16 ms·

I made my first web0 website today. It's so cool it just works

258 points by cookingoils 5y ago

fleddr 5y ago
Both web3 and web2 are misnomers that sends discussions into every possible direction. They are misnomers because of the word "web". The original meaning of "web" was for it to be one of many applications on the underlying internet. Another application could be FTP, telnet, Gopher. As such, web2 is an imprecise term because it is a conceptual change not restricted to web technology. It's the internet becoming a two-way street, rather than mostly read-only for the typical user. When you post some content using a mobile app, that's "web2", even if not a single web technology is used end-to-end. And to add to the confusion, "web3" is specifically a response to the 2nd phase of "web2": the centralization of content discovery and monetization. The well known big tech gate keepers that slurp up all content, your private data, put ads on them, and this way become filthy rich whilst content producers get nothing. Some content producers may get a piece of the pie, but terms may change or they may just kick you off the platform. Not even by a human, by AI. And they won't even bother to tell you why. Likewise, app store owners can just take 30% of your business, dictate how you do business with them, and get sole access to your customers' data. Gatekeepers may also arbitrarily decide what is allowed speech and what isn't. I could go on, but the issues that come from "web2" monopolies are well known, and nothing new. Most people are in agreement that they are serious issues, all the way up to governments. As such, it's sad that a movement that has the potential to make somewhat of a meaningful change, namely "web3", is met with such ridicule. Just because it has the trigger word "crypto" associated with it. It's truly anti-intellectual and lazy to not even acknowledge the problems with "web2" and to just decide in a heartbeat that "web3" is a scam. Because you read the word "crypto". Meanwhile, "crypto" adds 100M new users every year, and accelerating. VCs, including the ones behind this website, are throwing everything and the kitchen sink at it. Whilst you laugh at NFTs, musicians, car manufacturers, event organizers and sports teams are embracing it. Crypto-assets backed gaming is about the enter the hype phase. Facebook is throwing tens of billions into the metaverse with the idea to make it compatible with leading blockchains. Twitter is integrating Bitcoin payments and verified NFTs, as well as working on some decentralized social network. At what point do you stop to wonder...maybe something's up with this crypto thing? I'm not here to sell you crypto, as clearly this community has made up its mind and thinks it's about "too much javascript". I'm here to tell you that you dramatically underestimate the speed at which it develops, is normalized and becoming mainstream. Be skeptical, but not a fool.
deleted 5y ago
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bestcoder69 5y ago
We should invest even heavier into web∅, which is when you don’t even have a website. Can’t get lighter than that.
- schoen 5y ago
  Maybe all web∅ pages are the empty string, so they're all equal to one another?
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    Empty string or null string?
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
I guess this is the webdev equivalent of meta commentary in the media where somebody doesn't actually talk about anything other than what their reaction to it means.
- vmception 5y ago
  Most blog posts are the same Theyre just Super comments nobody’s can reply directly to
athenot 5y ago
A happy medium can still be had by including all the typesetting niceties in the same file, or maybe one extra included file. Still amazingly fast.
MatthiasWandel 5y ago
And yet it has stuff that wouldn't be recognized by early browsers, like https, or the viewport meta tag (useful for mobile)
nerdponx 5y ago
I wrote my first grad student website in raw HTML. In Vi, on a Unix mainframe, over SSH. It was fun, but I don't blame developers for trying to make things more composable and reusable. I'm big on tools that let you build plain static HTML pages, but rendered from templated components.
- hondo77 5y ago
  > ...a Unix mainframe... ???
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    The university had (has?) some kind of central Unix system for students to mess around with, share files, and host their webpages. This was around 2014.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  >In Vi, on a Unix mainframe, over SSH. I did mine APoAC in a blizzard. Lots of dropped packets.
peanut_worm 5y ago
whats wrong with css
- it 5y ago
  Typically it means adding another file.
  - yladiz 5y ago
    You could copy and paste the CSS in every page using style tags.
    - 6510 5y ago
      Server Side Includes
  - peanut_worm 5y ago
    sure but theyre already using inline css whats the problem with using a style tag? theyre already including a favicon might as well swap that for a css file if youre worried about get requests or something
- kubb 5y ago
  it requires expert knowledge
  - peanut_worm 5y ago
    layout sure but font-size and background are pretty straight forward if you can set up a web server i am sure you could figure out enough to qualify for web 1.0 level complexity if simplicity is the concern why not just host a text file? browsers format them nicely
    - oblib 5y ago
      That's a great point. I didn't get involved with the web until around 1998-99 so I'm not sure, but did the web ever not support plain old .txt?
julienreszka 5y ago
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
- szczepano 5y ago
  https://thebestmotherfucking.website/ https://thebestmotherfucking.website/
dvt 5y ago
Ah, yes, I remember this from web0: <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"> <meta name="twitter:title" content="My first web0 website!"> <meta name="twitter:description" content=""> <meta name="twitter:image" content="https://elliott.computer/pages/web0/social.jpg"> Trying to make web3 go away is just as pointless as trying to make web2 go away. It's here, it's going to stick around. Yes, there's a lot of hype, it probably won't look the same in 10 years, and yes there's a lot of charlatans, but I think ignoring its importance is myopic.
- riffic 5y ago
  when the folks with the laser eyes won't even look at the existing systems which can be used to extend the web in a standards-compliant way, then we have every right to be dismissive of their position (holding bags). They have every right to come to the table at the W3C. The federated social web has existed since 2008. It is the real web3.
  - pcthrowaway 5y ago
    "The folks with laser eyes" are affectionately known as bitcoin maxis, and they have more interest in web0 than in web3.
    - riffic 5y ago
      the bros with the ape avatars then? you know who I'm talking about.
- yob28 5y ago
- gred 5y ago
  > Web3, also known as Web 3.0, is an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web Cool, cool... > that incorporates decentralization based on blockchains k bye
  - 5y ago
TurkishPoptart 5y ago
Inspected the page. What does this stuff do? ><script type="text/javascript">window["_gaUserPrefs"] = { ioo : function() { return true; } }</script>
- peanut_worm 5y ago
  I don’t see that, do you have some extension that might add that?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - TurkishPoptart 5y ago
    I think it is Privacy Badger, actually.
- tyingq 5y ago
  Are you running the "gaoptout" extension? ( this thing: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-analytics-opt-out/fllaojicojecljbmefodhfapmkghcbnh?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-analytics-o...) That snippet is what it injects to opt you out of Google Analytics. I do not see that snippet in the page source.
  - TurkishPoptart 5y ago
    Oh, I'm running Privacy Badger, so perhaps that injected it.
- mostlysimilar 5y ago
  It appears to be opt-out for Google Analytics. Source: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/21163#issuecomment-468054382 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/21163#issuecomm...
userbinator 5y ago
It's both pleasing and a little disappointing to see this being "marketed" under the name "web0" --- especially on a "nonstandard" TLD. All websites used to be simple handwritten hyperlinked pages. I guess what's old is new again? Of course, Big Tech would want you to use its browser (not browser_s_) and indulge in the insane complexity of "the web stack" which guarantees its monopoly, but it doesn't have to be that way for everyone. Maybe once more people realise the latter, the web can become mostly-browser-neutral again.
- rhizome 5y ago
  CanIuse should have a page that lists all of the browser features that are supported by all browsers and in the same way. Of course it's not as simple as that, but in short, what has a green square across the current versions of all browsers? Green-green, not half-stepping green.
  - jefftk 5y ago
    What would that presentation be useful for? They certainly have the data, but I have trouble thinking of a situation where I would want that kind of list.
    - rhizome 5y ago
      Then it wouldn't be for you. For me, it could indicate the amount of web page knowledge necessary to minimize maintenance overhead.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  I feel like just a basic stylesheet improves things quite a lot (this isn't using CSS at all). But otherwise I agree that a lot more website should be like this.
  - ceautery 5y ago
    The site uses an inline CSS statement to set the font size. I like the attempt, though. I could go off on an old-man tangent about "kids these days don't even know what a fieldset is!" or whatever, but I very much appreciate the call to do things more simply.
yayr 5y ago
just to be a bit picky - it technically has some CSS albeit in a style tag: <center style="font-size: 18px">... is it now web1?
- cookingoils 5y ago
  okay i'll remove if it will make you happy : )
  - jagger27 5y ago
    If you want your bigger font back, change the DOCTYPE to HTML4 and use a good ol' <font> tag instead! <font size="+2">foobar</font>
    - cookingoils 5y ago
      good call. thank you
- ezequiel-garzon 5y ago
  The viewport meta tag is also a post web0, almost web2 forced addition. I say forced in the sense that it’s required for proper rendering in mobile even for CSS-free sites.
  - Jerrrry 5y ago
    >proper rendering in mobile this is the thing everyone adds because someone said it was the right way. it is the "assumption" that everyone does not want their user to _zoom out_ on mobile sites. it is wrong, and nobody questions it
f0e4c2f7 5y ago
I was expecting plain text. Don't be shy. Browsers will serve up basically anything.
- tentacleuno 5y ago
  It can also serve XML with an optional XML stylesheet (XSLT or something, I believe)? Browsers have a lot of support for many different standards.
- cookingoils 5y ago
  Here's my old website: https://archive.elliott.computer/old-index.txt https://archive.elliott.computer/old-index.txt
  - tailspin2019 5y ago
    Plain text?? I was expecting binary.
    - cookingoils 5y ago
      brb
remram 5y ago
A site with no content and no feature. That's cool.
- lsalvatore 5y ago
  Yes, functionality would require skills, and skills require opinionated tools. Opinions require taking a stance, and that's the last thing anyone here wants to do.
  - remram 5y ago
    I was trying to be snarky, implying that it's easy to make a site with no tech when that site has no feature and no content. I am quite curious at what you're trying to say, because I caught the sarcasm but none of your meaning. Your first sentence goes my way, but then... I don't know.
    - lsalvatore 5y ago
      The prevailing view here is that JavaScript is a nightmare to develop with when in fact, there is actually a bit of a golden age going on right now. It's never been more stable and fun to build apps on the web. Maybe I'll write a post about it.
oars 5y ago
I don't understand, how is this different to me just serving a plain HTML page with the latest Nginx Docker image and claiming we're back to Web 0? Is there something special about this page specifically e.g. not being hosted on a normal web server?
- cookingoils 5y ago
  yes, did you feel the energy?
root_axis 5y ago
The thing being called web3 doesn't seem mutually exclusive to what is being called web0 in this post. Might be a sign that web3 isn't a great name for sites integrated with blockchain content. I know, I know, you can't unsqueeze the toothpaste tube.
zimbatm 5y ago
I wish browsers would render text/markdown. It's easy to write, theme, and host. I know it's not the best text format out there but it's reasonable to write and read for most cases.
- easrng 5y ago
  I'm making an addon for Firefox (not sure if it will work on chrome) that renders markdown and gemtext right now actually. It's not on AMO yet, but you can get it from https://github.com/easrng/txtpage https://github.com/easrng/txtpage
- NateEag 5y ago
  It's not hard to generate a static collection of HTML from Markdown documents. Pandoc is probably my favorite tool for that job: https://pandoc.org/ https://pandoc.org/
rootsudo 5y ago
Hey, I guess that's why the 3 www's in front of any website is for. For web3.0! web 2.0 is two w's and one had none?
deleted 5y ago
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tehjoker 5y ago
It's funny that web3 is being sold as the decentralized web when that's what the internet architecture was literally designed for -- to survive an apocalyptic nuclear war. However, big players used their ability to purchase infrastructure and unforeseen flaws in the protocols to centralize much of the activity on the web. Lol if you think money can't do that to any decentralized architecture. One thing that would at least help. We got the web fractured from a p2p two-way street into a broadcast medium because ISP's were able to use the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space to limit stable IPs to business class connections. I can't claim we can bring that back, but wide deployment of IPv6 would at least demolish the argument against consumer static IPs and open up the network as a fair flat graph again.
- krapp 5y ago
  They didn't do anything to the architecture. The fact that most people spend most of their time on a few websites doesn't centralize the architecture at all, or even the web, it only centralizes attention.
  - tehjoker 5y ago
    I'm not claiming they did something to the architecture and it definitely doesn't solve the problem you identified. More that this flaw in the difference between userbase growth and the protocol made it very difficult to have the kind of vibrant consumer-to-consumer architectures that could have potentially competed. Nowadays, probably ddos and things like that are other barriers. However, I do think that IPv6 does at least remove a fundamental limiter even if that alone isn't enough.
  - throwawaycities 5y ago
    DNS/root servers/ICANN are fundamental architecture of the internet that are centralized. People either forget, or weren’t around, when domains names were thought of and treated much like NFTs are today. There was a small group of early adopters but for the most part big business considered websites/domain names something akin to digital monopoly money, just a play thing with no relation to the real world. In the early days even the law and courts didn’t know how to treat claims over domain names. Now ICANN dictates DNS rules worldwide and streamlines the process for businesses to take domains according to ICANN rules. There are many examples of new decentralized architecture and protocols being built for web3 and the decentralized web, like: IPFS: a p2p alternative to https ENS: a decentralized domain name protocol as a alternative to DNS
DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
Web 1.0: HTML Web 2.0: HTML + Javascript Web 3.0: HTML + Javascript + Ponzi. source: https://twitter.com/jeremiahg/status/1473768877377130505 https://twitter.com/jeremiahg/status/1473768877377130505
- b1n 5y ago
  There are real things happening in web 3.0, they are just being obscured by layers and layers of bullshit, scams and other fuckery. Once all that has crashed and everyone has lost all their money there will still be real and interesting tech remaining. Be very sceptical, but don't ignore the whole thing or you might end up missing the next real wave of innovation in tech (which is what i thought HN was about).
  - qaq 5y ago
    I think if you want to dispel the skepticism describing those real things would go a long way.
    - b1n 5y ago
      Identity that solves Zooko's Triangle, Censorship Resistant Storage, P2P/Decentralization (separate from blockchain), alternative funding models for all kinds of SaaS and Open Source projects. Look it up yourself, or don't.
    - oblib 5y ago
      I've yet to see those "real things" described and would be interested to see it summed up so I can.
    - hwhelan210 5y ago
      I'm working on a decentralized storage solution for personal data. To be fair, it's not actually being used anywhere meaningful but I think it has real value (data ownership / privacy, encryption, protection from client code) and we have a proof-of-concept website that you could test it out on.
wy35 5y ago
If I had a dollar every time one of these "javascript bad, raw html good" websites/rants gets posted here, I'd have enough money to buy the entirety of YC just so I could ban such posts.
frozenport 5y ago
needs more blink tag
- jonathankoren 5y ago
  https://jonathankorensucks.com/blink.HTM https://jonathankorensucks.com/blink.HTM
cmer 5y ago
It's not web0 without <blink> and <marquee>!
fb03 5y ago
Sorry, but this is a rant. I am deeply saddened by the current state of affairs in the web today. in Javascript right now there are so many layers upon layers upon layers of DSLs and mannerisms on top of questionable language features which 'must be used' because the former language features are not cool anymore since a few days ago. The whole ecosystem is turning into a meme of itself. In a few months someone will reinvent another part of the big clusterfuck again and publish it in a shiny new website and we'll have another 3 month old Javascript framework being touted as the next earth-shattering thing that will revolutionize all things. And again. And again. We have nice things. We have nice abstractions already. We should be working on toning down and optimizing the good stuff, the good bits that get stuff done, not ramping up on new shiny buttons for each and every edge case out there just because we need to stay on the loop (whatever this loop is).
- c0balt 5y ago
  The amount of reinvention in the JS space is mind boggling. While this works to drive the whole thing forward it would be nice to see more LTS support rather than yet another templating library. Not that most their languages are inherently better but some have a way of mitigating the problem slightly, like e.g. python's extensive std lib collection.
  - fb03 5y ago
    I am a backend engineer by trade, and I have been trying to learn me a little React because I decided I should learn new tech (not the stuff I use on a daily basis, which is Python) on side projects. So the backend is being done in Rust, and frontend is using React. I had this moment where I thought "well, I need Typescript, because I want nicely typed interfaces and contracts, and I need React". Turns out it's not easy like that. To cobble everything together you need a proper template for webpack. and there's Babel and that also needs to be caressed in the right React-y way. You can't just "hop in". You have to use cookiecutter-styled tools to bootstrap because the whole thing just got so complex so that even a Hello World styled project needs a mindboggling amount of tools all orchestrated and plugged into each other in the right way or it all blows up in your face. Also, there are more than one cookiecutter-styled tools and you have to choose the right one. "But don't fret you can always run eject to see the whole machinery inside". It's saddening and tiring.
de6u99er 5y ago
Web3 is a trojan horse. It's about exchanging money into crypto currencies to pay those hosting the Web3. I bet if we allow this to happen, most of Web3's hosting will belong to a few, and they will finally have made us pay for using the web.
0x0nyandesu 5y ago
I remember when web 2.0 became a thing it was more of a generic description of web design style and the advent of tech like ajax. Web 3 so far seems like astroturphed nonsense.
ape4 5y ago
Back in the day html was <CENTER>UPPERCASE</CENTER>
panic 5y ago
An HTTPS URL makes this more like web1.5.
Commodore63 5y ago
Nobody's going to get rich from shilling existing tech. Crypto bagholders need new marks.
dxbydt 5y ago
I made my first "professional" web0 page 25 years ago. I made twenty of them, in fact. Each of the 20 webpages belonged to a Computer Science professor in the CS department I was in. I got paid a grand total of $800 to do that. Of that, I paid $200 in rent to my landlord for my room and utilities. My monthly groceries were always under $100. The remaining $500 I diligently sent home to my poor mom & dad back in India. Of the 20 professors, one(two?) has died. Few have retired. Some have quit academia for industry. The rest have replaced my web0 page with the latest & greatest web2, web2++ pages. But one stubborn professor continues to hang on to the web0 page I made for him !!! When I made that page, he was an assistant professor. He became associate professor, then full professor, then Dean! Here is his web0 page I made for him 25 years ago - https://www.unf.edu/~wkloster/ https://www.unf.edu/~wkloster/
- throwaway2016a 5y ago
  My first website was about the same time. If I realized the significance of it, I would have kept it. You're lucky to have kept yours. Mine was a Nintendo 64 fan site where I reviewed N64 and eventually Playstation 1 games. Those were the days.
- fouc 5y ago
  Mmm, those raised table borders. Timeless!
- Havoc 5y ago
  haha that moment when something is so old it becomes cool again
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- smartbit 5y ago
  An online shop for Computer parts in The Netherlands left their site online for memories of the good old days http://www.pcwebstore.nl/defaultoud.asp http://www.pcwebstore.nl/defaultoud.asp The domain was registered on 1997-05-28. In that same year the young entrepreneurs won a Business Challenge by the Rabobank for their innovative business model.
magicjosh 5y ago
IPFS is still super slow, but can work well for raw HTML sites like this. For example http://vitalik.eth.link http://vitalik.eth.link is hosted on IPFS. It's a simple text blog and is pretty fast.
yalogin 5y ago
What is web0? Looks like I am out of the loop here.
- argvargc 5y ago
  Hand-coding a website using only rudimentary HTML tags (eg, <p> or <br>) and nothing else, resulting in a charmingly-ugly yet functional self-published site. Roughly speaking, like much of the internet was in the 90's.
trentprynn 5y ago
Funnily enough I recently did the same thing for my personal website[1][2]. Previously I had used create-react-app to build what was essentially some basic static HTML with styling and I took a step back and realized how insane it was that I had an entire build + deploy pipeline to show some basic information. The website is currently 16.59KB transferred and it has the following - dark mode support - social media display support - basic, anonymous analytics using simpleanalytics It's hosted for free using GitHub pages and a push to master immediately makes the changes available on the internet. Additionally GitHub manages all of the SSL certs so I don't even have to think about it. Compared to the SPAs I (and most WebDevs) write for work nowadays it was actually a breath of fresh air to take away so much! [1] website: https://trentprynn.com/ https://trentprynn.com/ [2] source: https://github.com/trentprynn/trentprynn.com https://github.com/trentprynn/trentprynn.com
magicjosh 5y ago
To the author: you would have fun checking out IPFS. It's a decentralized way to host your site. It's still in its infancy, and slow...but your site will be plenty fast on IPFS. Check out fleek.co for an easy way to start hosting on IPFS.
czhu12 5y ago
I've never quite understood the gripe people have with modern web development. React took off in ~2015 and the only thing that has really changed about it is how you do state management (flux -> redux -> hooks). Plenty of frontends still rely on jQuery which can easily be sprinkled into a frontend, and the API hasn't really changed in nearly 20 years. What is the author advocating that we adopt this html-only approach for? Just personal blogs? Is it really a problem on the internet that personal blogs have way too much Javascript and CSS and therefore we need to throw out javascript? I would love to see someone try to build something even remotely complex or valuable without using Javascript and CSS. I would expect that if Banking portals, EHR's, CRM's (name any other service even moderately complex) were stitched together with a series of html documents and forms, customers wouldn't be as excited about that.
- throwaway984393 5y ago
  > I would love to see someone try to build something even remotely complex or valuable Why though? Just make it simple and functional. No need to get complex. > I would expect that if Banking portals, EHR's, CRM's (name any other service even moderately complex) were stitched together with a series of html documents and forms, customers wouldn't be as excited about that. Why should customer excitement force us to create over-complicated solutions?
  - czhu12 5y ago
    Because most software exist to provide solutions to customers and not to satisfy the developers. If you're going through a 40 page mortgage application, and an accidental page refresh loses everything you've filled in, thats not ideal. If you're trying to catch an uber, and the status isn't updated in real time, thats not ideal. If you're a customer support agent, and incoming messages require a page refresh to see, that not ideal.
    - throwaway984393 5y ago
      That is a great answer: because we're trying to solve users' problems. So we need to make things complex enough to solve a user's problem, and no more. I think the difficulty we run into is that last bit.
oblib 5y ago
I would offer the design of this page is elegant, but not "beautiful" and the difference is not necessarily subtle. A poem can be elegant and beautiful. A blog post yearning for web0? That's a bit tougher to pull off when you compare it to modern web designs. That feels more like an imposter.
lsalvatore 5y ago
Oh, it's this thread again. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29552322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29552322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23228904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23228904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26740593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26740593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8024799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8024799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12691600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12691600
jonathankoren 5y ago
This isn't a Gopher site.
alphachloride 5y ago
I think this website is a sales pitch for their patreon, which itself doesn't seem to be doing anything meaningful to advocate for web0. A funding goal is to "publish a guide on tapping the raw power of HTML". I mean, just google how to write HTML. I do think we should be conservative about complexity in websites, but advocating for removing interactivity and styling (js/css) seems too idealistic and simply contrarian. So I definitely think this is a good conversation starter, but not a serious goal.
RF_Savage 5y ago
I recently also wrote my own page in bare html, in nano, on my shell account at the server, which I get s a member service to hobby club. It delightfully old school and writing bare ugly html works okay for me, I can actully concentrate on the content instead of learning how to use and maintain a cms. It is my main homepage and very portable if I ever need to change hosts for example. Its kainda like 2003 again for me, when I had a 100MHz AMD K5 box with 64mb ram and 1gb ide hdd serving my homepage over my parents adsl connection. Too bad bare html looks a bit bad on mobile.
- bradley_taunt 5y ago
  Just slap a viewport tag in the head of that bad boy and call it a day :)
TheDesolate0 5y ago
cookingoils 5y ago
To all those web0/HTML heads out there. Here's a song for you: https://html.energy/pages/imagine/ https://html.energy/pages/imagine/ Happy New Year!
chanandler_bong 5y ago
Get off my lawn. "It's so cool is just works"?! OP sounds shocked that you don't need 50MB+ of scripts and CSS to serve a webpage.
toss1 5y ago
Totally cool to see this tip of HN! For most things, it's the way it should be. Less really IS more I deeply miss websites that -reliably- loaded faster than you could blink. The megatons of cruft that comes with even the simplest page, the dozens of remote code callouts that show up in NoScript (and the mere fact that it's been for years prudent to run NoScript...), the slogging wait for pageloads.... It'd just a vast disappointment. And these awful load times and performance are on CAD-level laptops. I left the industry 15+ years ago seeing the writing on the wall and hoping I was wrong - writing code had become like walking in quicksand - unable totrust the stacks of garbage underneath to behave as documented, and abstractions becoming increasingly purposeless. I'd hoped it'd get better, but as far as I can tell, it was a good move, when something like this is merely quaint. The hardware industry has produced astonishing improvements every decade, and the software industry just continues to squander those improvements at an even faster rate, producing an ever-degrading experience. Really sad.
cableshaft 5y ago
I'm studying up on web3 but I also kinda miss web0, or at least a simple static site with some basic CSS and no javascript. More sites should go back to that. Whenever I get around to making a personal site again, it will probably be compiled to a static site, even if I end up using a static site generating tool to allow for some templating.
j45 5y ago
If everyone started at Web0, it would be a lot easier to understand (and question) how some of the things are so complex in web development today.
throwaway2016a 5y ago
I would say Web 0 was Gopher and Usenet. This page is definitely Web 1. But with that said, I do find it interesting how many Web 3 things are just more complicated ways to solve problems already solved in the 80s and 90s. I remember when I first heard Web 2.0 in a conference by Tim O'Reilly. I wasn't a fan but it became a convenient way to describe a new web that was driven by user generated and dynamic content. With the help of this new thing called Ajax and mirror effect, lots and lot of mirror effects on graphics and 12 pointed stars. Web 3 is not an evolution of the web but rather a side show. A side show that will definitely have some useful things come of it but it lacks the spirit of Web 2.
- krapp 5y ago
  >I would say Web 0 was Gopher and Usenet. Let's not muddy the waters even more. "Web" refers to the Worldwide Web created by Tim Berners-Lee. Gopher and Usenet don't count.
  - throwaway2016a 5y ago
    By that logic then (which may be entirely fair and I don't necessarily disagree!) Web 3 is not the web either since blockchain is not a web protocol but rather a different type of P2P protocol also built on TCP/IP. But also, to my sort-of point. Web 1 was (among other things like hypertext and some dynamic content via PHP/ASP/Perl/C via CGI-bin/etc) static plain HTML pages. This linked page is most certainly not "Web 0".
    - krapp 5y ago
      >By that logic then (which may be entirely fair and I don't necessarily disagree!) Web 3 is not the web either since blockchain is not a web protocol but rather a different type of P2P protocol also built on TCP/IP. Yes. "Web 3" despite the name, is not the web, it's an application on the internet. The web is also an application on the internet, separate from Web3 (and Gopher and FTP and everything else.) >But also, to my sort-of point. Web 1 was static plain HTML pages. This linked page is most certainly not "Web 0". I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this, since it's just a semantic argument. To me, Web 0 was static plain HTML. Web 1 was possibly the introduction of CSS and JS. Web 2 was AJAX and dynamic websites. And my hot take on Web 3, not that it matters, is that it's properly multilingual computation on the web. Specifically being able to run applications compiled to Webassembly, and containers for legacy native applications.
wheresmycraisin 5y ago
I don't think there's anything wrong with more complex tooling, as long as the deliverable is simple.... I use a static site generator (11ty in my case, but there's hundreds just like it) and, even though my node_modules is 81M, it produces clean html free of unnecessary js or css. Just like a modern digital artist might use photoshop/illustrator to create a static jpeg. Of course, you also have things like gatsby/gridsome which are supposedly also "static site generators" but also ship ridiculous amounts of js to do ridiculous things like "hydrate" the client-side to a full spa.
sparrish 5y ago
Strange. I remember people using the shift key back in the web0 days to capitalize the first letter of a sentence. Get off my lawn.
kingcharles 5y ago
You're wasting characters, /> is only a requirement of XHTML. You can just use <br> and it is valid. Also, are HTML comments are allowed before the DOCTYPE technically? (this is the kind of tomfoolery that escapes unit testing on browsers)
jdubner 5y ago
Wait. Uppercase wasn't used for the personal pronoun "I" or to begin sentences in web0? Not cool.
simonebrunozzi 5y ago
I made my first professional web0 age 22 years ago, in 1999. It was amazing.
jzellis 5y ago
It's amazing to me how many "web developers" don't actually seem to know how to write pure html/css anymore by hand. They rely on these gigantic frameworks to do literally everything. Like a lot of Gen X/Gen Y oldsters, I wrote my first web page in Notepad in 1995 or so and uploaded it to my ISP hosting, after undergoing a "bootcamp" that consisted of reading W3C specs, Netscape.com tutorials, going on Usenet, and viewing source on a bunch of other people's pages, sitting all night on my grandfather's Pentium desktop (because we dialed up to get online) and listening to Mine Inch Nails on headphones. Someone in here points out that complexity produces friction that will drive consumers away. Good. Not all technology has to be a product you can pimp to a VC in an elevator. I love the idea of Web0, of building a new web that requires a bare minimum of engagement on the part of users rather than simply making everything as easy as possible. There's more than enough brightly lit malls in the metaverse, where everything is just a funnel to catch your attention or your money. But there's also infinite space for simplicity and the digital equivalent of "roughing it", of applying the concepts of appropriate technology to online interaction. Viva la Web0. :-)
pabe 5y ago
Taking a look at "web0" again actually is what the Jamstack is doing. Do static rendering and only load JS where / when necessary.
rchaud 5y ago
Bare HTML may as well be the internet equivalent of a .txt file. Is it good enough for some people? Absolutely. Does it even remotely meet the preferences of the average web user? No. This must be the 100th iteration of the "motherf'ing website' manifesto I've seen. They all use default browser styling and system fonts. It's easy to marvel at how fast the site loads when the page doesn't even include so much as a JPG.

258 points by cookingoils 5y ago

Both web3 and web2 are misnomers that sends discussions into every possible direction. They are misnomers because of the word "web". The original meaning of "web" was for it to be one of many applications on the underlying internet. Another application could be FTP, telnet, Gopher. As such, web2 is an imprecise term because it is a conceptual change not restricted to web technology. It's the internet becoming a two-way street, rather than mostly read-only for the typical user. When you post some content using a mobile app, that's "web2", even if not a single web technology is used end-to-end. And to add to the confusion, "web3" is specifically a response to the 2nd phase of "web2": the centralization of content discovery and monetization. The well known big tech gate keepers that slurp up all content, your private data, put ads on them, and this way become filthy rich whilst content producers get nothing. Some content producers may get a piece of the pie, but terms may change or they may just kick you off the platform. Not even by a human, by AI. And they won't even bother to tell you why. Likewise, app store owners can just take 30% of your business, dictate how you do business with them, and get sole access to your customers' data. Gatekeepers may also arbitrarily decide what is allowed speech and what isn't. I could go on, but the issues that come from "web2" monopolies are well known, and nothing new. Most people are in agreement that they are serious issues, all the way up to governments. As such, it's sad that a movement that has the potential to make somewhat of a meaningful change, namely "web3", is met with such ridicule. Just because it has the trigger word "crypto" associated with it. It's truly anti-intellectual and lazy to not even acknowledge the problems with "web2" and to just decide in a heartbeat that "web3" is a scam. Because you read the word "crypto". Meanwhile, "crypto" adds 100M new users every year, and accelerating. VCs, including the ones behind this website, are throwing everything and the kitchen sink at it. Whilst you laugh at NFTs, musicians, car manufacturers, event organizers and sports teams are embracing it. Crypto-assets backed gaming is about the enter the hype phase. Facebook is throwing tens of billions into the metaverse with the idea to make it compatible with leading blockchains. Twitter is integrating Bitcoin payments and verified NFTs, as well as working on some decentralized social network. At what point do you stop to wonder...maybe something's up with this crypto thing? I'm not here to sell you crypto, as clearly this community has made up its mind and thinks it's about "too much javascript". I'm here to tell you that you dramatically underestimate the speed at which it develops, is normalized and becoming mainstream. Be skeptical, but not a fool.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bestcoder69 5y ago

We should invest even heavier into web∅, which is when you don’t even have a website. Can’t get lighter than that.

schoen 5y ago
Maybe all web∅ pages are the empty string, so they're all equal to one another?
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Empty string or null string?

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

I guess this is the webdev equivalent of meta commentary in the media where somebody doesn't actually talk about anything other than what their reaction to it means.

vmception 5y ago
Most blog posts are the same Theyre just Super comments nobody’s can reply directly to

athenot 5y ago

A happy medium can still be had by including all the typesetting niceties in the same file, or maybe one extra included file. Still amazingly fast.

MatthiasWandel 5y ago

And yet it has stuff that wouldn't be recognized by early browsers, like https, or the viewport meta tag (useful for mobile)

nerdponx 5y ago

I wrote my first grad student website in raw HTML. In Vi, on a Unix mainframe, over SSH. It was fun, but I don't blame developers for trying to make things more composable and reusable. I'm big on tools that let you build plain static HTML pages, but rendered from templated components.

hondo77 5y ago
> ...a Unix mainframe... ???
- nerdponx 5y ago
  The university had (has?) some kind of central Unix system for students to mess around with, share files, and host their webpages. This was around 2014.
ineedasername 5y ago
>In Vi, on a Unix mainframe, over SSH. I did mine APoAC in a blizzard. Lots of dropped packets.

peanut_worm 5y ago

whats wrong with css

it 5y ago
Typically it means adding another file.
- yladiz 5y ago
  You could copy and paste the CSS in every page using style tags.
  - 6510 5y ago
    Server Side Includes
- peanut_worm 5y ago
  sure but theyre already using inline css whats the problem with using a style tag? theyre already including a favicon might as well swap that for a css file if youre worried about get requests or something
kubb 5y ago
it requires expert knowledge
- peanut_worm 5y ago
  layout sure but font-size and background are pretty straight forward if you can set up a web server i am sure you could figure out enough to qualify for web 1.0 level complexity if simplicity is the concern why not just host a text file? browsers format them nicely
  - oblib 5y ago
    That's a great point. I didn't get involved with the web until around 1998-99 so I'm not sure, but did the web ever not support plain old .txt?

julienreszka 5y ago

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

szczepano 5y ago
https://thebestmotherfucking.website/ https://thebestmotherfucking.website/

dvt 5y ago

Ah, yes, I remember this from web0: <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"> <meta name="twitter:title" content="My first web0 website!"> <meta name="twitter:description" content=""> <meta name="twitter:image" content="https://elliott.computer/pages/web0/social.jpg"> Trying to make web3 go away is just as pointless as trying to make web2 go away. It's here, it's going to stick around. Yes, there's a lot of hype, it probably won't look the same in 10 years, and yes there's a lot of charlatans, but I think ignoring its importance is myopic.

riffic 5y ago
when the folks with the laser eyes won't even look at the existing systems which can be used to extend the web in a standards-compliant way, then we have every right to be dismissive of their position (holding bags). They have every right to come to the table at the W3C. The federated social web has existed since 2008. It is the real web3.
- pcthrowaway 5y ago
  "The folks with laser eyes" are affectionately known as bitcoin maxis, and they have more interest in web0 than in web3.
  - riffic 5y ago
    the bros with the ape avatars then? you know who I'm talking about.
yob28 5y ago
gred 5y ago
> Web3, also known as Web 3.0, is an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web Cool, cool... > that incorporates decentralization based on blockchains k bye
- 5y ago

TurkishPoptart 5y ago

Inspected the page. What does this stuff do? ><script type="text/javascript">window["_gaUserPrefs"] = { ioo : function() { return true; } }</script>

peanut_worm 5y ago
I don’t see that, do you have some extension that might add that?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- TurkishPoptart 5y ago
  I think it is Privacy Badger, actually.
tyingq 5y ago
Are you running the "gaoptout" extension? ( this thing: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-analytics-opt-out/fllaojicojecljbmefodhfapmkghcbnh?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-analytics-o...) That snippet is what it injects to opt you out of Google Analytics. I do not see that snippet in the page source.
- TurkishPoptart 5y ago
  Oh, I'm running Privacy Badger, so perhaps that injected it.
mostlysimilar 5y ago
It appears to be opt-out for Google Analytics. Source: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/21163#issuecomment-468054382 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/21163#issuecomm...

userbinator 5y ago

It's both pleasing and a little disappointing to see this being "marketed" under the name "web0" --- especially on a "nonstandard" TLD. All websites used to be simple handwritten hyperlinked pages. I guess what's old is new again? Of course, Big Tech would want you to use its browser (not browser_s_) and indulge in the insane complexity of "the web stack" which guarantees its monopoly, but it doesn't have to be that way for everyone. Maybe once more people realise the latter, the web can become mostly-browser-neutral again.

rhizome 5y ago
CanIuse should have a page that lists all of the browser features that are supported by all browsers and in the same way. Of course it's not as simple as that, but in short, what has a green square across the current versions of all browsers? Green-green, not half-stepping green.
- jefftk 5y ago
  What would that presentation be useful for? They certainly have the data, but I have trouble thinking of a situation where I would want that kind of list.
  - rhizome 5y ago
    Then it wouldn't be for you. For me, it could indicate the amount of web page knowledge necessary to minimize maintenance overhead.
nicoburns 5y ago
I feel like just a basic stylesheet improves things quite a lot (this isn't using CSS at all). But otherwise I agree that a lot more website should be like this.
- ceautery 5y ago
  The site uses an inline CSS statement to set the font size. I like the attempt, though. I could go off on an old-man tangent about "kids these days don't even know what a fieldset is!" or whatever, but I very much appreciate the call to do things more simply.

yayr 5y ago

just to be a bit picky - it technically has some CSS albeit in a style tag: <center style="font-size: 18px">... is it now web1?

cookingoils 5y ago
okay i'll remove if it will make you happy : )
- jagger27 5y ago
  If you want your bigger font back, change the DOCTYPE to HTML4 and use a good ol' <font> tag instead! <font size="+2">foobar</font>
  - cookingoils 5y ago
    good call. thank you
ezequiel-garzon 5y ago
The viewport meta tag is also a post web0, almost web2 forced addition. I say forced in the sense that it’s required for proper rendering in mobile even for CSS-free sites.
- Jerrrry 5y ago
  >proper rendering in mobile this is the thing everyone adds because someone said it was the right way. it is the "assumption" that everyone does not want their user to _zoom out_ on mobile sites. it is wrong, and nobody questions it

f0e4c2f7 5y ago

I was expecting plain text. Don't be shy. Browsers will serve up basically anything.

tentacleuno 5y ago
It can also serve XML with an optional XML stylesheet (XSLT or something, I believe)? Browsers have a lot of support for many different standards.
cookingoils 5y ago
Here's my old website: https://archive.elliott.computer/old-index.txt https://archive.elliott.computer/old-index.txt
- tailspin2019 5y ago
  Plain text?? I was expecting binary.
  - cookingoils 5y ago
    brb

remram 5y ago

A site with no content and no feature. That's cool.

lsalvatore 5y ago
Yes, functionality would require skills, and skills require opinionated tools. Opinions require taking a stance, and that's the last thing anyone here wants to do.
- remram 5y ago
  I was trying to be snarky, implying that it's easy to make a site with no tech when that site has no feature and no content. I am quite curious at what you're trying to say, because I caught the sarcasm but none of your meaning. Your first sentence goes my way, but then... I don't know.
  - lsalvatore 5y ago
    The prevailing view here is that JavaScript is a nightmare to develop with when in fact, there is actually a bit of a golden age going on right now. It's never been more stable and fun to build apps on the web. Maybe I'll write a post about it.

oars 5y ago

I don't understand, how is this different to me just serving a plain HTML page with the latest Nginx Docker image and claiming we're back to Web 0? Is there something special about this page specifically e.g. not being hosted on a normal web server?

cookingoils 5y ago
yes, did you feel the energy?

root_axis 5y ago

The thing being called web3 doesn't seem mutually exclusive to what is being called web0 in this post. Might be a sign that web3 isn't a great name for sites integrated with blockchain content. I know, I know, you can't unsqueeze the toothpaste tube.

zimbatm 5y ago

I wish browsers would render text/markdown. It's easy to write, theme, and host. I know it's not the best text format out there but it's reasonable to write and read for most cases.

easrng 5y ago
I'm making an addon for Firefox (not sure if it will work on chrome) that renders markdown and gemtext right now actually. It's not on AMO yet, but you can get it from https://github.com/easrng/txtpage https://github.com/easrng/txtpage
NateEag 5y ago
It's not hard to generate a static collection of HTML from Markdown documents. Pandoc is probably my favorite tool for that job: https://pandoc.org/ https://pandoc.org/

rootsudo 5y ago

Hey, I guess that's why the 3 www's in front of any website is for. For web3.0! web 2.0 is two w's and one had none?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tehjoker 5y ago

It's funny that web3 is being sold as the decentralized web when that's what the internet architecture was literally designed for -- to survive an apocalyptic nuclear war. However, big players used their ability to purchase infrastructure and unforeseen flaws in the protocols to centralize much of the activity on the web. Lol if you think money can't do that to any decentralized architecture. One thing that would at least help. We got the web fractured from a p2p two-way street into a broadcast medium because ISP's were able to use the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space to limit stable IPs to business class connections. I can't claim we can bring that back, but wide deployment of IPv6 would at least demolish the argument against consumer static IPs and open up the network as a fair flat graph again.

krapp 5y ago
They didn't do anything to the architecture. The fact that most people spend most of their time on a few websites doesn't centralize the architecture at all, or even the web, it only centralizes attention.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  I'm not claiming they did something to the architecture and it definitely doesn't solve the problem you identified. More that this flaw in the difference between userbase growth and the protocol made it very difficult to have the kind of vibrant consumer-to-consumer architectures that could have potentially competed. Nowadays, probably ddos and things like that are other barriers. However, I do think that IPv6 does at least remove a fundamental limiter even if that alone isn't enough.
- throwawaycities 5y ago
  DNS/root servers/ICANN are fundamental architecture of the internet that are centralized. People either forget, or weren’t around, when domains names were thought of and treated much like NFTs are today. There was a small group of early adopters but for the most part big business considered websites/domain names something akin to digital monopoly money, just a play thing with no relation to the real world. In the early days even the law and courts didn’t know how to treat claims over domain names. Now ICANN dictates DNS rules worldwide and streamlines the process for businesses to take domains according to ICANN rules. There are many examples of new decentralized architecture and protocols being built for web3 and the decentralized web, like: IPFS: a p2p alternative to https ENS: a decentralized domain name protocol as a alternative to DNS

DyslexicAtheist 5y ago

Web 1.0: HTML Web 2.0: HTML + Javascript Web 3.0: HTML + Javascript + Ponzi. source: https://twitter.com/jeremiahg/status/1473768877377130505 https://twitter.com/jeremiahg/status/1473768877377130505

b1n 5y ago
There are real things happening in web 3.0, they are just being obscured by layers and layers of bullshit, scams and other fuckery. Once all that has crashed and everyone has lost all their money there will still be real and interesting tech remaining. Be very sceptical, but don't ignore the whole thing or you might end up missing the next real wave of innovation in tech (which is what i thought HN was about).
- qaq 5y ago
  I think if you want to dispel the skepticism describing those real things would go a long way.
  - b1n 5y ago
    Identity that solves Zooko's Triangle, Censorship Resistant Storage, P2P/Decentralization (separate from blockchain), alternative funding models for all kinds of SaaS and Open Source projects. Look it up yourself, or don't.
  - oblib 5y ago
    I've yet to see those "real things" described and would be interested to see it summed up so I can.
  - hwhelan210 5y ago
    I'm working on a decentralized storage solution for personal data. To be fair, it's not actually being used anywhere meaningful but I think it has real value (data ownership / privacy, encryption, protection from client code) and we have a proof-of-concept website that you could test it out on.

wy35 5y ago

If I had a dollar every time one of these "javascript bad, raw html good" websites/rants gets posted here, I'd have enough money to buy the entirety of YC just so I could ban such posts.

frozenport 5y ago

needs more blink tag

jonathankoren 5y ago
https://jonathankorensucks.com/blink.HTM https://jonathankorensucks.com/blink.HTM

cmer 5y ago

It's not web0 without <blink> and <marquee>!

fb03 5y ago

Sorry, but this is a rant. I am deeply saddened by the current state of affairs in the web today. in Javascript right now there are so many layers upon layers upon layers of DSLs and mannerisms on top of questionable language features which 'must be used' because the former language features are not cool anymore since a few days ago. The whole ecosystem is turning into a meme of itself. In a few months someone will reinvent another part of the big clusterfuck again and publish it in a shiny new website and we'll have another 3 month old Javascript framework being touted as the next earth-shattering thing that will revolutionize all things. And again. And again. We have nice things. We have nice abstractions already. We should be working on toning down and optimizing the good stuff, the good bits that get stuff done, not ramping up on new shiny buttons for each and every edge case out there just because we need to stay on the loop (whatever this loop is).

c0balt 5y ago
The amount of reinvention in the JS space is mind boggling. While this works to drive the whole thing forward it would be nice to see more LTS support rather than yet another templating library. Not that most their languages are inherently better but some have a way of mitigating the problem slightly, like e.g. python's extensive std lib collection.
- fb03 5y ago
  I am a backend engineer by trade, and I have been trying to learn me a little React because I decided I should learn new tech (not the stuff I use on a daily basis, which is Python) on side projects. So the backend is being done in Rust, and frontend is using React. I had this moment where I thought "well, I need Typescript, because I want nicely typed interfaces and contracts, and I need React". Turns out it's not easy like that. To cobble everything together you need a proper template for webpack. and there's Babel and that also needs to be caressed in the right React-y way. You can't just "hop in". You have to use cookiecutter-styled tools to bootstrap because the whole thing just got so complex so that even a Hello World styled project needs a mindboggling amount of tools all orchestrated and plugged into each other in the right way or it all blows up in your face. Also, there are more than one cookiecutter-styled tools and you have to choose the right one. "But don't fret you can always run eject to see the whole machinery inside". It's saddening and tiring.

de6u99er 5y ago

Web3 is a trojan horse. It's about exchanging money into crypto currencies to pay those hosting the Web3. I bet if we allow this to happen, most of Web3's hosting will belong to a few, and they will finally have made us pay for using the web.

0x0nyandesu 5y ago

I remember when web 2.0 became a thing it was more of a generic description of web design style and the advent of tech like ajax. Web 3 so far seems like astroturphed nonsense.

ape4 5y ago

Back in the day html was <CENTER>UPPERCASE</CENTER>

panic 5y ago

An HTTPS URL makes this more like web1.5.

Commodore63 5y ago

Nobody's going to get rich from shilling existing tech. Crypto bagholders need new marks.

dxbydt 5y ago

I made my first "professional" web0 page 25 years ago. I made twenty of them, in fact. Each of the 20 webpages belonged to a Computer Science professor in the CS department I was in. I got paid a grand total of $800 to do that. Of that, I paid $200 in rent to my landlord for my room and utilities. My monthly groceries were always under $100. The remaining $500 I diligently sent home to my poor mom & dad back in India. Of the 20 professors, one(two?) has died. Few have retired. Some have quit academia for industry. The rest have replaced my web0 page with the latest & greatest web2, web2++ pages. But one stubborn professor continues to hang on to the web0 page I made for him !!! When I made that page, he was an assistant professor. He became associate professor, then full professor, then Dean! Here is his web0 page I made for him 25 years ago - https://www.unf.edu/~wkloster/ https://www.unf.edu/~wkloster/

throwaway2016a 5y ago
My first website was about the same time. If I realized the significance of it, I would have kept it. You're lucky to have kept yours. Mine was a Nintendo 64 fan site where I reviewed N64 and eventually Playstation 1 games. Those were the days.
fouc 5y ago
Mmm, those raised table borders. Timeless!
Havoc 5y ago
haha that moment when something is so old it becomes cool again
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
smartbit 5y ago
An online shop for Computer parts in The Netherlands left their site online for memories of the good old days http://www.pcwebstore.nl/defaultoud.asp http://www.pcwebstore.nl/defaultoud.asp The domain was registered on 1997-05-28. In that same year the young entrepreneurs won a Business Challenge by the Rabobank for their innovative business model.

magicjosh 5y ago

IPFS is still super slow, but can work well for raw HTML sites like this. For example http://vitalik.eth.link http://vitalik.eth.link is hosted on IPFS. It's a simple text blog and is pretty fast.

yalogin 5y ago

What is web0? Looks like I am out of the loop here.

argvargc 5y ago
Hand-coding a website using only rudimentary HTML tags (eg, <p> or <br>) and nothing else, resulting in a charmingly-ugly yet functional self-published site. Roughly speaking, like much of the internet was in the 90's.

trentprynn 5y ago

Funnily enough I recently did the same thing for my personal website[1][2]. Previously I had used create-react-app to build what was essentially some basic static HTML with styling and I took a step back and realized how insane it was that I had an entire build + deploy pipeline to show some basic information. The website is currently 16.59KB transferred and it has the following - dark mode support - social media display support - basic, anonymous analytics using simpleanalytics It's hosted for free using GitHub pages and a push to master immediately makes the changes available on the internet. Additionally GitHub manages all of the SSL certs so I don't even have to think about it. Compared to the SPAs I (and most WebDevs) write for work nowadays it was actually a breath of fresh air to take away so much! [1] website: https://trentprynn.com/ https://trentprynn.com/ [2] source: https://github.com/trentprynn/trentprynn.com https://github.com/trentprynn/trentprynn.com

magicjosh 5y ago

To the author: you would have fun checking out IPFS. It's a decentralized way to host your site. It's still in its infancy, and slow...but your site will be plenty fast on IPFS. Check out fleek.co for an easy way to start hosting on IPFS.

czhu12 5y ago

I've never quite understood the gripe people have with modern web development. React took off in ~2015 and the only thing that has really changed about it is how you do state management (flux -> redux -> hooks). Plenty of frontends still rely on jQuery which can easily be sprinkled into a frontend, and the API hasn't really changed in nearly 20 years. What is the author advocating that we adopt this html-only approach for? Just personal blogs? Is it really a problem on the internet that personal blogs have way too much Javascript and CSS and therefore we need to throw out javascript? I would love to see someone try to build something even remotely complex or valuable without using Javascript and CSS. I would expect that if Banking portals, EHR's, CRM's (name any other service even moderately complex) were stitched together with a series of html documents and forms, customers wouldn't be as excited about that.

throwaway984393 5y ago
> I would love to see someone try to build something even remotely complex or valuable Why though? Just make it simple and functional. No need to get complex. > I would expect that if Banking portals, EHR's, CRM's (name any other service even moderately complex) were stitched together with a series of html documents and forms, customers wouldn't be as excited about that. Why should customer excitement force us to create over-complicated solutions?
- czhu12 5y ago
  Because most software exist to provide solutions to customers and not to satisfy the developers. If you're going through a 40 page mortgage application, and an accidental page refresh loses everything you've filled in, thats not ideal. If you're trying to catch an uber, and the status isn't updated in real time, thats not ideal. If you're a customer support agent, and incoming messages require a page refresh to see, that not ideal.
  - throwaway984393 5y ago
    That is a great answer: because we're trying to solve users' problems. So we need to make things complex enough to solve a user's problem, and no more. I think the difficulty we run into is that last bit.

oblib 5y ago

I would offer the design of this page is elegant, but not "beautiful" and the difference is not necessarily subtle. A poem can be elegant and beautiful. A blog post yearning for web0? That's a bit tougher to pull off when you compare it to modern web designs. That feels more like an imposter.

lsalvatore 5y ago

Oh, it's this thread again. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29552322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29552322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23228904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23228904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26740593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26740593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8024799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8024799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12691600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12691600

jonathankoren 5y ago

This isn't a Gopher site.

alphachloride 5y ago

I think this website is a sales pitch for their patreon, which itself doesn't seem to be doing anything meaningful to advocate for web0. A funding goal is to "publish a guide on tapping the raw power of HTML". I mean, just google how to write HTML. I do think we should be conservative about complexity in websites, but advocating for removing interactivity and styling (js/css) seems too idealistic and simply contrarian. So I definitely think this is a good conversation starter, but not a serious goal.

RF_Savage 5y ago

I recently also wrote my own page in bare html, in nano, on my shell account at the server, which I get s a member service to hobby club. It delightfully old school and writing bare ugly html works okay for me, I can actully concentrate on the content instead of learning how to use and maintain a cms. It is my main homepage and very portable if I ever need to change hosts for example. Its kainda like 2003 again for me, when I had a 100MHz AMD K5 box with 64mb ram and 1gb ide hdd serving my homepage over my parents adsl connection. Too bad bare html looks a bit bad on mobile.

bradley_taunt 5y ago
Just slap a viewport tag in the head of that bad boy and call it a day :)

TheDesolate0 5y ago

cookingoils 5y ago

To all those web0/HTML heads out there. Here's a song for you: https://html.energy/pages/imagine/ https://html.energy/pages/imagine/ Happy New Year!

chanandler_bong 5y ago

Get off my lawn. "It's so cool is just works"?! OP sounds shocked that you don't need 50MB+ of scripts and CSS to serve a webpage.

toss1 5y ago

Totally cool to see this tip of HN! For most things, it's the way it should be. Less really IS more I deeply miss websites that -reliably- loaded faster than you could blink. The megatons of cruft that comes with even the simplest page, the dozens of remote code callouts that show up in NoScript (and the mere fact that it's been for years prudent to run NoScript...), the slogging wait for pageloads.... It'd just a vast disappointment. And these awful load times and performance are on CAD-level laptops. I left the industry 15+ years ago seeing the writing on the wall and hoping I was wrong - writing code had become like walking in quicksand - unable totrust the stacks of garbage underneath to behave as documented, and abstractions becoming increasingly purposeless. I'd hoped it'd get better, but as far as I can tell, it was a good move, when something like this is merely quaint. The hardware industry has produced astonishing improvements every decade, and the software industry just continues to squander those improvements at an even faster rate, producing an ever-degrading experience. Really sad.

cableshaft 5y ago

I'm studying up on web3 but I also kinda miss web0, or at least a simple static site with some basic CSS and no javascript. More sites should go back to that. Whenever I get around to making a personal site again, it will probably be compiled to a static site, even if I end up using a static site generating tool to allow for some templating.

j45 5y ago

If everyone started at Web0, it would be a lot easier to understand (and question) how some of the things are so complex in web development today.

throwaway2016a 5y ago

I would say Web 0 was Gopher and Usenet. This page is definitely Web 1. But with that said, I do find it interesting how many Web 3 things are just more complicated ways to solve problems already solved in the 80s and 90s. I remember when I first heard Web 2.0 in a conference by Tim O'Reilly. I wasn't a fan but it became a convenient way to describe a new web that was driven by user generated and dynamic content. With the help of this new thing called Ajax and mirror effect, lots and lot of mirror effects on graphics and 12 pointed stars. Web 3 is not an evolution of the web but rather a side show. A side show that will definitely have some useful things come of it but it lacks the spirit of Web 2.

krapp 5y ago
>I would say Web 0 was Gopher and Usenet. Let's not muddy the waters even more. "Web" refers to the Worldwide Web created by Tim Berners-Lee. Gopher and Usenet don't count.
- throwaway2016a 5y ago
  By that logic then (which may be entirely fair and I don't necessarily disagree!) Web 3 is not the web either since blockchain is not a web protocol but rather a different type of P2P protocol also built on TCP/IP. But also, to my sort-of point. Web 1 was (among other things like hypertext and some dynamic content via PHP/ASP/Perl/C via CGI-bin/etc) static plain HTML pages. This linked page is most certainly not "Web 0".
  - krapp 5y ago
    >By that logic then (which may be entirely fair and I don't necessarily disagree!) Web 3 is not the web either since blockchain is not a web protocol but rather a different type of P2P protocol also built on TCP/IP. Yes. "Web 3" despite the name, is not the web, it's an application on the internet. The web is also an application on the internet, separate from Web3 (and Gopher and FTP and everything else.) >But also, to my sort-of point. Web 1 was static plain HTML pages. This linked page is most certainly not "Web 0". I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this, since it's just a semantic argument. To me, Web 0 was static plain HTML. Web 1 was possibly the introduction of CSS and JS. Web 2 was AJAX and dynamic websites. And my hot take on Web 3, not that it matters, is that it's properly multilingual computation on the web. Specifically being able to run applications compiled to Webassembly, and containers for legacy native applications.

wheresmycraisin 5y ago

I don't think there's anything wrong with more complex tooling, as long as the deliverable is simple.... I use a static site generator (11ty in my case, but there's hundreds just like it) and, even though my node_modules is 81M, it produces clean html free of unnecessary js or css. Just like a modern digital artist might use photoshop/illustrator to create a static jpeg. Of course, you also have things like gatsby/gridsome which are supposedly also "static site generators" but also ship ridiculous amounts of js to do ridiculous things like "hydrate" the client-side to a full spa.

sparrish 5y ago

Strange. I remember people using the shift key back in the web0 days to capitalize the first letter of a sentence. Get off my lawn.

kingcharles 5y ago

You're wasting characters, /> is only a requirement of XHTML. You can just use <br> and it is valid. Also, are HTML comments are allowed before the DOCTYPE technically? (this is the kind of tomfoolery that escapes unit testing on browsers)

jdubner 5y ago

Wait. Uppercase wasn't used for the personal pronoun "I" or to begin sentences in web0? Not cool.

simonebrunozzi 5y ago

I made my first professional web0 age 22 years ago, in 1999. It was amazing.

jzellis 5y ago

It's amazing to me how many "web developers" don't actually seem to know how to write pure html/css anymore by hand. They rely on these gigantic frameworks to do literally everything. Like a lot of Gen X/Gen Y oldsters, I wrote my first web page in Notepad in 1995 or so and uploaded it to my ISP hosting, after undergoing a "bootcamp" that consisted of reading W3C specs, Netscape.com tutorials, going on Usenet, and viewing source on a bunch of other people's pages, sitting all night on my grandfather's Pentium desktop (because we dialed up to get online) and listening to Mine Inch Nails on headphones. Someone in here points out that complexity produces friction that will drive consumers away. Good. Not all technology has to be a product you can pimp to a VC in an elevator. I love the idea of Web0, of building a new web that requires a bare minimum of engagement on the part of users rather than simply making everything as easy as possible. There's more than enough brightly lit malls in the metaverse, where everything is just a funnel to catch your attention or your money. But there's also infinite space for simplicity and the digital equivalent of "roughing it", of applying the concepts of appropriate technology to online interaction. Viva la Web0. :-)

pabe 5y ago

Taking a look at "web0" again actually is what the Jamstack is doing. Do static rendering and only load JS where / when necessary.

rchaud 5y ago

Bare HTML may as well be the internet equivalent of a .txt file. Is it good enough for some people? Absolutely. Does it even remotely meet the preferences of the average web user? No. This must be the 100th iteration of the "motherf'ing website' manifesto I've seen. They all use default browser styling and system fonts. It's easy to marvel at how fast the site loads when the page doesn't even include so much as a JPG.