14 ms·

I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

332 points by memorable 4y ago

bryanrasmussen 4y ago
I feel that as raw and unpolished as the web of those vanished days was, there was still significantly less fucking than Justin Jackson remembers.
- mijustin 4y ago
  Hahahaha. This is my favorite comment. ;)
Jasonrams 4y ago
matthewcanty 4y ago
I’m working on a musical project and the website alone fucking rocks. atticshapes.com I reviewed before adding comment, and I feel like changing info@ to webmaster@ now, in homage to the internet.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  Clean and simple.
- defanor 4y ago
  > I reviewed before adding comment, and I feel like changing info@ to webmaster@ now, in homage to the internet. RFC 2142 [1] defines both those (among others), for different purposes. I tend to set all those for the used services (and one for XMPP, per XEP-0157 [2]) as aliases: usually it's not hard and costs nothing, but allows to adjust the aliases in the future (in case if somebody else will maintain some of the services), and provides standard ways for inquiries regarding those services. [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2142 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2142 [2] https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0157.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0157.html
ashneer 4y ago
I really wish I could experience the web back then at 1993 (I'm 25). I imagine much faster, and intuitive websites than nowadays. Beautiful UX is one thing but making a website feels natural, that's what I think the internet is missing today.
- fuzzy2 4y ago
  Faster? Not really. Even with ISDN, stuff was slow af. 8000 bytes per second just isn't a lot. Latency was often high as well.
  - mrblampo 4y ago
    Can you imagine how fast those websites would be today, though, compared to modern websites?
    - pizza234 4y ago
      One can easily test this. This is the performance of two semi-randomly picked websites: - Peter Ferrie's homepage (http://pferrie.epizy.com/?i=1 http://pferrie.epizy.com/?i=1), old school: approx. 900ms - Netflix landing page (https://www.netflix.com/de-en https://www.netflix.com/de-en), modern: approx. 1.8s Measured via Firefox "load time". Peter Ferrie is a famous security researcher. The Netlix page is clearly 2x as slow, but the load time is far from proportional to the overall data transfer. The HN front page, right now, takes approx. 1.7s. :)
      - christophilus 4y ago
        Netflix is a bad example of modern websites, as they’ve hired really good developers to optimize the snot out of it. I’d say, compare it to Reddit or Pinterest or something like that.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Page loads were slow, but you don't get that weird thing you get today when a page is slow even after it's loaded, or stuff keeps loading in and changing the layout so you need to sit and wait for an unknown period before you can interact with it. It feels like websites are a lot jankier today. The old web was slow, but it was predictable. Like I know a site where if you don't wait for it to finish to load (and it's javascript loading, so you get no browser indication that it's actually loading), then the all the links will be wrong. That is, you get the wrong content if you click a link. It's quietly kind of amazing how they've managed to break hyperlinks, given they're a part of HTML itself and work well out of the box.
trevormcneal 4y ago
I miss those times. I could spend hours complaining about the depressive current state of the web, I imagine being a newcomer to such world and have to handle the over complexity of the current scenario without knowing that things could be simpler. I remember seeing a team member migrating a project from grunt to webpack, the project was just a 404 page. "You need to compile your assets" they say, just a cat *.css > site.css would do it. Or even better, just do it inside the HTML and that is it. People who need a JS library to check if a number is odd or even went way too far, I'm not exaggerating - https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-odd https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-odd
- 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
  First job title in 2007 was "web master". 15 years later and i feel more like a web dinosaur than a web master. sick of it all.
  - sph 4y ago
    Computers are still exciting, the web is not. Now the web is just business, advertising and Javascript. It wears a suit, a fancy haircut and deck shoes. It looks like a crypto billionaire.
  - layer8 4y ago
    More like a web orchestrator these days, so maybe “web maestro”. ;)
- surrTurr 4y ago
  There’s also is-even[1]. It has one dependency: is-odd [1]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even
  - dgb23 4y ago
    This has to be a joke right?
scandox 4y ago
I know this is kind of negative: but I don't like nostalgia much and I think I like tech-nostalgia least. Don't get me wrong I like old tech, but just for what it is. Text based, simple, fast etc...but I don't like wallowing in a warm, fuzzy feeling about how it was. I mean I personally do recall 5.25" disks. I liked their look and feel as a kid. Fine. But making a big deal out of it feels retrograde...
- blowski 4y ago
  Exactly. The problem with the 1993 web was that it was usable by and appealed to only a very small part of the population. When people say stuff like this, it sounds to me like they're saying "I wish the web could go back to being a more exclusive club of which I was a member".
  - prawn 4y ago
    Maybe it wasn't that it was exclusive, but that it felt manageable and comprehensible. It felt like you could be aware of the breadth of it all (even if some was already out of reach). Now, that feels beyond impossible - we have every niche and every underworld. I started as a web designer as images were being added to browsers and you could change the default grey background colour. Things are a bit different now...
  - JohnWhigham 4y ago
    They're right though. The Internet was better when it didn't have tons of people giving their unsolicited opinions and corporations coming in and having every single one of their actions be antithetical to the esprit of the WWW. It was better when people had to put in effort to find something and not take 30 seconds to select the first Google-approved search result.
    - blowski 4y ago
      Was it better for those who couldn't use it?
      - 4y ago
tomhoward 4y ago
My 1996 self feels very seen. I think a lot about the way the web was back in the mid 90s, compared to the bleeding-edge technologies of today, particularly blockchain and cryptocurrency. And one major aspect I keep coming back to is that web technologies in the 90s, and even their descendent technologies now, are simple enough for most technology-literate people to understand, and that carried with it a lot of comfort and trust. For anyone who had been using desktop computers and office software in the early 90s, which was basically everyone who was a student or an office worker, the web was just files on a computer, served over a network, which we already had plenty of experience using. And I think that's why my father, who was only a little older than I am now when I first showed him the web, grasped it straight away and was supportive of me building a website for his business. These days I'm not spending much time writing HTML files in a text editor and uploading them via FTP; rather I'm writing programmatic code that talks to a database (A database! Just like MS Access or FileMaker Pro), does some processing, and displays the result on the screen with some elaborate JavaScript to make it look and function how I want (I’m happily a heavy user of React for building rich web apps), but it's still fundamentally the same concepts. Files on servers, accessed over a network and delivering useful information to my browser or app. The beautiful simplicity is still there, and it still doesn't feel like a big leap from the kind of computing we were doing 1993. The world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies and "web3" feels vastly more opaque and esoteric by comparison and therefore untrustworthy to many of us, which I think is a significant answer to the question that was asked here in the past couple of days: "Why is Hacker News so anti-crypto?" [1]. I can't quite accept that it's just that I'm "old"; firstly because first heard about Bitcoin soon after it appeared and was excited by its potential, but also because I remember how people older than me reacted when the web arrived, and there was much more rapid acceptance and embrace than there I currently see for cryptocurrency, outside of those who are just chasing quick riches. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302494
- soco 4y ago
  Erm, no, many understand very well what blockchain is and it's definitely not opaqueness what they accuse it of. But everybody can choose their own strawman to fight, can't they.
dmje 4y ago
"WordPress is too complicated! Let's do everything in React" is my current favourite developer anti-pattern :-)
- awestroke 4y ago
  "React is too complicated! Let's use inferior tools instead" is my current favorite developer anti-pattern
  - lmariscal 4y ago
    "One tool is the right answer for every question" is mine!
- _Algernon_ 4y ago
  Enlightened centrism take: both are equally shit. Go back to ~~monke~~ regular html.
  - Semiapies 4y ago
    Really, that's what fatigues me about a lot of these "I miss websites." posts. I think if more people would at least try to build and maintain their own website, starting with the barest of basic HTML, we'd have less of this tech wistfulness around the old web. They'd do one or more of a few things: 1) Find a personal outlet in the hand-rolled site. 2) Find that outlet, but get tired of wading through angle brackets and set up/write a static site generator. 3) Find more they want the site to do and start coding. 4) Realize they've exhausted everything they want to say to the world and abandon it. But what else would happen in any case would be a demystification of it. Old hands would lose their nostalgia goggles, and young folks would recognize how much of the irritations of social media derived from people's dissatisfaction with the time and effort it took to shout into the void on the old web.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  It's even worse; it went from static sites (html) to dynamic sites (Wordpress, PHP) to webapps, and now back to static sites but built using the tools to make webapps with. Apple wanted to make web technology the one for iOS but quickly realized it wasn't fast enough, so they spent time developing a really good native platform, but now it's boomeranging back to webapps, or adding layers on top of the native layers to stay in that web app comfort zone (react native, flutter, etc). It's refusing to use the path of least resistance because of perceived benefits, or something. Same with desktop apps that now all have to be web technology for some reason.
uwagar 4y ago
its all JS's fault.
- prawn 4y ago
  Brings to mind applets.
- ricardo81 4y ago
  Don't know about 'all' - centralisation of content for me is the most depressing part of the modern web.
  - uwagar 4y ago
    centralisation dialed to 11 by JS / AJAX mostly.
f0e4c2f7 4y ago
His description of what web dev felt like in those early days captures how I feel about VR now. Back then it was obvious to me that was the coolest thing you could possibly learn. Still to me it is outrageously cool that I can think something up and then in not that much time it can be a website. So whats the new magic? To me it's the idea of being able to think something up and conjour it into the virtual world too.
- brightball 4y ago
  I’m curious if you could elaborate on that some. VR just seems like another type of game design to me, as someone who isn’t active in the space. Yours is the first perspective I’ve seen that actually made me curious.
  - f0e4c2f7 4y ago
    If you get a chance to try it, or maybe you already have - you get this odd sense of presence when using VR. It's not quite the same as playing a normal game. Even just perspectives of things like size seem much more real in VR. Even with today's early hardware it's pretty good at tricking your brain. This combination of presence and multiplayer create these crazy (to me) experiences where it's like you're stepping into the internet to meet people and explore it with them. VRChat is one of the more popular examples, but most of it stuff still needs to be built in the first place.
  - david_allison 4y ago
    * More innovations with passthrough (combination of a VR headset and AR). Currently you can get "X-Ray Vision" to see where your controllers are in a room. In the future, this could be expanded to other peripherals such as keyboards. It allows you to have a cooking video playing while cooking (hands-free control) [1] or place/design furniture in your room [2] * Once the resolution is a little better - virtual offices[3] and cinemas[4] allow for significantly more screen real estate than a traditional setup, requiring less space and capital investment. * Live/pre-recorded virtual concerts and sports games[5] are already occurring (where you can invite friends to watch in real time). The current 'experiences' (wingsuit flying, virtual tourism, etc..) are far more immersive than watching the equivalent 360° Video * VR fitness is a reasonable method of cardio, burning ~9 calories a minute. It can also augment other training methods, such as a stationary bike[6] * Haptic suits[7], gloves and treadmills[8] - not really my thing, but allowing 360° running and feeling the interactions with your environment. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keufFXiO1_M&t=3m45s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keufFXiO1_M&t=3m45s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZFiaILqQng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZFiaILqQng [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_bVkbG1ZCo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_bVkbG1ZCo [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh9n0bZcprk&t=1m7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh9n0bZcprk&t=1m7s [5] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/duMowUK6tk4 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/duMowUK6tk4 [6] https://www.holodia.com/vr-fitness-blog/holofit-vr-works-with-any-indoor-bike-transform-your-indoor-cycling/ https://www.holodia.com/vr-fitness-blog/holofit-vr-works-wit... [7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4UdbYrqa2A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4UdbYrqa2A [8] https://omni.virtuix.com/ https://omni.virtuix.com/
FpUser 4y ago
That is because there are "fucking websites" and "fucking web applications". These two require different skill set. Second one being a programmer. I do not think it is smart idea to make everything into web app. My daughter for example is Web Designer / Web Master and makes very healthy living designing and building front ends for various businesses. She does not see less need for her skillset over the years. Just the opposite.
HisNameIsTor 4y ago
I'm fucking a webmaster
skilled 4y ago
I never changed from being a webmaster to being something else. For the last 15 years I still manage my own servers, I still design my own websites, I still do most things myself when it comes to building/managing a website. And the fact that everything is SaaS now, well, that just gives me motivation to keep it that way. Easy for me to say, of course, since I grew up back then and was fortunate to have the experience of the pre-modernization of the Internet. Good times.
- sixQuarks 4y ago
  I’ve been and still am a webmaster for 24 years. It’s always difficult when people ask me what I do these days, I literally tell them I’m a webmaster.
SkipperCat 4y ago
Back in the early 2000's, I taught "computers" to a bunch of kids in DC. I first started off with how a computer work; IO, CPU, storage and their eyes glazed over. I quickly ditched that topic and went right to building a web page. Taught them a few HTML tags and they instantly became "webmasters". They were so thrilled. They could create blinking text, could make all the fonts pink. All just by moving around some simple text in NotePad. Most importantly, they were creating things that they thought were only able to be created by "scientists". I loved how it boosted their own self worth. I've stopped teaching a long time ago. Not sure if there's still tools out there where a 13 year old kid with no technical experience can immediately get gratification with something so simple on a computer. Maybe it is a time gone by.
- fartcannon 4y ago
  You can still just use HTML.
  - diamondo25 4y ago
    At least the doctype is simple nowadays. The XHTML one was horrendous.
    - laristine 4y ago
      Horrendous yes, but it was necessary, because without it we wouldn't have had the nice doctype HTML5 today. It addressed a lot of problems found in the early html and paved way for standardization and a path forward.
  - jerf 4y ago
    This does indeed work fine. The major problem is still finding somewhere to host it, and incurring the still non-trivial risks thereto, since among the many things students want to do with free web space, hosting warez and other things that will get you in trouble quickly is still pretty far up the list. Plus someone has to pay for a domain name or something. If you can get a modern text editor that can use SSH or something to mount a remote directory you can easily have an HTML party like it's 1999. That's easier than ever. But the surrounding issues are worse than they were in 1999, unfortunately.
growt 4y ago
Back around 1996 or so, I made my first webpage. I didn't have Internet at that time :) So I build this site, complete with articles about comics, animated gifs, frames etc. just for myself. I think I never put it online. Later when I finally got access to the internet and some webspace I already build another thing and webspace was precious (I got around 1-2mb if I remember right).
alexellisuk 4y ago
_Bring_ _back_ _Geocities_
- 369548684892826 4y ago
  They did [0] and it's really good! 0: https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
corobo 4y ago
It amazes me when I look back on my web career. My first website was hosted on an IP address - I'd literally tell people to visit h t t p : / / eight one dot ... - because I'd not come across DNS or how to use domains yet, never mind afford one when I figured them out I distinctly remember I could never seem to manage to make a website fast. It was always quick (total load time <10s) but it was never fast (<3s). I spent so long learning underlying systems and various caching options. 20 years later I can throw together anycast DNS, geo-routing, web/SQL cluster, in/out MX services, memcached cluster, load balancer, whatever you need. No bother. I'm glad that first site gave me so much grief!
boopmaster 4y ago
snot-nosed 90s kids? I resemble that remark! I do feel like HN still gives off better vibes from the better days when the netizens had netiquette, when the information superhighway beckoned to the explorer, before the undying flame wars…
anta40 4y ago
I was in the last year of junior high school in 2000-2001. We had computer lab running Windows 3.1 (each student had their own floppy disks to save their works before logging out). We learnt HTML basics: displaying paragraphs, images, blinking/colored text, marquee, etc. It was definitely an eye-opening moment for me: computer was not a device only for playing games or typing documents, but something that could run what your instructions are. Then during high school days, I learnt more serious programming languages: Basic, C, and Pascal. These days, web frontend is definitely more complicated: HTML5, JS, CSS, etc. Nope, not interested to touch them anymore :)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rikroots 4y ago
I must be very old. I still put my name in the footer of all my personal websites. Which reminds me: must update the copyright year in those footers!
duxup 4y ago
I like this article as I'm pretty nostalgic about those things too. >Our websites were pretty damned ugly. Instead of worrying about window dressing, we focused on words, hierarchy, and structure. Naw, the sites were ugly because we were bad at window dressing and the tools were wonky ... and it was glorious that we were bad at it. I loved the ugly web. It reeked of "trying things".
marban 4y ago
Not to mention that there's now a generation of users that, thanks to siloed apps and ecosystems, can probably go days without ever hitting the actual Web.
layer8 4y ago
The “webmaster” designation probably came from the “webmaster@domain” functional email addresses, which in turn were modeled after the existing “postmaster@domain” convention for contacting the email admin(s) of a domain. Does anyone know if there were other *masters?
- hansjorg 4y ago
  hostmaster, ftpmaster, listmaster, gophermaster, fingermaster, timemaster (NTP)
  - layer8 4y ago
    Right, at least hostmaster and listmaster are what I’m familiar with and should have thought of.
- jolted 4y ago
  There aren't too many other *masters, but check out RFC-2142.
minroot 4y ago
TODO: Be a fucking webmaster
lampshades 4y ago
Like everyone else here in the comments, I got major nostalgic vibes from this post. I was one of the snot-nosed kids back in the late 90s/early 2000s that made sure to add myself on my own staff page as "Webmaster". Does anyone remember the early anime community of those days, by chance? It was such a vibrant community of builders and "webmasters".
joshu 4y ago
1993 seems very unlikely?
- cbm-vic-20 4y ago
  It was definitely early-days, but people were writing HTML and putting up web pages back in 1993. Mosaic was released in 93.
- agiacalone 4y ago
  I started on the web in late 1993, so yes. This stuff was around then. There was actually a competing protocol in those days: gopher. It still exists and has a small, near-fanatical community these days.
radar1310 4y ago
I created podcastbunker.com in 2004. In 2005 it was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the 50 coolest web sites. You can look it up if you want. I was a f*king webmaster:-)
frzen 4y ago
I think the statute of limitations is up at this point so I am free to share this with you. It was me all those years ago who downloaded and edited the html for google.com adding my name to the page. I showed my mother the result of this pure vandalism before spending the next desperate few minutes putting it back how it was before. I regret nothing
- markyc 4y ago
  what now?
OrvalWintermute 4y ago
I remember telling people with a serious expression that I was the #2 on my huge army base after the Commanding General because as the Webmaster & Intranet Master, I controlled what everyone saw on their browser when their browser opened (intranet site), and our public web presence (web site), and over 100 tenant and subordinate organizations received our hierarchal navigation headers and footers via SSIs.
pentagrama 4y ago
Almost 40, I'm getting older I guess but lately I feel put off with the unnecessary cursing on things that I find interesting.
- awillen 4y ago
  It's perfectly relevant stylistically - he's talking about a time when things were scrappier and there weren't rules or established standards in his domain (pun intended). This isn't a manual, it's a paean to a time and an attitude that he misses, and cursing is certainly representative of that attitude.
smm11 4y ago
Took me forever to realize that's what I actually was, when I wasn't.
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
(2016)
- ChrisArchitect 4y ago
  Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11684424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11684424
DamnInteresting 4y ago
I built my first site in ~1997, and my primary email address is still webmaster@. Nevertheless, I do feel that these early-Internet nostalgia posts mostly forget how crappy many webpages were back in the day. Blinking text, marquees, animated gifs, frames, inline fonts, ActiveX, "Best viewed in Internet Explorer 3", popup windows, tables for layout, terrible search, etc. Today's sites are often bloated, but those of the past had their own issues. For me personally, the appeal of the web back then was not that it was good, rather it was new.
- agiacalone 4y ago
  Plus, it all had to be done (typically) on a dial-up modem which made all of those "web effects" absolutely horrible. Even today's web sucks without some heavy ad-blocking and script controls.
IshKebab 4y ago
"Back in my day..." Always amazes me how rose-tinted people who supposedly deal with cutting edge technology are.

332 points by memorable 4y ago

I feel that as raw and unpolished as the web of those vanished days was, there was still significantly less fucking than Justin Jackson remembers.

mijustin 4y ago
Hahahaha. This is my favorite comment. ;)

Jasonrams 4y ago

matthewcanty 4y ago

I’m working on a musical project and the website alone fucking rocks. atticshapes.com I reviewed before adding comment, and I feel like changing info@ to webmaster@ now, in homage to the internet.

Gordonjcp 4y ago
Clean and simple.
defanor 4y ago
> I reviewed before adding comment, and I feel like changing info@ to webmaster@ now, in homage to the internet. RFC 2142 [1] defines both those (among others), for different purposes. I tend to set all those for the used services (and one for XMPP, per XEP-0157 [2]) as aliases: usually it's not hard and costs nothing, but allows to adjust the aliases in the future (in case if somebody else will maintain some of the services), and provides standard ways for inquiries regarding those services. [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2142 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2142 [2] https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0157.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0157.html

ashneer 4y ago

I really wish I could experience the web back then at 1993 (I'm 25). I imagine much faster, and intuitive websites than nowadays. Beautiful UX is one thing but making a website feels natural, that's what I think the internet is missing today.

fuzzy2 4y ago
Faster? Not really. Even with ISDN, stuff was slow af. 8000 bytes per second just isn't a lot. Latency was often high as well.
- mrblampo 4y ago
  Can you imagine how fast those websites would be today, though, compared to modern websites?
  - pizza234 4y ago
    One can easily test this. This is the performance of two semi-randomly picked websites: - Peter Ferrie's homepage (http://pferrie.epizy.com/?i=1 http://pferrie.epizy.com/?i=1), old school: approx. 900ms - Netflix landing page (https://www.netflix.com/de-en https://www.netflix.com/de-en), modern: approx. 1.8s Measured via Firefox "load time". Peter Ferrie is a famous security researcher. The Netlix page is clearly 2x as slow, but the load time is far from proportional to the overall data transfer. The HN front page, right now, takes approx. 1.7s. :)
    - christophilus 4y ago
      Netflix is a bad example of modern websites, as they’ve hired really good developers to optimize the snot out of it. I’d say, compare it to Reddit or Pinterest or something like that.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Page loads were slow, but you don't get that weird thing you get today when a page is slow even after it's loaded, or stuff keeps loading in and changing the layout so you need to sit and wait for an unknown period before you can interact with it. It feels like websites are a lot jankier today. The old web was slow, but it was predictable. Like I know a site where if you don't wait for it to finish to load (and it's javascript loading, so you get no browser indication that it's actually loading), then the all the links will be wrong. That is, you get the wrong content if you click a link. It's quietly kind of amazing how they've managed to break hyperlinks, given they're a part of HTML itself and work well out of the box.

trevormcneal 4y ago

I miss those times. I could spend hours complaining about the depressive current state of the web, I imagine being a newcomer to such world and have to handle the over complexity of the current scenario without knowing that things could be simpler. I remember seeing a team member migrating a project from grunt to webpack, the project was just a 404 page. "You need to compile your assets" they say, just a cat *.css > site.css would do it. Or even better, just do it inside the HTML and that is it. People who need a JS library to check if a number is odd or even went way too far, I'm not exaggerating - https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-odd https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-odd

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
First job title in 2007 was "web master". 15 years later and i feel more like a web dinosaur than a web master. sick of it all.
- sph 4y ago
  Computers are still exciting, the web is not. Now the web is just business, advertising and Javascript. It wears a suit, a fancy haircut and deck shoes. It looks like a crypto billionaire.
- layer8 4y ago
  More like a web orchestrator these days, so maybe “web maestro”. ;)
surrTurr 4y ago
There’s also is-even[1]. It has one dependency: is-odd [1]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even
- dgb23 4y ago
  This has to be a joke right?

scandox 4y ago

I know this is kind of negative: but I don't like nostalgia much and I think I like tech-nostalgia least. Don't get me wrong I like old tech, but just for what it is. Text based, simple, fast etc...but I don't like wallowing in a warm, fuzzy feeling about how it was. I mean I personally do recall 5.25" disks. I liked their look and feel as a kid. Fine. But making a big deal out of it feels retrograde...

blowski 4y ago
Exactly. The problem with the 1993 web was that it was usable by and appealed to only a very small part of the population. When people say stuff like this, it sounds to me like they're saying "I wish the web could go back to being a more exclusive club of which I was a member".
- prawn 4y ago
  Maybe it wasn't that it was exclusive, but that it felt manageable and comprehensible. It felt like you could be aware of the breadth of it all (even if some was already out of reach). Now, that feels beyond impossible - we have every niche and every underworld. I started as a web designer as images were being added to browsers and you could change the default grey background colour. Things are a bit different now...
- JohnWhigham 4y ago
  They're right though. The Internet was better when it didn't have tons of people giving their unsolicited opinions and corporations coming in and having every single one of their actions be antithetical to the esprit of the WWW. It was better when people had to put in effort to find something and not take 30 seconds to select the first Google-approved search result.
  - blowski 4y ago
    Was it better for those who couldn't use it?
    - 4y ago

tomhoward 4y ago

My 1996 self feels very seen. I think a lot about the way the web was back in the mid 90s, compared to the bleeding-edge technologies of today, particularly blockchain and cryptocurrency. And one major aspect I keep coming back to is that web technologies in the 90s, and even their descendent technologies now, are simple enough for most technology-literate people to understand, and that carried with it a lot of comfort and trust. For anyone who had been using desktop computers and office software in the early 90s, which was basically everyone who was a student or an office worker, the web was just files on a computer, served over a network, which we already had plenty of experience using. And I think that's why my father, who was only a little older than I am now when I first showed him the web, grasped it straight away and was supportive of me building a website for his business. These days I'm not spending much time writing HTML files in a text editor and uploading them via FTP; rather I'm writing programmatic code that talks to a database (A database! Just like MS Access or FileMaker Pro), does some processing, and displays the result on the screen with some elaborate JavaScript to make it look and function how I want (I’m happily a heavy user of React for building rich web apps), but it's still fundamentally the same concepts. Files on servers, accessed over a network and delivering useful information to my browser or app. The beautiful simplicity is still there, and it still doesn't feel like a big leap from the kind of computing we were doing 1993. The world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies and "web3" feels vastly more opaque and esoteric by comparison and therefore untrustworthy to many of us, which I think is a significant answer to the question that was asked here in the past couple of days: "Why is Hacker News so anti-crypto?" [1]. I can't quite accept that it's just that I'm "old"; firstly because first heard about Bitcoin soon after it appeared and was excited by its potential, but also because I remember how people older than me reacted when the web arrived, and there was much more rapid acceptance and embrace than there I currently see for cryptocurrency, outside of those who are just chasing quick riches. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302494

soco 4y ago
Erm, no, many understand very well what blockchain is and it's definitely not opaqueness what they accuse it of. But everybody can choose their own strawman to fight, can't they.

dmje 4y ago

"WordPress is too complicated! Let's do everything in React" is my current favourite developer anti-pattern :-)

awestroke 4y ago
"React is too complicated! Let's use inferior tools instead" is my current favorite developer anti-pattern
- lmariscal 4y ago
  "One tool is the right answer for every question" is mine!
_Algernon_ 4y ago
Enlightened centrism take: both are equally shit. Go back to ~~monke~~ regular html.
- Semiapies 4y ago
  Really, that's what fatigues me about a lot of these "I miss websites." posts. I think if more people would at least try to build and maintain their own website, starting with the barest of basic HTML, we'd have less of this tech wistfulness around the old web. They'd do one or more of a few things: 1) Find a personal outlet in the hand-rolled site. 2) Find that outlet, but get tired of wading through angle brackets and set up/write a static site generator. 3) Find more they want the site to do and start coding. 4) Realize they've exhausted everything they want to say to the world and abandon it. But what else would happen in any case would be a demystification of it. Old hands would lose their nostalgia goggles, and young folks would recognize how much of the irritations of social media derived from people's dissatisfaction with the time and effort it took to shout into the void on the old web.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
It's even worse; it went from static sites (html) to dynamic sites (Wordpress, PHP) to webapps, and now back to static sites but built using the tools to make webapps with. Apple wanted to make web technology the one for iOS but quickly realized it wasn't fast enough, so they spent time developing a really good native platform, but now it's boomeranging back to webapps, or adding layers on top of the native layers to stay in that web app comfort zone (react native, flutter, etc). It's refusing to use the path of least resistance because of perceived benefits, or something. Same with desktop apps that now all have to be web technology for some reason.

uwagar 4y ago

its all JS's fault.

prawn 4y ago
Brings to mind applets.
ricardo81 4y ago
Don't know about 'all' - centralisation of content for me is the most depressing part of the modern web.
- uwagar 4y ago
  centralisation dialed to 11 by JS / AJAX mostly.

f0e4c2f7 4y ago

His description of what web dev felt like in those early days captures how I feel about VR now. Back then it was obvious to me that was the coolest thing you could possibly learn. Still to me it is outrageously cool that I can think something up and then in not that much time it can be a website. So whats the new magic? To me it's the idea of being able to think something up and conjour it into the virtual world too.

brightball 4y ago
I’m curious if you could elaborate on that some. VR just seems like another type of game design to me, as someone who isn’t active in the space. Yours is the first perspective I’ve seen that actually made me curious.
- f0e4c2f7 4y ago
  If you get a chance to try it, or maybe you already have - you get this odd sense of presence when using VR. It's not quite the same as playing a normal game. Even just perspectives of things like size seem much more real in VR. Even with today's early hardware it's pretty good at tricking your brain. This combination of presence and multiplayer create these crazy (to me) experiences where it's like you're stepping into the internet to meet people and explore it with them. VRChat is one of the more popular examples, but most of it stuff still needs to be built in the first place.
- david_allison 4y ago
  * More innovations with passthrough (combination of a VR headset and AR). Currently you can get "X-Ray Vision" to see where your controllers are in a room. In the future, this could be expanded to other peripherals such as keyboards. It allows you to have a cooking video playing while cooking (hands-free control) [1] or place/design furniture in your room [2] * Once the resolution is a little better - virtual offices[3] and cinemas[4] allow for significantly more screen real estate than a traditional setup, requiring less space and capital investment. * Live/pre-recorded virtual concerts and sports games[5] are already occurring (where you can invite friends to watch in real time). The current 'experiences' (wingsuit flying, virtual tourism, etc..) are far more immersive than watching the equivalent 360° Video * VR fitness is a reasonable method of cardio, burning ~9 calories a minute. It can also augment other training methods, such as a stationary bike[6] * Haptic suits[7], gloves and treadmills[8] - not really my thing, but allowing 360° running and feeling the interactions with your environment. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keufFXiO1_M&t=3m45s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keufFXiO1_M&t=3m45s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZFiaILqQng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZFiaILqQng [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_bVkbG1ZCo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_bVkbG1ZCo [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh9n0bZcprk&t=1m7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh9n0bZcprk&t=1m7s [5] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/duMowUK6tk4 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/duMowUK6tk4 [6] https://www.holodia.com/vr-fitness-blog/holofit-vr-works-with-any-indoor-bike-transform-your-indoor-cycling/ https://www.holodia.com/vr-fitness-blog/holofit-vr-works-wit... [7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4UdbYrqa2A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4UdbYrqa2A [8] https://omni.virtuix.com/ https://omni.virtuix.com/

FpUser 4y ago

That is because there are "fucking websites" and "fucking web applications". These two require different skill set. Second one being a programmer. I do not think it is smart idea to make everything into web app. My daughter for example is Web Designer / Web Master and makes very healthy living designing and building front ends for various businesses. She does not see less need for her skillset over the years. Just the opposite.

HisNameIsTor 4y ago

I'm fucking a webmaster

skilled 4y ago

I never changed from being a webmaster to being something else. For the last 15 years I still manage my own servers, I still design my own websites, I still do most things myself when it comes to building/managing a website. And the fact that everything is SaaS now, well, that just gives me motivation to keep it that way. Easy for me to say, of course, since I grew up back then and was fortunate to have the experience of the pre-modernization of the Internet. Good times.

sixQuarks 4y ago
I’ve been and still am a webmaster for 24 years. It’s always difficult when people ask me what I do these days, I literally tell them I’m a webmaster.

SkipperCat 4y ago

Back in the early 2000's, I taught "computers" to a bunch of kids in DC. I first started off with how a computer work; IO, CPU, storage and their eyes glazed over. I quickly ditched that topic and went right to building a web page. Taught them a few HTML tags and they instantly became "webmasters". They were so thrilled. They could create blinking text, could make all the fonts pink. All just by moving around some simple text in NotePad. Most importantly, they were creating things that they thought were only able to be created by "scientists". I loved how it boosted their own self worth. I've stopped teaching a long time ago. Not sure if there's still tools out there where a 13 year old kid with no technical experience can immediately get gratification with something so simple on a computer. Maybe it is a time gone by.

fartcannon 4y ago
You can still just use HTML.
- diamondo25 4y ago
  At least the doctype is simple nowadays. The XHTML one was horrendous.
  - laristine 4y ago
    Horrendous yes, but it was necessary, because without it we wouldn't have had the nice doctype HTML5 today. It addressed a lot of problems found in the early html and paved way for standardization and a path forward.
- jerf 4y ago
  This does indeed work fine. The major problem is still finding somewhere to host it, and incurring the still non-trivial risks thereto, since among the many things students want to do with free web space, hosting warez and other things that will get you in trouble quickly is still pretty far up the list. Plus someone has to pay for a domain name or something. If you can get a modern text editor that can use SSH or something to mount a remote directory you can easily have an HTML party like it's 1999. That's easier than ever. But the surrounding issues are worse than they were in 1999, unfortunately.

growt 4y ago

Back around 1996 or so, I made my first webpage. I didn't have Internet at that time :) So I build this site, complete with articles about comics, animated gifs, frames etc. just for myself. I think I never put it online. Later when I finally got access to the internet and some webspace I already build another thing and webspace was precious (I got around 1-2mb if I remember right).

alexellisuk 4y ago

_Bring_ _back_ _Geocities_

369548684892826 4y ago
They did [0] and it's really good! 0: https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

corobo 4y ago

It amazes me when I look back on my web career. My first website was hosted on an IP address - I'd literally tell people to visit h t t p : / / eight one dot ... - because I'd not come across DNS or how to use domains yet, never mind afford one when I figured them out I distinctly remember I could never seem to manage to make a website fast. It was always quick (total load time <10s) but it was never fast (<3s). I spent so long learning underlying systems and various caching options. 20 years later I can throw together anycast DNS, geo-routing, web/SQL cluster, in/out MX services, memcached cluster, load balancer, whatever you need. No bother. I'm glad that first site gave me so much grief!

boopmaster 4y ago

snot-nosed 90s kids? I resemble that remark! I do feel like HN still gives off better vibes from the better days when the netizens had netiquette, when the information superhighway beckoned to the explorer, before the undying flame wars…

anta40 4y ago

I was in the last year of junior high school in 2000-2001. We had computer lab running Windows 3.1 (each student had their own floppy disks to save their works before logging out). We learnt HTML basics: displaying paragraphs, images, blinking/colored text, marquee, etc. It was definitely an eye-opening moment for me: computer was not a device only for playing games or typing documents, but something that could run what your instructions are. Then during high school days, I learnt more serious programming languages: Basic, C, and Pascal. These days, web frontend is definitely more complicated: HTML5, JS, CSS, etc. Nope, not interested to touch them anymore :)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

rikroots 4y ago

I must be very old. I still put my name in the footer of all my personal websites. Which reminds me: must update the copyright year in those footers!

duxup 4y ago

I like this article as I'm pretty nostalgic about those things too. >Our websites were pretty damned ugly. Instead of worrying about window dressing, we focused on words, hierarchy, and structure. Naw, the sites were ugly because we were bad at window dressing and the tools were wonky ... and it was glorious that we were bad at it. I loved the ugly web. It reeked of "trying things".

marban 4y ago

Not to mention that there's now a generation of users that, thanks to siloed apps and ecosystems, can probably go days without ever hitting the actual Web.

layer8 4y ago

The “webmaster” designation probably came from the “webmaster@domain” functional email addresses, which in turn were modeled after the existing “postmaster@domain” convention for contacting the email admin(s) of a domain. Does anyone know if there were other *masters?

hansjorg 4y ago
hostmaster, ftpmaster, listmaster, gophermaster, fingermaster, timemaster (NTP)
- layer8 4y ago
  Right, at least hostmaster and listmaster are what I’m familiar with and should have thought of.
jolted 4y ago
There aren't too many other *masters, but check out RFC-2142.

minroot 4y ago

TODO: Be a fucking webmaster

lampshades 4y ago

Like everyone else here in the comments, I got major nostalgic vibes from this post. I was one of the snot-nosed kids back in the late 90s/early 2000s that made sure to add myself on my own staff page as "Webmaster". Does anyone remember the early anime community of those days, by chance? It was such a vibrant community of builders and "webmasters".

joshu 4y ago

1993 seems very unlikely?

cbm-vic-20 4y ago
It was definitely early-days, but people were writing HTML and putting up web pages back in 1993. Mosaic was released in 93.
agiacalone 4y ago
I started on the web in late 1993, so yes. This stuff was around then. There was actually a competing protocol in those days: gopher. It still exists and has a small, near-fanatical community these days.

radar1310 4y ago

I created podcastbunker.com in 2004. In 2005 it was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the 50 coolest web sites. You can look it up if you want. I was a f*king webmaster:-)

frzen 4y ago

I think the statute of limitations is up at this point so I am free to share this with you. It was me all those years ago who downloaded and edited the html for google.com adding my name to the page. I showed my mother the result of this pure vandalism before spending the next desperate few minutes putting it back how it was before. I regret nothing

markyc 4y ago
what now?

OrvalWintermute 4y ago

I remember telling people with a serious expression that I was the #2 on my huge army base after the Commanding General because as the Webmaster & Intranet Master, I controlled what everyone saw on their browser when their browser opened (intranet site), and our public web presence (web site), and over 100 tenant and subordinate organizations received our hierarchal navigation headers and footers via SSIs.

pentagrama 4y ago

Almost 40, I'm getting older I guess but lately I feel put off with the unnecessary cursing on things that I find interesting.

awillen 4y ago
It's perfectly relevant stylistically - he's talking about a time when things were scrappier and there weren't rules or established standards in his domain (pun intended). This isn't a manual, it's a paean to a time and an attitude that he misses, and cursing is certainly representative of that attitude.

smm11 4y ago

Took me forever to realize that's what I actually was, when I wasn't.

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

(2016)

ChrisArchitect 4y ago
Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11684424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11684424

DamnInteresting 4y ago

I built my first site in ~1997, and my primary email address is still webmaster@. Nevertheless, I do feel that these early-Internet nostalgia posts mostly forget how crappy many webpages were back in the day. Blinking text, marquees, animated gifs, frames, inline fonts, ActiveX, "Best viewed in Internet Explorer 3", popup windows, tables for layout, terrible search, etc. Today's sites are often bloated, but those of the past had their own issues. For me personally, the appeal of the web back then was not that it was good, rather it was new.

agiacalone 4y ago
Plus, it all had to be done (typically) on a dial-up modem which made all of those "web effects" absolutely horrible. Even today's web sucks without some heavy ad-blocking and script controls.

IshKebab 4y ago

"Back in my day..." Always amazes me how rose-tinted people who supposedly deal with cutting edge technology are.