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Geocities and other public sites like it filled the void for people who did not have access to a shell account or didn’t have the skills to ftp files to one. A

Geocities and other public sites like it filled the void for people who did not have access to a shell account or didn’t have the skills to ftp files to one. As for html editors, frontpage, HoTMetaL, and eventually even Netscape itself (in version 3) were very popular wysiwyg html editors released in the mid to late 1990s. There is still innovation in this space as evidenced in this very thread! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33577086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33577086 No non technical user wants to think about hosting. Especially in the mid 1990s when home internet was exclusively dialup, what value does holding your one phone line hostage 24x7 to host a web server provide you? So yes hosting has been and will always be the playground of the enthusiast and commercial entities. Self hosting made sense for academics as they had access to free high speed internet, free electricity and free high speed workstations, as well as the technical know how or easy access to those who could help.

imiric 4y ago
> Geocities and other public sites like it filled the void for people who did not have access to a shell account or didn’t have the skills to ftp files to one. Again, you're echoing my point, while trying to argue against it(?). WYSIWYG editors came too late, and were woefully insufficient, far from user friendly, and still required technical know-how. A testament to that is the fact they died out, and were replaced by site builders and hosters, which still exist today. > No non technical user wants to think about hosting. Right. The fact "hosting" is in the modern vernacular is an indication that this is a failure of early web designers. End users shouldn't have to think about HTML and "hosting" content, just as they don't think about HTML and consuming it today. A web browser is simply a tool they use to get "online", which is only a part of what's actually possible with the web. > Especially in the mid 1990s when home internet was exclusively dialup I agree with you there. The infrastructure didn't exist for everyone to run a web server from home. But the web is what drove ISPs and the general move towards broadband. Had there been an early push towards self-hosting as much as there was for consuming, you can be certain that ISPs would've been forced to deliver a service that was equally capable of serving content, and technology would've been created to work around the limitations of dialup. Maybe we would've seen earlier broadband adoption, or at the very least, symmetric connections would've been standardized. Besides, none of that was relevant at the turn of the century, when broadband was seeing mass adoption. If self-hosting hadn't taken off by then, that could've been the turning point. But by that time, tech giants were starting to be established, and millions of people were getting online to an already established web. Regardless, there's not much point in discussing _why_ this didn't happen. I'm only lamenting it didn't, and theorizing about what might've been.

imiric 4y ago

> Geocities and other public sites like it filled the void for people who did not have access to a shell account or didn’t have the skills to ftp files to one. Again, you're echoing my point, while trying to argue against it(?). WYSIWYG editors came too late, and were woefully insufficient, far from user friendly, and still required technical know-how. A testament to that is the fact they died out, and were replaced by site builders and hosters, which still exist today. > No non technical user wants to think about hosting. Right. The fact "hosting" is in the modern vernacular is an indication that this is a failure of early web designers. End users shouldn't have to think about HTML and "hosting" content, just as they don't think about HTML and consuming it today. A web browser is simply a tool they use to get "online", which is only a part of what's actually possible with the web. > Especially in the mid 1990s when home internet was exclusively dialup I agree with you there. The infrastructure didn't exist for everyone to run a web server from home. But the web is what drove ISPs and the general move towards broadband. Had there been an early push towards self-hosting as much as there was for consuming, you can be certain that ISPs would've been forced to deliver a service that was equally capable of serving content, and technology would've been created to work around the limitations of dialup. Maybe we would've seen earlier broadband adoption, or at the very least, symmetric connections would've been standardized. Besides, none of that was relevant at the turn of the century, when broadband was seeing mass adoption. If self-hosting hadn't taken off by then, that could've been the turning point. But by that time, tech giants were starting to be established, and millions of people were getting online to an already established web. Regardless, there's not much point in discussing _why_ this didn't happen. I'm only lamenting it didn't, and theorizing about what might've been.