10 ms·
Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026
- macroteam 4mo agothe prediction wasn't even wrong, it just split in two. deploying a static site in 2026 is genuinely easier than 1998. you drag a folder into netlify and you're done, no ISP instructions, no FTP client, no guy with a tarp. what exploded is everything before the deploy. and the funny thing is the actual complaint buried in this thread, "i don't want to paste my nav into every page and update it by hand," is the exact problem we've spent 25 years re-solving. frames, then SSI, then php includes, then templating engines, then the whole frontend framework industry. react is, underneath everything, a really elaborate way to not repeat your navbar.
- lelanthran 4mo ago> react is, underneath everything, a really elaborate way to not repeat your navbar. That specific use-case is now replaced by having a single, small webcomponent for client-side includes. <cs-include remote-src="..."></cs-include> Is a much better dev-XP than configuring the server, then tying your sources to that specific server.
- slau 4mo agoWhat a brilliant piece of writing. I remember almost every single step—safe for actually getting angry emails. Maybe I ended up being the one writing them. What a glorious time period. Interestingly, it would’ve been impossible to share this writing with as many people as the author did by publishing it on mastodon and then it ended up on HN in 1998. The network effects are real.
- superkuh 4mo agoSSI is still the perfect balance of just enough power to do templating with .html fragments with a minimal attack surface and no maintainence from version churn. It's stable, it's tested, it's left alone. It's in most major webservers as a core module. It's as good now as it was in 1998.
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- rado 4mo agoCompletely ignoring accessibility
- marssaxman 4mo agoas is tradition
- superkuh 4mo agoWeb pages on web sites with text and images were inherently accessible. It's the modern javascript applications that have taken over that are not accessible.
- dpe82 4mo agoAnd there were a bunch of WYSIWYG editors in the mid-late 90s. It seems like everyone had one, including Netscape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer
- JimDabell 4mo agoThe very first web browser that ever existed – WorldWideWeb – had a WYSIWYG editor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb
- zuzululu 4mo agoNot seeing anything Looks like its getting a ton of traffic Spinner and load bar at the top
- dwedge 4mo agoThose angry emails from guys (it's always guys) felt so contrived and wedged in just to attack other guys. I reminded me of the tweet about how people online invent someone doing a hypothetical situation and then get mad at them
- mcphage 4mo ago> I reminded me of the tweet about how people online invent someone doing a hypothetical situation and then get mad at them You really think that bit was hypothetical?!
- dwedge 4mo agoOf course it was. The whole article was written in a hypothetical structure. "You do this, then that happens"
- pseudalopex 4mo agoIt was written in 2nd person structure. 2nd person and hypothetical are different ideas.
- nadagast 4mo agoI enjoyed this. But reading the claim that the iPhone was bad compared to other phones of the day makes me question it all. That's so incredibly backwards. It _was_ a much better internet in your pocket. If you couldn't see that, it says something about you, not phones.
- Retric 4mo agoIt was a bad phone, poor battery life, fragile, and relatively poor reception. That was more than offset by the unmetered internet connection + decent browser, but that’s a feature not everything.
- aaronbrethorst 4mo agoit's 3 products: a widescreen iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. Are you getting it?
- lostlogin 4mo ago> It was a bad phone It got a bit of traction, I think they did ok. Out of interest I checked. I live in New Zealand and iPhone revenue is about 60% more than my countries GDP.
- Retric 4mo agoThat’s the brand not a specific device these days Apple is selling well over 200 million phones a year. The original iPhone sold 6.1 million units in its lifetime and topped out at the 3rd most popular phone in the US, being dramatically less popular in Europe etc. IE less than 2% of current annual sales. By comparison just the base model iPhone 15 was the most popular phone globally for 3 quarters excluding the iPhone 15 Pro Max and iPhone 15 Pro which where close. Part of that is just being a way better phone in terms of battery life and being significantly more resistant to water etc.
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- beau_g 4mo agoI read the beginning of the post and immediately tabbed back to start writing a rant about standing up a website being fine, but the real loss of web functionality was Flash, glad I kept reading. I'm quite good with CSS and doing tricks with SVGs, but constantly run into things I want to do in 2D web I find to be complex enough and time consuming enough I don't even bother, while I would have been able to do it in Flash as a 13 year old in a few minutes. The modern web is a prison built out of <div>s, the tricks you see for "amazing" websites with obnoxious scrolljacking/parallax don't hide it.
- xvxvx 4mo agoMy experience was almost identical. Don’t forget all the time spent balancing image quality with load speed to get that perfect blend of shit quality and slow download.
- sznio 4mo ago> Making a website should be the easiest fucking thing in the world by now. There should be a program that you can use to spit out a website as easy as Word spits out words on paper squarespace? > and we - us fucking foss nerds or whoever - should've made it. wordpress?
- decimalenough 4mo agobut but WordPress is written in PHP screeeee <explode type="nerd-apoplexy/>
- jauco 4mo agoActually, do things ever get easier to tinker with as technology matures? Is it easier to build or repair a radio now than it was when they were first sold? A computer? A car? A washing machine? A vacuum cleaner?
- rwmj 4mo agoBut this is about building radios, which is easier (probably?) now. You can drag and drop an FM radio in pure software (well, with a USB dongle). Or if you insist on hardware, use free tools and cheap PCB services to prototype your radio, grab the parts from Digikey and follow a Youtube tutorial to solder it all together.
- mft_ 4mo agoYes, before the enshittification kicks in. 3D printers are mostly still repairable and far more reliable and usable than a few years ago when the majority of the hobby wasn’t making stuff, it was tuning the printer to work reliably. Bambu and California may be signalling that the enshittification inflection point is near. Not quite the same level, but home/hobby electronics with tiny microcontrollers is more accessible than ever before thanks to the availability of cheap ESP8266/32 clones. And there are some obvious individual counter-examples - Framework computers, or repairable blenders[0]… but you’ve got to pay a premium for the privilege. But broadly you’re totally right - in the modern world, by the time something becomes a mainstream product aimed at general consumers, there’s a profit to be made and it’s likely on a downwards path. [0] https://www.openfunk.co/pages/re-mix https://www.openfunk.co/pages/re-mix
- lelanthran 4mo ago> Is it easier to build or repair a radio now than it was when they were first sold? "Build"[1], yes. "Repair", not really. A lot of things (like radio) can be an isolated module you just drop in. Right now a bright HS student can produce a clock radio by plugging together an arduino, an I2C FM receiver, I2C display, an I2C audio amp and a speaker. Pop it all into an enclosure and you have a real clock radio. Compare to building a clock radio back in 1990 - you'll have to understand how to wire up an op-amp, the principles behind op-amps, how to drive the readout from a clock, etc. ------------------- [1] By "build" I assume you mean "assemble from parts".
- surgical_fire 4mo agoMy actual thoughts were "Wow, doing front end is a shitty experience in 1998, I'll bet it'll be even shittier in 2026".
- brador 4mo agoMissed Twitter bootstrap which was huge for web design. Also missed the HP IPAQ.
- easyThrowaway 4mo agoHe's missing the last step: Somehow around the 2010s we all decided that everything in the web had to become "reactive" and "asynchronous" - which is a fancy way of saying things can theoretically happen at any time but realistically if you try to make it happen in ways that don't resemble the previous serial approach you get weird race conditions - and instead of making sure this was implemented in HTML now we have to write another web browser on top of our web browser in javascript, using a thing called shadow DOM. Also somehow now you have to understand how the internet works at protocol level unless you want way worse performance than that page written in Dreamweaver 20 years ago. But this is fine because this is the way big companies run things, which we all know they always make the correct decisions like giving their AI full access to their login and password recovery process.
- pllbnk 4mo agoI have been building a small web app for my family recently. I was planning to host it on my own server and not do any fancy reactive and asynchronous stuff. It was a simple multi-page app with simple forms and links. And it sucked because we didn’t know who was doing what live, we needed to refresh pages needlessly just to see if something has changed. Funny that it seemed fine while I have been the only user testing the app but once we got more family members in what seemed like “production ready” it was immediately obvious that it needed interactivity.
- mcphage 4mo ago> back then, it sucked so hard that web designers with a decade of experience would crank out articles about trying to achieve "the Holy Grail of web design," which was three columns, a header, and a footer, with stuff in the middle bit and links in the left bit and maybe some other links in the right bit, that didn't fuck up in some hilarious or obscure way. Shit that was trivial and intuitive with tables, but absolutely fucking impossible with CSS. This fact (which is 100% true) makes me so angry about CSS. They had a really good idea—separate structure from content. But they didn't design CSS about what people Actually Wanted To Do, so for what, a decade plus? CSS was this steaming pile of hacks and hoops and bullshit. Designers wanted 3-column layouts. They wanted pinstriping. They wanted drop shadows. They wanted to center things vertically. And rather than make those dead simple, they made them all pains in the ass. Why spend all that time designing and developing and proselyting a technology, without ever thinking about what sort of thing people will want to do with it?
- JimDabell 4mo agoThey did, in fact, design CSS to implement this kind of design easily. You were able to implement that in a simple way without any weird hacks using only the functionality in CSS 2.0, published in 1998. Unfortunately, the simple way was to use display: table-cell, and Microsoft didn’t implement that part of the standard until Internet Explorer 8, released in 2009. And since old browser versions stuck around longer back in those days, it was several years after that before web developers could count on it. If it weren’t for Microsoft abandoning Internet Explorer development for five entire years once they got a browser monopoly, you could’ve been doing this in a much simpler way more than a decade sooner. You’re blaming the W3C for not putting an easy way to do it into the standard but they did put it into the standard. It’s just what they put into the standard didn’t matter – Internet Explorer had >90% market share so Microsoft didn’t care about the standards and paralysed the industry for over a decade. A truly vast amount of the weird hacks we had to do back then was simply papering over the shortcomings of Internet Explorer.
- icedchai 4mo agoCSS was the worst part of the HTML/CSS/JS combo. It was easier to build layouts with tables, 1995 style, for a very long time.
- Zetaphor 4mo agoSomething powered by an LLM is going to end up being the tool that makes this accessible in the way it always should have been, and that gives me complex feelings.