3 ms·

12 year old me's website from 2002 on webarchive looks like trash compared to when I made it because framesets and css has evolved since then. Many of my nerdy

by 1dom 2y ago

12 year old me's website from 2002 on webarchive looks like trash compared to when I made it because framesets and css has evolved since then. Many of my nerdy friends at the time also had fully flash based, or just a flash animation on the front of their websites. We also all made liberal use of blink and marquee tags which might still work in some places, but are officially deprecated and unsupported in others. At the time, these sorts of things were considered the latest and greatest. Hell, I remember one maniac playing around with Microsoft Silverlight on their personal site as we were in college. We knew some was good, some was bad etc. None of it survives as intended now though, unless it was updated. There aren't many personal like websites I remember that have stayed personal sites for over 10 years. But some have, kind of. Take gwern.net or stevepavlina (not a regular reader anymore): both of them - if you squint - look pretty similar minimal 2000 - 2010 style as when they first started, but the implementation has had to evolve as even things like CSS have had a bunch of breaking changes over the major versions. codinghorror uses Discourse for comments, and that didn't come around until 2014, and the only thing that looks like it might be from 10+ years ago on daringfireball is the content: the tech that renders it and the design all hinges on 2010+ technologies and companies. I love minimal styles and ideals. But if you want to create a personal website that survives time and looks how you expect in a modern browser, even a minimal one, you have 2 options: 1. it has to either look exactly like some variation of motherfuckingwebsite.com, and that will eventually vary between browsers 2. it takes some effort to maintain over a period of years Sorry, I wrote the lengthy response above and I think just realised me and the other person who responded to you have misunderstood your comment: I think me and the other person initially assumed you're making only 1 point, that latest and greatest tech wouldn't render, but your examples clearly use modern tech from well after 2004, which makes no sense. On rereading, you're making 2 points, right? 1 point is that tech from 2004 can still work (but you didn't provide example) and other point is that those 2 sites you did provide are example that "website structures" (e.g. linear blog) can survive time but didn't actually state that point. Is that right? Assuming so, you're completely right on your second point, and people who've done that (maintained a blog for years) are the real legends who've conquered person website anxiety. They're better than many, including me and OP, who have the issue of feeling like they need to completely rearchitect their website every 2 years to a wiki, or digital garden, or knowledge base, or whatever the latest PKM tech buzzword is. This is why I was saying that there's no need to crap all over e.g. blogs for rotting, as your examples prove blogs can survives decades. OP is just another response to that feeling of "uuurgggh I can't quite wrangle my thoughts into a neat, atomic, chronological list of blog posts and people who read blogs will judge my personal website, so I'll tell them it's not a blog".

gwern 2y ago
> There aren't many personal like websites I remember that have stayed personal sites for over 10 years. But some have, kind of. Take gwern.net or stevepavlina (not a regular reader anymore): both of them - if you squint - look pretty similar minimal 2000 - 2010 style as when they first started, but the implementation has had to evolve as even things like CSS have had a bunch of breaking changes over the major versions. FWIW, I don't think CSS/JS have been much of a problem in terms of breaking. Before Said Achmiz got involved, while gwern.net was still a fairly simple static website, there were pretty much no serious instances of browsers breaking the CSS/JS. Everything ran fine. (Browsers are good at backwards compatibility, as long as you aren't pushing features too hard, as my site was not.) The big problem was changing expectations and demands. 2010-era Gwern.net would continue to look fine and render fine in a 2025 web browser... as long as you were on a desktop/laptop. If you were laying in bed at night on a smartphone or a tablet, it would be both blinding and unreadable. This wasn't a problem in 2010, when <5% of my traffic was 'mobile' and mobile was very hard to design for even if you wanted to bother, but it is a problem in 2025, when >50% of my traffic is mobile. You can't write off >50% of your traffic. People now assume that a website will render reasonably on a smartphone, and they increasingly assume there will be a dark-mode. But, even if you aren't using a legacy website based on Flash or tables, and are creating a clean greenfield HTML5 website, these are actually quite complex, demanding features! You can get 80% of the way with some relatively simple tweaks, but then the rest can be almost arbitrarily difficult. Note that aspects of dark-mode can be subtle - while most websites have settled on the body class approach which avoids the 'blinding flash of white' problem, they continue to screw up dark-mode by treating it as a binary toggle between light vs dark, instead of a three-way toggle between auto vs light vs dark, and most dark-modes settle for fading out images instead of inverting vs fading them with a heuristic like https://invertornot.com/ https://invertornot.com/ . (We're still iterating on both features. Most recently, in November 2024: moving the scrollspy header to the bottom of mobile screens instead of top, and taking another dive into color theory in order to have colored link-icons which look good on mobile dark-mode.) Compared to the burden of features like a mobile mode which is actually good, the regular level of web browser JS/CSS breakage is scarcely noticeable. (It tends to look something like, 'oh no, now in Chrome 123, there's a 1px gap in the dropcaps and the spacing constants have to be adjusted, THANKS GOOGLE'. Annoying, but hardly a major burden.) Of course, you can quickly strangle yourself with your dependency stack, particularly if you get involved in NPM or you listen to the wrong web gurus, and your website will break overnight, and JS is definitely very fragile and rapidly bitrotting if you define 'JS' as node et al. But if you are being sensible about it and using plain JS (as we do) or well-chosen stable frameworks, of web dev's woes, 'web browsers keep breaking old working CSS/JS' is thankfully far down the list. The big problems are self-inflicted ecosystem problems like bitrot/bitcreep (https://gwern.net/holy-war#bitrot https://gwern.net/holy-war#bitrot), and the ever greater complexity expected of websites compared to the old 'preview in the only web browser anyone uses (ie. IE6), make sure it looks fine in the standard monitor dimension 800x600, export from MS Frontpage, ftp up to your shell account, done' days.

by 1dom 2y ago

gwern 2y ago

> There aren't many personal like websites I remember that have stayed personal sites for over 10 years. But some have, kind of. Take gwern.net or stevepavlina (not a regular reader anymore): both of them - if you squint - look pretty similar minimal 2000 - 2010 style as when they first started, but the implementation has had to evolve as even things like CSS have had a bunch of breaking changes over the major versions. FWIW, I don't think CSS/JS have been much of a problem in terms of breaking. Before Said Achmiz got involved, while gwern.net was still a fairly simple static website, there were pretty much no serious instances of browsers breaking the CSS/JS. Everything ran fine. (Browsers are good at backwards compatibility, as long as you aren't pushing features too hard, as my site was not.) The big problem was changing expectations and demands. 2010-era Gwern.net would continue to look fine and render fine in a 2025 web browser... as long as you were on a desktop/laptop. If you were laying in bed at night on a smartphone or a tablet, it would be both blinding and unreadable. This wasn't a problem in 2010, when <5% of my traffic was 'mobile' and mobile was very hard to design for even if you wanted to bother, but it is a problem in 2025, when >50% of my traffic is mobile. You can't write off >50% of your traffic. People now assume that a website will render reasonably on a smartphone, and they increasingly assume there will be a dark-mode. But, even if you aren't using a legacy website based on Flash or tables, and are creating a clean greenfield HTML5 website, these are actually quite complex, demanding features! You can get 80% of the way with some relatively simple tweaks, but then the rest can be almost arbitrarily difficult. Note that aspects of dark-mode can be subtle - while most websites have settled on the body class approach which avoids the 'blinding flash of white' problem, they continue to screw up dark-mode by treating it as a binary toggle between light vs dark, instead of a three-way toggle between auto vs light vs dark, and most dark-modes settle for fading out images instead of inverting vs fading them with a heuristic like https://invertornot.com/ https://invertornot.com/ . (We're still iterating on both features. Most recently, in November 2024: moving the scrollspy header to the bottom of mobile screens instead of top, and taking another dive into color theory in order to have colored link-icons which look good on mobile dark-mode.) Compared to the burden of features like a mobile mode which is actually good, the regular level of web browser JS/CSS breakage is scarcely noticeable. (It tends to look something like, 'oh no, now in Chrome 123, there's a 1px gap in the dropcaps and the spacing constants have to be adjusted, THANKS GOOGLE'. Annoying, but hardly a major burden.) Of course, you can quickly strangle yourself with your dependency stack, particularly if you get involved in NPM or you listen to the wrong web gurus, and your website will break overnight, and JS is definitely very fragile and rapidly bitrotting if you define 'JS' as node et al. But if you are being sensible about it and using plain JS (as we do) or well-chosen stable frameworks, of web dev's woes, 'web browsers keep breaking old working CSS/JS' is thankfully far down the list. The big problems are self-inflicted ecosystem problems like bitrot/bitcreep (https://gwern.net/holy-war#bitrot https://gwern.net/holy-war#bitrot), and the ever greater complexity expected of websites compared to the old 'preview in the only web browser anyone uses (ie. IE6), make sure it looks fine in the standard monitor dimension 800x600, export from MS Frontpage, ftp up to your shell account, done' days.