You know when the Web Dark Ages are? They're upon us right now. With Google, Fb extracting all value out of the extant web, github & co having "educated" developers what to expect from software download sites and depending on network effects, StackExchange and a couple other sites covering "How To" material (not meant as a SE critique) and ad prices going down, the only "rational" incentive for new content is to publish polarizing clickbait. In the 1990s and 2000s, all kinds of Wikis and collaboration sites emerged; in the early 2010s, the nascent mobile web prompted a vibrant web design community, but when was the last time you went to a new web site? The web was once meant as an easy way for self-publishing, bypassing middle-men. Turns out we've just exchanged one middleman with another. I'm especially pissed at the staged HTML5 campaign to yield power over web standards to Google. HTML5 chose a shield as a logo, but who's going to shield us from Google and WHATWG destroying the web?
Facebook is perhaps the most frightening for me, because for many people Facebook is the internet!
Something I absolutely hate is when I want to learn more about a local business and search for them on Google, but all I find is a Facebook page with minimal info - what happened to websites?!
Facebook is like AOL in the heyday: a curated contained world complete with IM. Chrome is effectively IE6 as Blink makes up a significant portion of the browser engines these days and many only test against it. Need some "Best viewed in Chrome!" gifs.
This effect is even stronger in certain countries where Facebook pays ISPs to zero-rate their pages, so many people only have access to Facebook because they can't afford to access the rest of the internet. If you think clickbait headlines are bad, imagine not having the ability to even click through to the article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Zero
Facebook is "free" (as in it does not cost money to open a profile and post info there). Websites are not, and even if they are, not all people know how to publish something to a website. I hate it too yeah, but for non-techie people Facebook is just plain simple.
Did you ever think that many businesses never had a website.
Even fewer had one that was up-to-date and useful.
What happened is that the masses found their way in to the web, and they did it the easiest way possible.
There is still many independent businesses that have a small website. You haven't proven that the number of such independent business websites has declined.
Most likely, the fraction of small businesses that has an online presence has increased. And this may have skewed the ratio of websites to Facebook pages.
But in absolute numbers, I doubt there's fewer small independent websites today.
I know. It would be okay if you could view Facebook pages without an account, but since I don’t have one, all of those pages (including many friends and family members) are entirely shut out for me.
> Facebook is perhaps the most frightening for me, because for many people Facebook is the internet!
This reminded me the times of Mozilla Netscape, IE and Firefox. I remember having conversations in /. about how for "normal people" the big blue E icon is the Internet and that grandmas of the world cried that "the internet was gone" when that icon disappeard.
I'm a self-taught developer with no professional experience, but for over a year I learned everything I needed to know to build a massive web application to fulfill my own need: a collaborative annotation wiki. I poured my freaking heart into it and could never get a single user.
I drew on Jimmy Wales' experiences founding Wikipedia for a lot of inspiration. But got nowhere near the traction he got. As in, I got zero users after nine months since launch. Now it's largely a portfolio piece as I try to search for a real job in tech, by leveraging the 14,000 lines of code in Python/Flask to prove that I know how to develop an app. ( https://anno.wiki is the url if you're curious).
I can only hope that the real reasons I haven't gained traction are that (a) the interface just isn't welcoming enough (I tried too hard to do progressive enhancement with almost no experience in UX) and (b) simply not advertising. After a nine month break I'm getting ready to start re-developing a new front end in React to maybe make it more welcoming to non-techie lit nerds, and then maybe target advertise on Facebook, but I just don't know.
My deepest fear is just that the web is not an interesting place anymore, and Wikipedia just wouldn't get a foothold now, and that's why I can't. I just don't know.
The basic idea was (is) to create a definitive resource for annotations on literature. Annotated information on any text is spread sloppily across different editions, from Oxford World Classics to Norton, and generally don't focus on the same issues. Much of it is commentary on textual issues, or only identify certain things. Entire passages will be detailed in one copy, but not in another.
Basically I just feel like there should be a definitive resource for deep reading. An ever more detailed pool of analytical interpretation. It's a dream, I just don't know that others are as interested in it as me.
There are certain resources, like Infinite Jest Page by Page[1] that were essentially a single book version of what I'm trying to accomplish and were super effective, but not very normalized or formalized. I really just hope to do something like that, on a larger scale, with more literature. My dream would be to also include copyright texts, viewable either through a token provided by a purchase of the text from the publisher, or by just searching for lines to see annotations. I really just want to create a super massive body of exhaustive and quasi-definitive annotations to all of the world's literature.
And yeah, the color scheme is apparently not very popular. It's really just my own implementation of Ethan Schoonover's light version of solarized[0], which is supposed to be what it's like to read a book in the shade on a bright summer day. But however romantic that sounds, it's not very popular.
I don’t mind the contrast, the design looks pretty good to me but I don’t get what it’s for. It looks like a cross between Reddit and Wikipedia, and I bet most people go “huh” and move on.
More like, reading text printed in white directly on the blazing surface of the sun. ;)
You might find some interested parties in academia. I happen to have met a postgraduate once whose entire thesis was in the form of annotations. Apparently it's a big deal in lit academia, maybe you could become their Arxiv. Maybe when it comes time to market you could cold email a bunch of grad students.
The truth is that millions of people can, just like you, develop an app like this and the world only needs a few of those. Hence, there are thousands of failed attempts just like yours. It resembles the writing/music market, where there's way more creators than the public's appetite for their creations.
Congrats on building something. How about making landing page explaining what it is? Also you need to work on UI with some designer (I have similar problem when building apps)
Thank you! A landing page is something I've been thinking a lot about recently. I took a long break on it and am now getting back into it. I think I'm going to relegate this ui to old.anno.wiki and rebuild the front end in React. Will definitely be putting a landing page on there.
I dislike targeted advertising, because I find it useless. I like context advertising much more: When I browse X then I find ads related to X sometimes useful. I use some of their products like gmail and drive sometimes. But for browsing and searching I use Firefox and DDG.
But as a web-dev I dislike Apple/Safari. They have become MS/IE 2.0. My not so generous assumption is that they try to restrict the web to make their app platform more appealing.
This issue is different from the things we criticize about Google. They neither restrict me as a user nor as a developer. I can avoid using their stuff and I can avoid aggressively targeted ads (in fact they have a psychologically negative impact on me).
As for personal sites and blogs: I still very much read personal blogs. The quality (whatever that means, but you know...) of articles on those is generally much higher than on medium/dev.to or whatever platform.
In fact there is so much good content on small/personal sites, that I don't have time to read it all.
> But as a web-dev I dislike Apple/Safari. They have become MS/IE 2.0.
This sentiment is inexact and incorrect. MS/IE was a problem once it achieved market dominance. Safari has never achieved such dominance.
More accurate is a comparison using Netscape 1.x-4.x and MSIE =< 6. Allow me to explain.
Prior to MSIE dominating with IE 6, MS was engaged in its campaign to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" Netscape. This is similar to where Google Chrome is now.
Google Chrome rolls in not-yet-ratified web "standards" before anyone, including Safari, has a chance to respond. Thereby, Google Chrome increasingly establishes its dominance.
Safari is in the position of Netscape, with a codebase that is increasingly perceived as inadequate when compared to Google Chrome.
Of course, such a comparison can only go so far.
My main point is that Safari is not flouting or disregarding established W3C/WHATWG web standards but, rather, being very careful about how it implements ratified standards, something that takes time.
Google Chrome, on the other hand, bakes in anything and everything to secure its advantage in the browser market, just as MS did with IE when Netscape was still around.
First of all thank you for relativising my one-sided comment. Let me clarify what I mean a bit.
I agree with you on your arguments about Chrome. I don't support Chrome specific features. They even have broken things in the past.
My perspective on this is that iOS locks out non-Safari browsers, so users are forced to use it and as a developer I'm forced to make workarounds for it.
With IE11 I don't have this problem anymore. We're at a stage now where I can convince my clients of "This is a browser, which is losing official support soon. I can make this feature work/look better on IE11 if you really want, which costs me this much time". IE is being faded out just by the fact that more new stuff looks worse and works worse.
With Safari this is not the case. There is no "Oh this website works better with Firefox, you should install it" which is likely the biggest factor for browser adoption and my gut feeling says that Apple knows and uses this.
This particular statement seems questionable:
> My main point is that Safari is not flouting or disregarding established W3C/WHATWG web standards but, rather, being very careful about how it implements those standards which takes time.
In some cases their actions simply don't make sense, except if you look at it from a perspective of protecting their iOS App platform. For example breaking localStorage in the name of privacy (which is ridiculously paradox) and not supporting obvious, simple UX improvements like scroll-anchoring.
Safari is in some cases stricter/more standards compliant than Firefox and especially Chrome. But in some cases like above the feature intersection of Firefox and Chrome is the one that makes the most sense for the web.
> iOS locks out non-Safari browsers, so users are forced to use it and as a developer I'm forced to make workarounds for it.
> In some cases their actions simply don't make sense, except if you look at it from a perspective of protecting their iOS App platform.
Agreed 100%!
My earlier comment was in the context of macOS and might have been very different had I also considered iOS/iPadOS.
iOS and iPadOS are restrictive and mobile Safari somewhat slows innovation. Your objections regarding mobile Safari's deficiencies are worth considering. Thank you. I also agree Apple does this to protect the iOS App platform (I might just say "iOS platform"). Reasonable arguments exist about why Apple's lock on mobile Safari is good and why it is bad. (I personally think Apple could do better here, but I am not knowledgeable enough to comment further.)
Apple doesn't need dominance to hold back the shared web while driving forward its proprietary platform at full speed, it only needs veto power, which Safari-by-any-other-name on iOS gives it. I don't want Google to be able to just do whatever they want, either, but if Apple really cared about improving the web, they would be better known for making their own proposals for improvement than for mainly blocking others' proposals.
A parent comment is calling Chrome/Blink as IE6, but for the is evident that is actually Apple (yes, the whole of Apple) the new IE6 force.
The IE6 concept i think is now something that transcends just the browser, because it describes very well a trick to maintain market dominance.
Once you get into a position of platform control, as Microsoft did in the IE6 days, together with Windows.. and note here how you have to circle around the whole platform, not just the browser to get the whole picture. To maintain your control, you keep others from telling what the next steps for that particular platform should be.
So its clear to me that its Apple with its OS market share that through Safari will try everything they can to stop the Web to become a competing platform to their "kits". And in their case, this strategy is more clear, when they dont let any other browser engine to be used except the one they control and will never let to become a competing platform to their own app kit.
Because they know that once developers create more multi-platform apps, their distinction as something different, unique and better starts to vanish.
They will play the card of security, and about how they are thinking in they users well-being (and this is whats Apple does best). And of course that "for the sake of security" will be also right, because more features means more ways to exploit. So this is a 'joker card' that they can always use to resort to some excuse their users will believe.
Chrome for instance also use a trick, but its the total reverse of 'IE6', they put in a lot of features, and with this 'platform bloat' its pretty hard for the others engines to follow, requiring a lot of engineering and money to keep playing this expensive and exhaustive game,
People complaining about Blink here, didn't see that other players let go the infernal mission to keep their web engines in sync with the "modern standards" that are mostly proposed by Google, and where almost only them have the
engineering and money resources to spend in this "platform bloat" game.
>But as a web-dev I dislike Apple/Safari. They have become MS/IE 2.0. My not so generous assumption is that they try to restrict the web to make their app platform more appealing.
Whatever Apple is doing with Safari, it seems much more resource efficient than Chrome on OS X. (Firefox is somewhere in the middle). Chrome can become unusable under a normal load, while Safari almost never does no matter how much I abuse it. Safari seems to hibernate background windows and tabs much better.
If the tradeoff for accomplishing that resource efficiency is not supporting all of the edge case features Google puts in its browsers, I'm ok with that. It's nice to have that option.
To add, a lot of practices that were considered "spyware" or "malware" during the web dark ages have become normalized as growth-hacks or the cost of using free (as in beer) software.
I assume you were being rhetorical - but it definitely still happens. Radiohead's website redesign being the last one I personally experienced earlier this year https://www.radiohead.com/library/#ir (mostly sharing because it's great).
This for me is what has really decreased the quality of the Internet. Geocities was full of really good articles about things like electronics instructions manuals, DIYs and whatnot.
Nowadays the Internet is full of spam disguised as content, but really not containing any content. The majority of the content you see on the web is actually written by marketing agencies, and even "white papers", "case studies" or other similar articles are nothing more than marketing material.
I think the Web Dark Ages are yet ahead of us. I've grown extremely pessimistic with the state of modern web, with corporate censorship and disinformation on ad-driven social media, dissolution of many open Web standards and WebKit/Blink hegemony that is impossible to topple. A decade ago I expected Web to become more open, but instead it has become a hellscape of closed gardens where maintaining even reasonable amount of privacy is nearly impossible.
90s web was a wild west, but it was a far cry from its "dark ages".
For what it's worth, during those "dark ages" web pages conveying useful information were typically no heavier than ten times the character count of the information. Sure, we had the <blink> tag, and garish geocities pages, hamsterdance and the rest. But that web delivered information really efficiently. Maybe we can start a movement to bring that back. Let's call it MarsMission: let's build web stuff that might be usable by the crew of a mission to Mars when they're hundreds of gigameters away.
Really all we need is to stop the worship of the mobile. Mobile is uniform and limited, and sadly it has made desktop uniform and limited as well.
Somehow even highly technical interfaces, e.g. DNZ zone editors are now made mobile-first. I wonder, is the majority of people really editing zone files on their phone? don't people value their time anymore?
Controversial opinion -- I think the era where we had separate, mobile optimized `m.domain.com` sites was best. We had more code to write, but it gave us two separate experiences tailored for each device.
Unless you're just reading a text-only article, there's a big difference between what a mobile interface can and should offer, and what a desktop interface can and should offer. I agree that we've sacrificed desktop for the sake of mobile.
I understand why this is done for sites whose goal is to show advertisements. If the majority of the users are mobile and you get most of your money from them, it becomes harder to justify creating a proper desktop experience.
I suppose I wish more people spent the time to build desktop-class interfaces regardless.
I'd say the m.domain.com concept was terrible. You'd often get redirected to the mobile homepage instead the mobile version of the link you clicked on. Then even if that worked correctly, you'd just have random features missing so you'd have to switch to desktop anyways.
While the mobile-first movement may sometimes go to far it can be a life saver in places where fully featured interfaces are out of reach.
I think the sweet spot is mobile-compatible controls and progressively enhanced design that can scale up or down. Preferably using the simplest tools, even if unfashionable.
We need the search engine to display some stats along with each search result link, for example:
# of bytes the page downloads.
# of scripts/stylesheets the page downloads.
# of ads the page downloads.
# of http requests the page does.
If that happens, the minimalists will typically choose the most efficient page because competition has already ensured that content quality will be top notch in almost all of them for most popular searches.
Although MarsMission could not say anything at the first time, I like the idea. I've collected a couple of links around the same topic, to build a corpus:
I've come to believe that, in retrospect, 'AJAX' was a mistake. For the first decade of the web, nearly all its functionality was implemented using HTML tags.
What roles does the web serve that benefit humanity? Some of the most important are: 'literary', 'research', 'educational', 'financial service', 'commercial service', 'audio/video'.
Then we have a 'typesetting/graphic-design' role, which is 99% of the reason the web 'requires' JS and CSS. As long as we were happy with a "one-size-fits-all" design, we could enable the other roles via (existing, and future) HTML tags alone (the way we did prior to the introduction of JS).
Now, what are the trade-offs we make to gain the 'typesetting/graphic-design' role? They are a loss of: security, privacy, legibility, compatibility, accessibility, ease-of-use, and page load speed. To be fair, we also gain fantastic abilities for web developers to innovate, but we could probably find some workaround, without 'AJAX', to allow devs to experiment.
The world would be better off, in may ways, if we scrapped the web's dynamic features, created a few new HTML tags, and re-implemented them using HTML alone.
There is absolutely no reason great typography should come at the expense of privacy, unless you are unable to upload custom fonts or have something against CSS.
You also don't need JS to support it, although you may have to give up on the idea that your site has to look the same in all browsers, because not all browsers can do things like automatic hyphenation.
And frankly I am happy that I don't have to read source code in Courier just because it is the only available monospace font.
> There is absolutely no reason great
> typography should come at the expense of privacy
I agree to the extent that there is an order of magnitude less reason to prohibit CSS than Javascript.
However CSS is not benign. There are features that bad actors regularly exploit. For example, setting the opacity of an evil button to 0, and positioning it above an innocent button.
Also, CSS, as currently designed, is a barrier to reuse. The model I like is one where users are at liberty to display web content however they (the user, not the website) prefer. Since CSS is basically reusable only in theory, it inhibits that.
> I am happy that I don't have to read source code in
> Courier just because it is the only available monospace font.
It's true that, as a web developer, you can provide Courier. As a user, it's not, by browser default, your choice whether you get Courier. If the server decides a user should see Comic Sans, that's what the client will use, no?
CSS is literally designed so that you can override previous definitions by loading your own stylesheet. Thats not just the standard, it is in the name (Cascading Style Sheet). The fact that no main-stream browser supports adding user specific styles out of the box is an issue with the browsers not acting as the user agents they are supposed to be and not really CSS.
CSS is reusable in some ways, but not in the sense that you can take a stylesheet from one site, apply it to another, and have a guarantee that the result will make sense.
This is partly because HTML has its own competing presentation features, and partly because there is an infinite number of cases for which a designer would have to write rules (eg: many html elements, that can also be nested)
Trends like using medium.com as blog replacements are also troublesome. These companies own your content. When they go away, so does your content. When they want to censor you, then can.
I've noticed that many people abandoned their blogs in favor of Twitter, where they developed a habit to build long threads in form of 1/2-sentence paragraphs. It troubles me, because I think Twitter is not a healthy medium for public discourse.
I believe microblogging is reshaping the way we approach public discussion as a whole. Limited capacity for expression and implicit ability to take everything out of context can lead to frustration and miscommunication.
Similarly Substack. I've been trying out Zotero and notice that even if you take snapshots of Medium or Substack articles and try to later access those snapshots, they'll briefly flash some content on the page and then it disappears. (Bizarrely, the replacement text for Medium pages says 404.)
If you dig through the HTML, the article content is all there, and it could be fixed with changes to Zotero's Medium and Substack translators[1], but that it should even been necessary to do what amounts to a site-specific hack is a problem in itself.
It used to be a very good experience, both for the blogger and the reader. Unfortunately, they took on lots of VC funding (as if building a blogging platform was that difficult) without a clear and ethical path to profit and now have no choice but to be nasty to try and make money.
And, somewhat related, there was period when I think a lot of people assumed, however incorrectly, that content on Medium was somehow differentiated and could be taken more seriously than content on a random individual web site. Anything I ever put on Medium was always mirrored elsewhere, but I did use it for a time--mostly for professional content that my company wanted to link to from newsletters and so forth.
There was a period during which Medium was a signal of quality, probably because it was a niche platform only known in the tech circle and I believe it was invite-only for a while as well.
Now that every marketer, "growth hacker", "entrepreneur" and their dog are on there it's the opposite. Medium is now a signal that some idiot is trying to build credibility in an unrelated field by rehashing basic facts/existing content and peppering it with stock images and "sign up for my newsletter" forms.
I agree that when Medium goes, so does the content.
But so do personal pages and other pages.
I was tasked with dealing with a old webapp based on some old technology. When googling the sheer amount of "here's the answer" with a link that is now dead ... and that same link spread across dozens of sites is very common.
Well that was the endgame here. Our beloved overlords now control the tech, policies and 'privacy' of the Web. They're the ones proposing the 'standards' they want and control the direction of the browsers they have. It's either Chrome, Firefox (Gecko) or Safari (WebKit) / Edge (Chrome again). There is little choice here for the users.
A big difference to me is that there is no gatekeeper for WASM like there was (Macromedia/Adobe) for Flash. Yes, it's true that you can't "view source" on WASM and get something meaningful like you could with JavaScript in the early days, but I'd argue that in the age of minification, most JS and the textual representation of WASM are comparably (il)legible.
I think the "gatekeeper" of Macromedia/Adobe is a bit of an overstatement; the proliferation of open SWF player projects shows it wasn't an obfuscated or challenging format. Additionally, they partnered with Mozilla to write the the JS engine for Firefox, then ES4 got scrapped. Adobe, having already built and shipped it for Flash, rebranded it as ActionScript 3. But it literally was a JS engine (what was supposed to become JS, anyways) and meant to be shipped in the most "open web" browser in wide use!
Also, before Atom and VS Code, Adobe worked on Brackets, which was a text editor built with web technologies (pre-Electron) with a lot of the same goals.
All this to say… it still wouldn't have been my preference (I love "View Source") but there's plenty of evidence they made attempts to engage the broader developer communities and do a fair bit of work in the open.
Good points, I wasn't aware of how supportive of third-party players they were. Was it possible to create .swf with open tooling as well? (I vaguely remember OpenLaszlo being a thing)
A little OT, but have you tried https://www.photopea.com for a "Photoshop in the browser" type experience? It's by no means a total replacement, but I've been impressed without how much is possible!
I thought the "Web Dark Ages" refered to people imagining us looking back on it in 20 years and finding it had dissapeared with only a tiny fraction of it archived. Under that definition the web dark ages ended when web archival services started to save snapshots of a majority of sites.
Most stuff is still not saved though. Sure, we might have a semi complete archive but it's not possible to archive the complete experience of e.g. old youtube.
> WebKit/Blink hegemony that is impossible to topple
The hegemony you're referring to is Blink, and it doesn't help the "toppling" effort when you lump WebKit in with it. WebKit is an effective check against Google's power, but not if folks continue imagining that two distinct projects that diverged years ago are one and the same.
Is completely wrong; Even today the most popular desktop screen resolution by a country mile is 1366x768. All the budget laptops sold in supermarkets etc. still use that resolution and most people simply can't afford to drop ~1,000 GBP/USD on the 'family computer'.
Fun fact... 1366x768 exists because it was trivial for far-east manufacturers to switch from 1024x768 4:3 to 1366x768 16:9, as the latter could still use 90% of existing LCD controller design, thus making it really cheap to switch their fabrication over.
It's super interesting to look at and filter for various categories. For desktop 1366x768 wins out slightly ahead of 1920x1080. But for mobile, devices report a lot of 360x640. Fascinating.
Here's the mandatory stackexchange discussion on why that is:
That is the resolution of the cheapest smartphones sold in India. Also, IIRC, the resolution sent to GA does not correct for orientation, zoom, or anything of that nature, it's raw pixel values. This may have changed in recent years.
If you filter to the US, the most common resolution is 1920x1080.
I hadn't looked in a while - it's nice to see 1920x1080 finally gaining popular traction - I guess those bargain-bin laptops are slowly getting upgraded!
Do web browsers still use screen resolution in these APIs? Didn't that go away with the abstract "px" unit in CSS and followed by ad hoc halving of reported measures to even native apps ("hidpi")?
As a follow up on this website's name. What does "web dark age" mean to HN people? I've seen political comments but no consensus yet.
For a long time I have thought of it as a period where all our data was stored in decaying media that would be lost to future historians, much like the real dark ages. My source for this idea comes from sci-fi author Charles Stross:
>In the future, the 20th century will be seen as a dark age — while previous centuries left books and papers that are stable for centuries with proper storage, many of the early analog recordings were stable enough to survive for decades, but the digital media and magnetic tapes and optical disks of the latter third of the 20th century decay in mere years. And if they don't decay, they become unreadable: the original tapes of the slow-scan video from the first moon landing, for example, appear to be missing, and the much lower quality broadcast images are all that remain. So stability is important, and I'm not even going to start on how we store data and metainformation describing it.
For the web as a medium it would be especially tragic since SGML (on what HTML is based) is explicitly designed for long-term archival of digital text and other media (gave a tutorial about preserving HTML sites using SGML just last year [1]).
Lately, I've been having thoughts about this a lot. I've yearned for a simpler age in technology. I grew up on the internet around 96/97ish, mostly because I wanted to play games over dial-up. In those formative years, I forged a lifelong fascination with wanting to know how all (most? some?) of this worked.
Things have changed a lot for me personally and for technology. In general, I feel my enthusiasm has dwindled somewhat in the way tech's role has played out in society. In my opinion the big "Web 2.0" and social rush was more about bending the Internet to the wills of private enterprise rather then private enterprise bending to the wills of the Internet. Or maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon now, a salty junior level graybeard.
I do have hope, though. It's probably that my youthful enthusiasm has given way to cautious optimism.
The aspect ratio is wrong for the 2 middle resolutions, really bothers me :D
PS: I don't think tables are a bad layout option. It's not as flexible as CSS obviously but you could make it scale really well to vastly different UI sizes with a combo of fixed and percentage based dimensions. Most "modern" sites just dump everything in a column in the middle. And scale everything as if everyone is on a fat-finger touch interface.
And I do miss the gradient button designs, I hate today's obsession with flatness. Bt that's a matter of taste I suppose. Maybe I don't have any :)
PS It should realllly have mentioned the <marquee>!
It's an exaggeration, I know. The web was visually unpleasant those days. Techwise too. Flash?! IE-only? OGM...
But almost all information was opened and text-search-ready.
Now information is behind walls (facebook, google) and hidden in videos. Websites lost control with amp-fication of the web, and we're seeing more and more Chrome-only signs.
Ads? everywhere. I remember long time when people despised the idea of using a computer with always-on ads display if it was cheaper. Now we have exactly that.
The web did evolve, but mainly in the wrong direction.
Imo, those were the times of unbounded creativity. With the limited, primitive tools, devs (webmasters?) of that era achieved great results.
A big chunk of modern websites lack character and look nearly the same to me. I know - consistency, principle of least surprise, et al. Maybe it is just me, but designing a website engaged more of my creative juices and certainly felt like more fun 20y ago.
Say what you will about the Flash website boom of the early 2000s, creative design did peak at the time. Discovering a new site and wowing over the unique design and interactions is an experience lost in time.
Unpopular opinion: there never was much wrong with the table layout, and subsequent standards efforts never really managed to properly support a lot of use-cases. You can still see people using display: table and display: table-cell for exactly this reason.
Where's my vertically centered div? Where is my elastic newspaper column layout? How much Javascript exists because people couldn't figure out how to position things the way they wanted?
And many websites have the div version of the "table nightmare", especially Facebook and Instagram. It's also popular to put a transparent div over images to prevent people casually saving them.
CSS Grid and Flex Box solve all of the use-cases of tables; it's only a matter of browser support these days. For a page created 3 years ago, it might still make sense to be using tables because some users are on older browsers, but for any website created from now on, it gets harder and harder to justify still using tables.
There's a lot missing from here but a pretty nice site.
- Java applets
- metacrawlers
- IE conditional stylesheets
As a side note, I've never understood "tag clouds". They're definitely not "dark ages" because they're still used unfortunately. I think they're the intersection between business-speak gibberish and graphic design and the represent the dangers of mixing product managers with graphic designers.
And how about dialing malware that connected your modem to a very coslty phone number. Was that a thing in other countries? in Germany quite a few people got ripped off this way and I always disconnected my modem whenever I wasn't online.
haha "dark ages"...in my opinion, these were the GOOD TIMES! the only thing you needed to know was HTML, and you could just "view source" and see how everyone else was doing it.
but yeah...a lot of people got paid a lot of money to do things that are so trivial nowadays, that there's a whole industry of workers who get paid to NOT do them.
Well they look like a lot of fun for dark ages. If anything that was the spring of the web, nowadays things have moved to mobile and web is neglected.
And i dont get the hate for tables, they are really handy to center stuff vertically/horizontally, and to scale an interface gracefully (e.g. image column takes up 15% of width), in a way that 12-grid systems fail. HN is tables.
One thing that responsive design does is it makes the zoom out/in gesture useless, while tables can preserve that.
I appreciate the celebration retrospective on what the web used to look like. However I take issue with the name. Since this is Hacker News, I hope you're okay with this kind of unimportant semantic argument.
From Wikipedia:
> The "Dark Ages" is a historical periodization traditionally referring to the Middle Ages (c. 5th–15th century) that asserts that a demographic, cultural, and economic deterioration occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire.
If you're trying to keep with how "Dark Age" I don't think the periods you're referring to are at all "Dark". The cultural output of the web back then was _massive_, novel, and growing. It's even more massive now, and growing at a faster rate than before. Whether that output is quite as novel now is up for debate, but what I'm saying is that if there is such a thing as a "Web Dark Age", we haven't seen it yet.
Back then, it was the early days and things were still being worked out. It wasn't a deterioration, since there was nothing to deteriorate.
Nonetheless, I like the website and it's a nice snapshot of some design trends of the time.
The Web 2.0 section with the ultra shiny, shadowy buttons and stickers was particularly amusing to see again.
I'm certainly glad a standardised way of handling custom fonts emerged though, I remember SIFR being particularly painful.
That said, this site could almost do with a "Best viewed in Chrome" sticker, as the removal of -webkit-font-smoothing does some weird things to text in desktop Safari for me.
Not to mention the evolution of Google from "a better search engine than the others" to "a lumbering behemoth that's competing with Facebook to gobble up the web."
Or, conversely, the evolution of Facebook from "bulletin board system for college students" to "a lumbering behemoth that's competing with Google to gobble up the web."
I’d say the real problem is that social media platforms became the predominant publishing mechanism now. There was a time when millions of people had their own home pages, and now they’ve been replaced with templated social network posts.
Even tumblr and blogger were better in the sense that there was some diversity and of course GeoCities while centralized, allowed people much greater content control.
The Dark Ages are the fact that Twitter and public Facebook pages eT al, won’t be backed up by Archive.org and decades of human culture will vanish one day when these sites go the way of GeoCities.
The rising appification of everything behind app stores also mean the death of content preservation. I can still load the first Web page ever published, I can still run spacejam.com, but tens of thousands of 32bit apps have disappeared from app stores never to be runnable again.
I can run 8bit and 16bit apps on emulators from my childhood, but can’t run games I enjoyed on iOS just a few years ago. Death of culture.
This is missing the main reason we used Flash: it was basically the Java of the web. Or maybe the jQuery of the web. Since no browser were standards compliant (or rather every browser adhered to their own version of a standard) writing web pages that were cross browser compatible was a pain (hence all the Best Viewed in Netscape Navigator or IE messages). Flash, on the other hand, took care of the cross-platform mess. You could use Flash and be reasonably sure it would look and work the same on every browser and OS that had a Flash player.
Yes. “Site map” links in the footer of business or government sites are much less common than they used to be, and those that are still there are regularly just an auto-generated list of URLs or of links with their page names, which in most cases is atrocious. The idea of it was that it present structure, and be curated.
For most sites, I’d say the near-ubiquitous mega footer pattern has supplanted the site map.
I really love this. Aside from the nostalgia, it was actually somewhat relaxing to view this. It was just easier to pay attention to for some reason. I wonder if the sterility and conformity of today has some measurable effect on attention.
I suspect part of me knew I didn’t have to worry about a barrage of popovers telling me about my cookie policy options, begging me to join the mailing list or to install an app for some reason.
It was just content. Blissfully simple, visually compelling content.
Seeing those stickers and buttons definitely gave me flash backs (no pun intended) to when I was first discovering the web.
I have vivid memories of making websites during secondary school. First for free on Geocities and then later on my first paid hosting (Lycos if I recall correctly) so that I could host my PHP projects. At some point I started making websites and animations in Macromedia Flash and those glassy buttons easy but cool to make at the time.
I thought this would be a post of what the web has become (big corp bubbles) and what's to come in the next years, but was pleased to find a shout out to 90s web, specially since some 12 hours ago I was showing a friend how the web looked like when she was just 2 years old.
And then I found some things I forgot to mention, like Guestbooks (wow) and Sitemaps. Gonna tour her right now!
I was positively surprised to find new on-topic usenet content lately in comp.lang.* (and not just formal announcements). As you know, DejaNews was just a web interface for usenet before they were bought by Google to lead audiences towards Google Groups, like they did with XMPP and a couple social sites such as Orkut.
Maybe I should check out what's going on in some of the newsgroups I hung out in, and if anything worthwhile comes up, get back on. I kind of quit bothering after Comcast killed off their news servers.
I don't want to bother with the binaries groups, though.
A that's nice, yes I miss DejaNews because it provided a search interface, you couldn't search the whole tree unless you had downloaded all messages yourself.
Historically, this was the start of an important process. That of turning a fully functional multimedia access and delivery network (the WWW) into a money-extraction system.
But Web 2.0 was just around the corner to solve that problem . . .
