5 ms·
Does anyone remember websites?
- zahlman 1y ago> You’ve enabled HTTPS-Only Mode for enhanced security, and a HTTPS version of tttthis.com is not available. This, too, is nostalgic, in a way.
- mapontosevenths 1y agoIt's silly to try and encrypt everything, and arguably it can be worse for the authors privacy. Sometimes a blog post on a plain http web site doesnt need to be encrypted.
- bee_rider 1y agoWhat’s the argument that it can be worse for the author’s privacy? In general, I think we should encrypt everything. The more encrypted stuff floating around, the less it stands out, and the better for everybody’s privacy. Of course, nowadays encrypted content is quite common. But it didn’t become that way without effort!
- mapontosevenths 1y agoThanks to let's encrypt it's now at least possible to get a valid certificate anonymously, but it's a pain that requires renewal every 60 to 90 days and puts you at their mercy. If they decide they don't like your brand of free speech it's lights out and they are the only game in town. Yes, I know you can automate renewal if you have shell access, but you'll probably have to remember to do it manually if you use shared hosting that doesn't provide a cert for you. That's a lot of work, and a lot of risk, to secure a message that's meant to be publicly broadcast in the first place. I imagine it to be a bit like encrypting OTA television. Sure, you could stop a pirate broadcast from inpersonating your station by encrypting it, but that's not actually a threat model that applies to normal people most of the time and it makes everything far more complex. Can your ISP MITM you? Yep, and if they do you should cancel your service then sue them into the ground.
- Tepix 1y agoIf you don‘t encrypt everything a malicious actor like some ISPs can inject nasty things like pervasive tracking or zero day exploits.
- cpa 1y agoIt helps against this kind of stuff (2015) https://blog.fox-it.com/2015/04/20/deep-dive-into-quantum-insert/ https://blog.fox-it.com/2015/04/20/deep-dive-into-quantum-in...
- simpaticoder 1y agoI disagree. The primary threat model for unencrypted http connections is a MITM attack. A middle box (a proxy or router) modifies the response payload to inject malicious content or modify the content. For an ordinary blog or personal website an attacker can gain compute, violate privacy, acquire a (minor) DDOS source, on the blogs users by injecting a script. Another type of attack would modify the content of the site to suit the attackers purpose - either to hurt the author and/or their message. Consider the damage an attacker can do if they injected CSAM onto a person's blog. The victim's life would be ruined long before the wheels of justice turned (if they turn at all). The one mitigating factor is that you'd need to have reliable control over a relatively stable middle-box to execute this attack, but that's quite feasible. Last but not least don't underestimate the way software grows. Sooner or later someone is going to implement HTTP basic authentication over plain HTTP and, needless to say, that's a bad idea. Look, I don't like it either. I remember when you could telnet into a server and interact with it. That was good for pedagogy and building a mental model of the protocol. But we have to deal with how things are, not how we want them to be.
- xantronix 1y agoopenssl s_client -connect host:port
- ranger_danger 1y agoUnfortunately this isn't 1999, and bad actors are everywhere. Even ISPs themselves (cough Comcast) have been injecting unsolicited new code into people's webpages for many years now.
- username223 1y agoIt was kind of awesome that you could telnet to port 80, type "GET / HTTP/1.0", press return a couple of times, and receive a web page. Then shitty hotel wifi that injected ads happened, so we had to encrypt traffic that had absolutely no sensitive information.
- mapontosevenths 1y agoOur solution was technical, the problem was political. It should have been solved using criminal penalties for the criminals who did this.
- epapsiou 1y agoI remember. Stumbled upon
- snitzr 1y agohttps://www.spacejam.com/1996/ https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
- devin 1y agoIf this is true to the original, I am surprised to see this was table-oriented layout and not a bitmap image with clickable x,y coordinates.
- hosh 1y agoTable-oriented layouts was a thing back then too.
- 123sereusername 1y ago[dead]
- zahlman 1y agoIt was common to make tables and use them to assemble a bitmap, where each cell had zero border/margin/padding and an exact size, and contained a "slice" of the image. Web authoring tools (and Photoshop) even had explicit support for generating this sort of thing, as I recall. This was I guess simpler to automate than defining clickable regions of a single image, and it allowed for the individual pieces of the image to be requested in parallel on slow connections (adding another dimension of progressive loading).
- hayleox 1y agoAh, nothing like trying to save the logo from such a website, then discovering the image you saved is partially cut-off and includes the navbar behind it instead having a transparent background.
- devin 1y agoYeah, I remember this. Macromedia Fireworks had a slice tool that I used quite a bit. You'd basically make an image which was your website, and then do all the layout with zero border tables. But for me, this was what I was doing circa 2004 before CSS was dominant. Earlier software from the '96 era like Frontpage I think would use bitmaps whole cloth, but maybe I'm misremembering.
- morcus 1y agoThis seems like it has at least partial overlap with the "small web": see https://kagi.com/smallweb https://kagi.com/smallweb
- xavierstein 1y agoI think that Homestar Runner did a great short[1] about this for their 25th anniversary. [1] https://homestarrunner.com/toons/backtoawebsite https://homestarrunner.com/toons/backtoawebsite
- mojuba 1y agoThe early internet was like some settlers' shacks, built uncontrollably and unsystematically whereas the modern web is all skyscrapers, residential and business. Uniform apartments, uniform offices all looking very similar differeing in only subtle interior design details here and there. Should we go back to the shack era? Of course not. But maybe we should start a new era of land exploration and start over. It shouldn't necessarily be Internet 3.0, might be something else completely. AR/VR? Possibly although that has already failed once.
- Llamamoe 1y agoThe only thing missing from your analogy is the fact that the shacks were filled with personal diaries and curios, while the skyscrapers are mostly chock-full of homogenous sewage slurry.
- bee_rider 1y agoAlso the shacks weren’t really particularly shabby or anything, they were just more like well-enough-constructed single family homes. Old websites before scripting became popular were pretty much solid in that boring-tech way. Hardware and networks were not as reliable, but the sites themselves could be fine via simplicity. Modern overdesigned sites are sort of like modern apartment buildings: shitty build quality under fake plastic marble and wood.
- cykros 1y agoWell, they did literally often have "this page is under construction" banners on them. and <blink> tags lol. I'd take it all back over the Squarespace hellscape the web has become.
- beckthompson 1y agoIf you've visited old mining operations / shacks that's pretty common! There are always some weird choices and cool things to see
- bee_rider 1y ago
- cal85 1y agoThe last sentence can’t be true. If you go looking for them, they’re easy to find. The problem is you don’t.
- MountDoom 1y agoSort of. There are many confounding factors here. For one, they're harder to find because the number of personal websites doesn't scale as quickly as commercial content and SEO spam. It's also a bit of a vicious cycle, because if your website is less likely to be read by anyone, why bother writing it in the first place? But for the most part, the very people bemoaning the current state of affairs then go back to scrolling through TikTok / Instagram / Facebook / Reddit.
- cal85 1y agoOr, when you do go looking, it doesn’t feel the same. Why?
- prewett 1y agoBecause you were 25 years younger. When you are, say, 20 years old, people >= 20 years old are likely to be interesting, which was pretty much everyone with a web page. When you are 45 years old, writings from 20 year olds are much less interesting, on average.
- LarsDu88 1y agoDoes anyone remember geocities, tripod, webrings, and Amazon affiliate links? Pepperidge farm remembers...
- DaveZale 1y agoI am currently building on neocities.org - that is the old geocities
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- DaveZale 1y agoI am compiling a website on neocites.org ... for about two months now, and I won't be complete for another year. It's basically a place for photos, maps and descriptions of a local community xeriscape garden with about 400 specimens. Others will take photos and videos of the place throughout the year, and post to social media, where they instantly get a couple dozen thumbs up, and gloat about it. That is not my intention. I want a coffee table book.
- krapp 1y agoWebsites do still exist. People do know what they are. There are more of them on the web than there ever have been. Nothing is stopping anyone from creating a website if they want. Nothing is stopping you.
- pessimizer 1y agoThey will not be indexed by search engines, though, so you had better email all your friends so you'll have a few visitors.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- chneu 1y agoYes they will? I run/host a bunch of personal websites for friends. I do nothing special to get them indexed and they are all on search engines.
- techjamie 1y agoI've created a few sites and never explicitly told search engines about them, and they got picked up just fine surprisingly quickly.
- TypicalHog 1y agohttps://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/
- tuukkah 1y agoI think e.g. Mastodon with IndieWeb is a way to fight against the enshittification and to bring back the good from the early years. "The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”. We are a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content." https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/
- jmclnx 1y agoThis comes up every so often, and I always post something like this :) It still exists with Gemini protocol and gopher: https://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2021/245/The-Rise-of-the-Small-Internet https://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2021/245/The-Rise-of-t... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://geminiprotocol.net/ https://geminiprotocol.net/ https://wiki.sdf.org/doku.php?id=gemini_site_setup_and_hosting_features https://wiki.sdf.org/doku.php?id=gemini_site_setup_and_hosti... https://sdf.org/?tutorials/gopher https://sdf.org/?tutorials/gopher I have moved my site to gemini (and gopher), maintaining both is far easier than what I had to go through with the WEB/htmp.
- techjamie 1y agoI can't speak for Gemini, but when I found out about Gopher I read the specification and made a very simple server implementation for myself. If you're looking for a quick project to play with, it's not a bad one to try. It didn't support everything, mostly just basic browsing and linking. But it was cool to build something mostly compliant to a spec that quickly.
- silexia 1y agoMy website joelx.com has been available for 18 years now. Lots of articles.
- bigjobby 1y agoI mean. There was a lot of absolute toss also? I like the current state of webpages. I'm confident they will load quickly and render properly. I'm happy to read streamlined posts and find the bigger sites will organised and much easier to navigate than sites of old