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I swear to God. I just want to go back to the 2000s where everything was just plain HTML and some basic CSS, if at all any, by default you got responsive design
by neya 4mo ago
I swear to God. I just want to go back to the 2000s where everything was just plain HTML and some basic CSS, if at all any, by default you got responsive design out of the box, readable text and super user friendly GUI from the browser's own default stylesheet.
Today you open any website. Everything is a fucking component. A simple dropdown with a finite list? Has its own loader and makes 10 fetch requests for no reason. Not even exaggerating - look at Instagram and Facebook on web.
Fuck all these specifications, just give me the raw HTML that isn't obfuscated by your shitty/shiny new JS framework that you swear will change the game (looking at you, React)
- Matl 4mo agoI too want to go back to that, but I fear most consumers/potential visitors to your website have been conditioned to expect flashy web by this point and so it's a self reinforcing paradigm.
- cutler 4mo agoNothing has changed. The "flashy web" of the 2000s was ... Flash. Corporates paid premium rates to Flash Designers who couldn't write a line of HTML.
- jfengel 4mo agoOh God I hated that. I'm not entirely sure why I hate it so much more than over-Javascripted sites. It feels even more alien.
- assimpleaspossi 4mo agoI wonder, though, if there are those who notice a simple, comfortable page.
- yolo3000 4mo agoI interviewed someone once for a fullstack role, gave him a mockup of a screen we had to build and asked how he would do it, in short some things on top of other things. The only thing he managed to say was how he would divide everything into components. I thought man, so many devs don't even know how to use html/css anymore, but who's laughing now, you just need to prompt a coding agent.
- testermelon 4mo agoThe cause is businesses are putting emphasis on showing their brand on the site. Every dropdown has to look and feel like their product. In short almost everyone wants their website to be a video game.
- officialchicken 4mo agoWhich brings up an interesting question about forced token consumption ... are "Easter Eggs" making a comeback?
- Gormo 4mo agoBut CSS can easily restyle every baseline HTML element. Making the web page look like the product is not only entirely possible without having to layer a framework on top, it's likely often easier and faster to implement than layering a framework on top.
- testermelon 4mo agoI heard dropdowns and certain some other elements are notoriously difficult to style. People resorting to tricks and js to handle their visuals. And it seems to be enough hassle to deem HTML+CSS a non-solution for some folks.
- notpushkin 4mo ago> A simple dropdown with a finite list? Has its own loader and makes 10 fetch requests for no reason. Not even exaggerating - look at Instagram and Facebook on web. I’ve seen an address form with search dropdowns that were absolutely bonkers. First it loads the list of countries. You start typing and the list disappears – it sends the text to backend, which returns... exactly the same list. The filtering is then done on the frontend. (After you select the country, you can select the region and then the city, which, of course, work exactly the same.)
- ex-leper 4mo agoIE6 was early 2000s, I remember it not being so great. CSS was starting to be supported but it was a minefield of un-supported features. It was bad enough I swore off front end work and made a pact with myself to focus only on backend or embedded, for my own mental health :-)
- blks 4mo agoIE6 was the most popular browser still during like 2006-2010. There was a point when Opera, Firefox, Chrome were already a thing, and they supported proper standard CSS and HTML, but 90%+ of users still used IE6 and you had to use tricks to support both standard and IE6 fuckery. I do miss those times.
- Geezus_42 4mo agoI'm my school district growing up in the early '00s, every single computer had Netscape Navigator and that is what everyone used.
- qup 4mo agoI was still supporting ie6 in at least 2014 for a couple of clients. I miss those times, too, but not the IE6 bullshit.
- joquarky 4mo agoThere is a company that makes a plurality of government software that still used VBScript-based HTML pages that required IE7 compatibility mode for their court management software when I left a few years ago.
- corvus-cornix 4mo agoI feel like this comment is channeling https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
- sham1 4mo agoWhile I'm sure people here have seen these, might as well link the rest of them to set how this can be evolved while keeping it small. - <http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/> - <https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/ https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/> - <https://www.thegreatestmotherfucking.website/ https://www.thegreatestmotherfucking.website/> - <https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/> And there are probably even more.
- Kudos 4mo agoIn the 2000s wasn't everything just misused/abused table layouts? Maybe we frequented different places, but that's how I remember it.
- JimDabell 4mo agoIt became feasible to switch to CSS layouts for complex websites and apps in the early 00s. How early depended upon your target demographics and skill set. Lots of people who didn’t want to learn new ways of doing things carried on using table layouts long after browser support demanded it. I was using CSS sparingly from 1999 onwards and ditched table layouts in 2002, but I was ahead of the curve.
- yesbabyyes 4mo agoSame here, we resigned our site in early 2003 with CSS layout. Late adopters would snicker a bit back then, seeing it as chasing a fad or being too hipster. Out of all similar situations, where I may have been an early adopter of a technology or method for reasons, using the web platform and following standards has probably been the one I least regret.
- GaryBluto 4mo agoIt worked for the most part.
- goalieca 4mo agoYes and no. ie6 couldn’t render anything near the full specification so tables and other tricks were used where css couldn’t cut it. I’d still that that over JavaScript “apps”
- EE84M3i 4mo agoStill works fine for this site.
- marginalia_nu 4mo agoTable designs were kinda brilliant though, both in how easy they were to create[1], but also how easy they were to parse programatically or with a text-based browser. Given context of the table in front of you, you can generally piece together where on the screen the information goes without rendering anything. You can generally do a lot of the same things with CSS grid layouts, but it's 100x more complicated, and the layout information is generally in the CSS file rather than the document itself making parsing the layout a Hard problem demanding the implementation of a partial CSS engine (and a sometimes JS engine too). [1] A totally viable workflow was to draw your website in something like photoshop, cut boxes where the content would go, and then export it to an HTML table.
- cutler 4mo agoResponsive design out of the box? Were you actually there? Back in 2000 you could make a career out of scripting browser polyfills or "DHTML".
- parkersweb 4mo agoQuite. Or differences in the box-model, appending weird symbols to CSS to target specific browsers, adding zoom:1, praying you didn’t have to support IE6….
- singpolyma3 4mo agoThat doesn't seem relevant to responsive design? HTML and CSS are definitely responsive out of the box, but OTOH I remember how many designers of that era thought responsiveness was a bug and asked devs to add width:920px to body...
- cutler 4mo agoCSS, especially the box model, was not consistent across browsers.
- singpolyma3 4mo agoTrue. Does not prevent the design from being responsive. Even with no CSS at all a design is responsive unless you specifically choose to break that
- codethief 4mo agoRight but how would you even display a vertical menu back then? `float: left` was rather bad, so you went back to using tables[0]. Good luck making these responsive. [0]: and to using dozens of images sliced to fit your table cells, for that cool hover effect as well as round corners. :-)
- joquarky 4mo ago
- exitnode 4mo agoI'm doing my part: https://rz01.org/handcrafted-html/ https://rz01.org/handcrafted-html/
- leavenotracks 4mo agoI like… great idea to start with the output of a SSG and then strip away the things you don’t want
- GaryBluto 4mo agoI miss the days of Flash. Not because I want to actually use it, but because it being an extension forced most websites to offer a basic HTML4 version as well as a fancy, more opaque Flash one. After the advent of HTML5 almost all websites feel like Flash on steroids. Ditto for the IE6 holdovers.
- boredtofears 4mo agoThat was the exception, the norm was definitely just a page that said, "Your browser does not support flash"
- carlosjobim 4mo agoThat's called reader mode. You're standing next to a fresh water spring complaining that you are thirsty.
- npc73x 4mo agoyes. The moment when I see the interception of the scroll to show some overlay content. my brains either switching to admire the aesthetics or get's irritated by that. In the mean time I totally forgot the reason of this website visit.
- brookst 4mo ago<html><body bgcolor=“#FF0000”><blink><font size=“+3” color=“#0000FF”>Me too!</font></body></blink></html>
- AlienRobot 4mo agoIs this tailwind?
- est 4mo ago> just plain HTML and some basic CSS Or even better. XML + XLST. True separation of representation and data. Is thousands of nested <div> really a good idea?
- matheusmoreira 4mo ago> just plain HTML and some basic CSS, if at all any I built my own website like this and I love it. Highly recommended.
- SpaceNoodled 4mo agoI built a website the other month with just pure HTML. It seems even easier to maintain.
- matheusmoreira 4mo agoFirst version of my website was pure HTML but that got unwieldly fast. I've been maintaining my own fork of the old pug/jade templating engine instead. It's essentially pure HTML but with no closing tags and with features to reduce repetition. I've been enjoying it a lot.
- AlienRobot 4mo agoThe problem is smartphones. You literally can't make a website from the 2000's nowadays, because that means you want a 800px fixed width layout or something of sort. If you do that, your website will look absolutely gorgeous since the 800px width + precise pointer + hover requirement allows you to get rid of all unnecessary whitespace, explain the UI with tooltips, and guarantees you always have enough width for one sidebar, but it won't be responsive. The real solution to the modern web is to destroy all mobile devices on the planet.
- e12e 4mo agoThe css zengarden works fine on phones? https://csszengarden.com/ https://csszengarden.com/ Granted, then you're talking 2003.
- chamomeal 4mo agoYeah I’m with you. If the web was still html-driven more than JS-driven, you wouldn’t need to make your site “agent-ready”. On the same topic, it’s hilarious how much everybody suddenly cares about ergonomics of non-browser software. I have used SO many APIs that are just miserably documented, but now they have magical MCPs!! Which seem like they’re basically well-documented APIs? And suddenly everything needs to have a decent CLI tool because that’s what LLMs are suited for. Like dang y’all didn’t care when the API was frustrating for me to use!!
- Pay08 4mo agoHonestly, the whole MCP thing has completely killed what little faith I had in commercial software development.
- InsideOutSanta 4mo agoThe 2000s, the golden age of web design, when people built inaccessible IE6-only mystery-meat navigation websites with Flash and HTML tables that dynamically loaded JS using iframes.
- pibaker 4mo agoCan't upvote this enough. People have very selective memory of how the 2000s web worked. Every other website requires Flash just to show you a carousel of images. "Serious" business websites implemented in slow, buggy Java applets. iframes everywhere. Incredibly fucked up tables with no semantic meanings in your HTML just to do what modern flexbox now does in two lines. No one cared about accessibility of anything. Clicking on anything can get you pwned because you never updated your Flash player which has an RCE vulnerability. And yes, so many websites will tell you to use Internet Explorer for best experience. I get being frustrated with some aspects of the modern web. But a lot of people are reminding of that Naomi Wolf tweet about how Belfast was calm and peaceful in the 1970s.
- neya 4mo ago> People have very selective memory > Every other website requires Flash just to show you a carousel of images. "Serious" business websites implemented in slow, buggy Java applets. iframes everywhere. Do you see the irony? This is a very selective example by itself. The table based minimal HTML + CSS websites existed throughout the decades (even so today) which is what I'm referring to specifically.
- Timwi 4mo ago> No one cared about accessibility of anything. I'm not dunking on your whole argument, but as for this specific point: as someone who finds the mouse difficult to use and requires the keyboard a lot, the web definitely used to be a lot more accessible in this regard. There's no keyboard navigability anymore. And it would be so simple, just put an accesskey attribute on your buttons and textboxes. Nobody does it, anywhere.
- 4mo ago
- philistine 4mo agoThe simple fix of the modern web is simple: no JavaScript. Enforce it as a security measure or whatever, but scripting is what is making the web worse.
- soundworlds 4mo agohttps://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/ is exactly what you are asking for!
- onion2k 4mo agoToday you open any website. Everything is a fucking component. We were doing the same things back then but with some nasty hacks to get things to work across different browsers. There's a reason why jQuery (released 2006) blew up, and plugin ecosystem was huge.