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There are many suspects in the "who killed the web" mystery but blogs are low down on that list. The real problem is that building a web page is much, much har

There are many suspects in the "who killed the web" mystery but blogs are low down on that list. The real problem is that building a web page is much, much harder today than it was 25 years ago. Back then you could slap together some HTML, add a picture and an under-construction GIF and call it a day. Everyone with their huge 800x600 monitors would see the same thing. Today you have to take into account not just monitors, but cell phones, and tablets of various resolutions and aspect ratios. And if you want something that looks as good as all the rest of the web you need fonts, fancy css, maybe some javascript controls. And that doesn't even take into account that all this is a moving target. I still see personal websites that are almost unreadable on small phones, for instance. I have a personal website and it has taken me years to get it looking the way I want. Every time I try something interesting (animation, javascript, etc) I have to test it widely. People who just want to put up a website about their favorite trees don't want to do that.

cpsns 4y ago
> I still see personal websites that are almost unreadable on small phones, for instance. My personal website is like that and I’ve made no effort to improve the phone experience. I really don’t care if phone users have access or not, on every other device it looks fine. It’s a personal website, if it looks good on my machine that’s enough for me.
- AndrewStephens 4y ago
  That was my opinion for a while as well. It depends on your audience but about 50% of hits to my site come from one mobile device or another and in the end I felt I had to put the effort in to support them.
  - TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
    What is this "audience" you speak of? I've run a blog for 25 years. First, it was FrontPage, then a custom PHP site, then a custom Rails app, and now Wordpress. The only thing that hits it is web crawlers. I do it because I must.
    - AndrewStephens 4y ago
      Ha! I run a simple hit tracker and most of my posts get single digit hits a year. I rent a server to run my blog and write a blog to have something for my server to do.
- bdw5204 4y ago
  I do a good bit of my web browsing on my phone and I hate those web sites that are "optimized for phones" and thus typically lacking content and features. You can sometimes disable them with desktop mode but usually those sites ignore that and force the "mobile site" version. If the content is too small on a phone, you can always just zoom in and scroll horizontally as well as vertically. Unless the creator of the site decides to "helpfully" create a phone version of their site in which case you have to go find a computer to use the site or download some app. A great example of this is Reddit which goes out of its way to make their "mobile site" unusable to force people to download the Reddit app so they can more easily spy on you. I do think web sites should scale properly to different window sizes which means not using certain formatting misfeatures that force certain elements to always appear on the screen or that make your menu unusable on a touch screen. That isn't hard to do because you have to make a deliberate bad design choice to make your site unusable on smaller resolutions. A well-designed web site will also work perfectly well on Lynx or a screen reader without any additional work.
  - masswerk 4y ago
    On the other hand, I hate websites that are built phone-only, meaning, you have to retract a few meters from a screen, in order to read it somewhat comfortably. (Then, you've to go back to reach for the mouse and scroll, since the screen page is already over.) And it doesn't stop with the presentation: On a mobile device, three to four paragraphs is already an article, while on a screen it's the beginning of an abstract… So there's always a mobile-only, a screen-only, a mobile-first, a screen-first and only rarely a general media web. It will depend on the author and the intended audiences.
shapefrog 4y ago
> many suspects in the "who killed the web" mystery Obviously it is all the fault of Millenials (/s?) > slap together some HTML, add a picture and an under-construction GIF and call it a day You forgot the page counter, visitor country flags and auto playing music.
oriolid 4y ago
> Back then you could slap together some HTML, add a picture and an under-construction GIF and call it a day. Everyone with their huge 800x600 monitors would see the same thing. How I remember it was that HTML standards were lagging far behind what browsers did. So you you put a "Best viewed with Netscape <version number here>" GIF there, or even "Best viewed with Mozilla" if you weren't afraid of turning back some people.
hardware2win 4y ago
What is much much harder in using some css from bootstrap or css grid/flex that will handle it?
- AndrewStephens 4y ago
  Everything. Writing plain HTML used to be easy - if you could edit a text file you could slap in a few tags and be happy enough. Having to learn CSS (there is nothing easy about grid/flex) just to get a good looking site is way more effort than most people want. Hence the reliance on content managers/social media site that do this hard work for you, at the cost of personalization.

cpsns 4y ago

> I still see personal websites that are almost unreadable on small phones, for instance. My personal website is like that and I’ve made no effort to improve the phone experience. I really don’t care if phone users have access or not, on every other device it looks fine. It’s a personal website, if it looks good on my machine that’s enough for me.

AndrewStephens 4y ago
That was my opinion for a while as well. It depends on your audience but about 50% of hits to my site come from one mobile device or another and in the end I felt I had to put the effort in to support them.
- TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  What is this "audience" you speak of? I've run a blog for 25 years. First, it was FrontPage, then a custom PHP site, then a custom Rails app, and now Wordpress. The only thing that hits it is web crawlers. I do it because I must.
  - AndrewStephens 4y ago
    Ha! I run a simple hit tracker and most of my posts get single digit hits a year. I rent a server to run my blog and write a blog to have something for my server to do.
bdw5204 4y ago
I do a good bit of my web browsing on my phone and I hate those web sites that are "optimized for phones" and thus typically lacking content and features. You can sometimes disable them with desktop mode but usually those sites ignore that and force the "mobile site" version. If the content is too small on a phone, you can always just zoom in and scroll horizontally as well as vertically. Unless the creator of the site decides to "helpfully" create a phone version of their site in which case you have to go find a computer to use the site or download some app. A great example of this is Reddit which goes out of its way to make their "mobile site" unusable to force people to download the Reddit app so they can more easily spy on you. I do think web sites should scale properly to different window sizes which means not using certain formatting misfeatures that force certain elements to always appear on the screen or that make your menu unusable on a touch screen. That isn't hard to do because you have to make a deliberate bad design choice to make your site unusable on smaller resolutions. A well-designed web site will also work perfectly well on Lynx or a screen reader without any additional work.
- masswerk 4y ago
  On the other hand, I hate websites that are built phone-only, meaning, you have to retract a few meters from a screen, in order to read it somewhat comfortably. (Then, you've to go back to reach for the mouse and scroll, since the screen page is already over.) And it doesn't stop with the presentation: On a mobile device, three to four paragraphs is already an article, while on a screen it's the beginning of an abstract… So there's always a mobile-only, a screen-only, a mobile-first, a screen-first and only rarely a general media web. It will depend on the author and the intended audiences.

shapefrog 4y ago

> many suspects in the "who killed the web" mystery Obviously it is all the fault of Millenials (/s?) > slap together some HTML, add a picture and an under-construction GIF and call it a day You forgot the page counter, visitor country flags and auto playing music.

oriolid 4y ago

> Back then you could slap together some HTML, add a picture and an under-construction GIF and call it a day. Everyone with their huge 800x600 monitors would see the same thing. How I remember it was that HTML standards were lagging far behind what browsers did. So you you put a "Best viewed with Netscape <version number here>" GIF there, or even "Best viewed with Mozilla" if you weren't afraid of turning back some people.

hardware2win 4y ago

What is much much harder in using some css from bootstrap or css grid/flex that will handle it?

AndrewStephens 4y ago
Everything. Writing plain HTML used to be easy - if you could edit a text file you could slap in a few tags and be happy enough. Having to learn CSS (there is nothing easy about grid/flex) just to get a good looking site is way more effort than most people want. Hence the reliance on content managers/social media site that do this hard work for you, at the cost of personalization.