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> Admittedly it still wasn’t easy for everyone to have their own website At least by the Geocities stage it was incredibly easy. Probably about as difficult as

> Admittedly it still wasn’t easy for everyone to have their own website At least by the Geocities stage it was incredibly easy. Probably about as difficult as making a PowerPoint slideshow. Lots of non-techy kids were doing this in the 90's and early 2000's. Blogging was the first big degradation of the web that I noticed. There was a big shift from evergreen content to churning out quick dopamine hits matching the time sensitive nature of blogging.

rchaud 2y ago
It was not easy. Everybody was copying and pasting "HTML templates", because HTML stops being readable the second you want your layout to have more than one column.
- gonzobonzo 2y ago
  I really think you're forgetting what most web pages looked like back then. A simple background, often just one or two columns of text, a few images put in there, some HTML links. Maybe frames for the more complex sites. Here's some popular pages from back then: Maddox's Page[1] Marathon Story Page[2] Both of these could be recreated by someone who had no previous knowledge of HTML after studying HTML for one or two days. And a lot of people's sites were even simpler - just text thrown up their with some images and links. But the thing is - people don't really need much more than that. Most Tweets, Blogs, articles, etc., are still just test and images when it comes down to it. The vehicle to deliver the content has gotten much more complex, but the content itself is usually (though not always) about the same as it was 30 years ago. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20021112205429/http://maddox.xmission.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20021112205429/http://maddox.xmi... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20000815234125/https://marathon.bungie.org/story/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000815234125/https://marathon....
  - asimpletune 2y ago
    Yeah HTML5 + CSS3 were not a thing yet. They were one of the last missing pieces to the puzzle of solving desktop publishing. I think after all these things (rss, usenet, irc, html5, css3, etc...) the only thing left was search. I don't think a user friendly solution for search ever came along. The original algorithm was good enough, and if google wanted to be good at search I think they could have combatted set spam. The problem for search was always money.
  - rchaud 2y ago
    Yeah, some sites were simple. Most sites people wanted to build required more sophisticated layouts, and thus began the great <table> age. Dreamweaver was a successful consumer product because of HTML and CSS' learning curve.
- deleted 2y ago
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- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  would you say making a powerpoint is "easy" or that "everyone copy/pastes a template they think looks good because design is hard"?
  - rchaud 2y ago
    Yes, PowerPoint is orders of magnitude easier, because it is a GUI-based app that's fully WYSIWYG with snap guides for aligning items. HTML + CSS is non-WYSIWYG and that alone will weed out a good 50% of the Word/PPT/Excel crowd. Even if they used Word and exported to HTML, that's just step 1 completed. How would they put that page online? What's SFTP? Why do I need SSL? Why doesn't the page look right on mobile?

rchaud 2y ago

It was not easy. Everybody was copying and pasting "HTML templates", because HTML stops being readable the second you want your layout to have more than one column.

gonzobonzo 2y ago
I really think you're forgetting what most web pages looked like back then. A simple background, often just one or two columns of text, a few images put in there, some HTML links. Maybe frames for the more complex sites. Here's some popular pages from back then: Maddox's Page[1] Marathon Story Page[2] Both of these could be recreated by someone who had no previous knowledge of HTML after studying HTML for one or two days. And a lot of people's sites were even simpler - just text thrown up their with some images and links. But the thing is - people don't really need much more than that. Most Tweets, Blogs, articles, etc., are still just test and images when it comes down to it. The vehicle to deliver the content has gotten much more complex, but the content itself is usually (though not always) about the same as it was 30 years ago. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20021112205429/http://maddox.xmission.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20021112205429/http://maddox.xmi... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20000815234125/https://marathon.bungie.org/story/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000815234125/https://marathon....
- asimpletune 2y ago
  Yeah HTML5 + CSS3 were not a thing yet. They were one of the last missing pieces to the puzzle of solving desktop publishing. I think after all these things (rss, usenet, irc, html5, css3, etc...) the only thing left was search. I don't think a user friendly solution for search ever came along. The original algorithm was good enough, and if google wanted to be good at search I think they could have combatted set spam. The problem for search was always money.
- rchaud 2y ago
  Yeah, some sites were simple. Most sites people wanted to build required more sophisticated layouts, and thus began the great <table> age. Dreamweaver was a successful consumer product because of HTML and CSS' learning curve.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
johnnyanmac 2y ago
would you say making a powerpoint is "easy" or that "everyone copy/pastes a template they think looks good because design is hard"?
- rchaud 2y ago
  Yes, PowerPoint is orders of magnitude easier, because it is a GUI-based app that's fully WYSIWYG with snap guides for aligning items. HTML + CSS is non-WYSIWYG and that alone will weed out a good 50% of the Word/PPT/Excel crowd. Even if they used Word and exported to HTML, that's just step 1 completed. How would they put that page online? What's SFTP? Why do I need SSL? Why doesn't the page look right on mobile?