neocities.org https://neocities.org seems fine for this purpose?