I wonder if there's some way to simulate the row by row image loading. I guess that's not the point of this website, but that would make me feel nostalgic.
You can see images load line by line today, if you throttle your network (either through Chrome devtools, or some external tool). Or just get a dialup modem, you probably have a provider you can reach, and the good ones can be plugged in through ethernet.
Just throttle your router settings for download/upload - have fun!
In all seriousness though, people designing websites should be given the shittiest connections possible and old computers (between 5 and 10 years old). Maybe then we'll end up with websites that haven't got more JS than content, broken CSS and images that push the page download over several megabytes.
Chrome Dev Tools let you simulate shit internet connection (2G, slow 3G, fast 3G, etc.) and Google encourages to this for development for the reasons you've mentioned.
It's awesome it exists, but useless if nobody uses it. I think the Google homepage is the only Google product I'm aware of that loads fast, minimal CSS and still loads without JS. Even on a modern computer, some websites have become completely unacceptable to run in the background (i.e. Facebook).
Installing NoScript and blocking external CSS was the best decision I ever made. Now use <25% of the RAM and <10% of the CPU I used to for the same number of tabs (in Firefox) - with a better experience because the browser isn't constantly trying to die.
and, in particular, to the post on the front page as of today, "9/11 and Vernacular Web" http://blog.geocities.institute/archives/5983, which catalogs Geocities pages updated on 9/11. Pretty haunting.
Last week I was looking at an old CD-ROM of photos taken by a survey crew in the buildings around Ground Zero in the first few days after the attack.
It was startling to see how many messages various people had written in the thick dust that covered everything. The most common message was one word: "Revenge!"
Outside of the silly nostalgia, I do appreciate the personal blog/websites that are very minimal in their theming, while still looking modern and clean.
The silly old geocities days were fun but, it's nice to have readable text too.
There was an Apple ][ game that did something similar. I think it might have been King's Quest. In the era when people used hole punchers to make flippy disks, if you accidentally put the game disk in your machine upside down, the game displayed upside down.
Today you can make any Mac's display turn upside down with a few clicks in System Preferences. Someone in my office may or may not make this happen on machines that haven't been properly logged out when someone goes on vacation.
(A quick Command-Option-8 is also good for some fun.)
Who would have thought on putting the simple and prevailing combo Ctrl + Alt + Down Arrow as a default hotkey for this? And in a program you didn't even intentionally installed?
Stupid Intel driver programmers, thanks for nothing, really.
Still wondering if this came to life as an internal joke.
The problem is not that the feature exist, it's that is set as default with key combos that are the standard way for selecting text, one of the most common use cases of the computer keyboard, afaik.
I can't help feel that most of that fun was the relative novelty at the time. Without that novelty, it's not so fun any more. Although I miss Usenet more than GeoCities and webrings etc
Oh man, I love stuff like this. It's too bad that the web has been taken over by bootstrap, WordPress, and squarspace. But you can do a lot with raw html, css, and JavaScript! And as a bonus, it ends up looking really unique. It's sort of weird that whenever I show friends the dumb shit I make [1], their immediate reaction is lump it in with geocities.
It is real! A few friends and co-workers bought some, and I traded 500 fastcash to my roommate for a bagel. Two internet strangers also bought a little bit.
I view it more as a donation-based project than an investment, so if you feel like buying me a beer, you should buy some fastcash :)
I love how some of the morons on bitcointalk don't realise that it's a parody. Regardless, this is a masterpiece. I can't begin to believe to what lengths you went making it.
I love the point the site is trying to make but I'm confused as to why this is built with a vue.js static site generator requiring node/npm/yarn and an almost 7,000 line yarn.lock file.
Shouldn't this literally be a single page, hand-built HTML file with inline CSS? Is this trying to be self-ironic or something?
Just for proper attribution, these pages are the work of Steph Davidson.[1] It's generally believed that these page were created when Richard Turley was working at Bloomberg as their creative director.[2]
I guess we now have an answer to what comes after material design. Somebody tell the maintainers of Bootstrap so we can have the entire internet updated asap.
Hand-build HTML file with inline CSS, that you edit with $YOURFAVOURITETEXTEDITOR which requires an OS that's 50 million lines of code. And you're complaining about 7000 lines in an auto-generated file, which doesn't even have to be touched nor edited by a human?
The tools we use are insignificant, what's important is the result. If the result is a HTML file with inline CSS, who cares how it was created? You can use punchcards and a 20ton 'computer' for all I care.
Indeed. From her twitter post: "We started making websites because it was fun because we wanted to make dumb shit and now everything is so serious and sometimes I feel like we need to go back"
Leave it to an internet forum to get all gripey about something someone did for fun.
Theodor Adorno said about philosophy that, "Philosophy is the most serious of things but then again it is not that serious".
I'm pretty sure we can say the same thing about web development.
I will tack on my own opinion that building sites that only function with javascript is a massive disservice to everyone. From disabled people with accessibility needs, to old hardware/software, and even to security/privacy conscious people the JS paradigm is a massive problem. The trend for "new shiny" has become ridiculous and I find most modern websites to be pretty but rather useless. I have to scroll forever past slices with massive images and marketing lingo just to find something that seems potentially helpful but just goes on to more marketing bullshit.
Want to get my buy-in for your tools? Stop making them a hard requirement and make sure you have a non-JS fallback that works.
I could idle I traffic for fifteen minutes and use more power in total. I mean honestly if you're concerned about energy use and environmental issues, then it's more effective to stop using mobile devices all together, and encourage the use of desktop.
I'm not obsessive about energy use. I just don't like unnecessary waste. The problem here is that wasteful engineering gets popular, and in software, all that waste is multiplied by the numbers of users. Both of those factors add up to significant carbon footprint, and also significant drain on mobile devices. The former is an environmental/social concern, the latter is what makes your devices last less on a single charge, what makes them lag, and what makes you able to run less software in parallel. Computing resources are a commons too.
That's not surprising because all the tools we had to make these horrible, ugly sites were pre-css and often browser specific items that would only work on say ie4.
Plus there's also "I can't understand what your code is doing therefore it sucks I need to write everything from scratch using a more modern language that looks better on my CV"
To achieve perfection you have to get every little thing just right, and that implies complexity. What it doesn't necessarily imply is complex processes or products, which is the problem with software.
Making the perfect knife, or the perfect cup of tea, can be done by one person with just two or three tools. But you have to know how to get everything just right, and that requires a lot of knowledge and experience.
You can make a machine or abstractions to handle most of these things, but rather than reach perfection, they just reach a reliably satisfactory facsimile. We keep tinkering, like an amateur sculpter carving out a mountain, because we're still hoping for perfection.
I keep seeing this general attitude about frontend, but I have a serious question: What’s the better alternative? I’m not asking this rhetorically because I have an answer, I just keep seeing the same remarks with no decent solutions. Is it time for the way we deliver the web to be rethought? Are we really in the golden age of the frontend but everyone is being too much of a hipster to realize it?
I don't know, either, but it does seem that the latest crop of frontend libraries (React & friends) is optimizing for a very high level of richness that simply isn't needed for most sites. Which is fine, but where it gets worrisome is when that lofty level of complexity is the only thing people know how to use.
I recently got to watch someone spend nearly a full week fiddling with building a React app for filling out a form for submitting a batch job on an intranet site. It's a lot of code, and it's non-trivial to understand how it works, what with all the async methods and clever state management and whatnot. It needs to be built, which is a thing, and building it requires having the right environment setup. (Its build speed reminds me of my C++ days, too.) I wouldn't be surprised if someone's already talking about incorporating Docker into its future.
At least to me, that's a rather arresting amount of time and money to see being sunk into a job that could have been accomplished with a simple HTML form on a static page.
I see a lot of frontend devs these days who remind me of the interview horror stories about enterprise C++ guys getting a question like "how would you pull 10,000 phone numbers in NNN-NNN-NNNN format from a gigantic HTML page?" and responding by laying out an architectural plan for a hulking >1kLoC monstrosity, because they'd never heard of (nor could they imagine) grep.
On the other hand, obscene overengineering is probably a good way to build a portfolio. Nobody will get hired for demonstrating that they can build an HTML form on a static page.
We're just starting. IMO, if we started from a better language than JS, we would take stuff like data-binding in react for Granted, since it would be much easier to this stuff it in other languages.
I'm fairly certain it isn't making a point at all. It's just a troll site.
"MySpace" websites were not "Fun", and they weren't "fun" because they looked like shit, either. They looked like shit because the tools for people who couldn't be bothered to learn HTML were shit.
Now the tools are better. There is a specific word or phrase to describe the site we're discussing, but I lack that... it'd be like someone saying "Remember when cars were suicide cages? Let's get rid of seat belts and have FUN again!". I can't say anything nice about it.
Check out Digital Folklore[1] if you're into this aesthetic, it's a good collection of essays on Geocities, the early web, and related topics. One of the authors' web site[2] is also worth a look (warning: there's sound :) ). She also runs a Tumblr blog[3] that posts screenshots of real Geocities sites.
It's nostalgic and definitely different from what we are used to today, but I don't really miss animated gifs, dozens of font styles and colors smashed together into a html. For me a cherry on the top was changing status message when hovering a link from target url to some custom text.
A few months ago I created a project called Hypertext Town, a simple project where anybody can create "camps" (a collection of HTML, images etc.) and connect them together through "towns". A town lives at a subdomain (e.g: town.hypertext.town) and a camp lives at /~camp (e.g: town.hypertext.town/~camp). I never "launched" it so it's just been languishing in obscurity on the www but if anybody wants to make cute little creative HTML websites without the need for hosting, it's live to use at: https://www.hypertext.town
1. click "Set up camp in www" 2. make an account 3. choose your camp name 3. add your html / images etc.
Although undocumented, there is a way to programmatically get the camps in a town, you can check the www. town source for an example of how I've done it, the endpoint is `/camps`, e.g:
Considering how much google search results dictate whether you come across information or not though, I wonder if webrings could make a lot of the web more visible these days?
Schools should do this, let their kids explore the joys of building their own personal online space, rather than the branded and conformed offerings they'll likely use instead (FB, Google, Pinterest, etc)
Yup. Sounds like less "technical" interface to a web server. I remember in high school we all had shell accounts on the school server, but you actually had to learn SCP and some basic Linux usage to make it work.
That was not "front end", that was webpages. There was no "back end" and no business, the webpage was the whole thing. And you were not paid as a "front end engineer" or even a "designer", in fact you were not paid at all, you were just some guy making a webpage.
huh? Since when was making blinking text and displaying clip arts fun? Even back in the day, you knew web as a platform was handicapped, when compared to the awesome expressiveness of Macromedia Flash.
I'm not sure that's true. The internet has largely shifted away from using customizable www sites for personal expression in the way people used to. Much of this activity has now moved to Facebook et al.
I'm not sure that's true. People still have personal sites they use. Hell, I would argue that there are more ways for people to express themselves online now, and the raw number of people doing this is has massively increased.
"Commerical internet" existed 'back then' as well.
Yes, obviously people still have personal sites, and obviously there are more raw personal sites. But for the average internet user and thus the modal exposure to the internet, it's become substantially more one-way, outside of the aforementioned centralized channels.
>Never did we only make websites just "because it was fun" any more or less than we do now.
The early internet was incredibly frivolous. Commercial activity was completely banned on ARPANET and NSFNET. SSL didn't come along until 1995. There was a brief but significant period before the first browser wars and the dot-com bubble, when lots of people were interested in this new internet thing but nobody knew what it was for.
I don't want to return to those days, but it's hard to overstate the extent to which the internet was just a toy for geeks.
I got online around the turn of the century and it was still frivolous. Hell, I contributed to some of the frivolity with my crappy personal teenage webpages.
EDIT: Now I made this[1] to make it easier to publish these kinds of frivolous sites.
I made websites "because it was fun". To begin with I didn't even have hosting so it just lived on my harddisk. Even when it went online I couldn't even think of content to put on there, it was just cool linking pages together and stuff.
Web pages used to be amazingly creative, with terrible usability. Now they're the exact opposite. Usability is good, but they all look the same.
I wonder what social sciences have to say about this. About public opinion swinging from one extreme to the other, never seeming to be able to land on the sane middle.
It's about maturity - trying many forms(creativity) and finding the forms that work(i.e. sell, bring search traffic) and reusing them over and over. The general process happens in many industries. and i don't think it will return to the wild creativity phase.
The used to be plenty of sites with great usability, in the style the FOX Toolkit website[1] still uses. Everything you expect is listed in a simple static menu to the left, requiring no hovering, no scrolling, no additional navigation. It's not trying to guide you to what they're guessing most people want (while hiding the things you actually want) with gigantic colorful buttons.
Today's "usable" websites seem to consist mostly of gigantic irrelevant photos, huge expanses of whitespace, and navigation consisting of buggy JavaScript puzzles for the user to trick into showing correctly.
Let's take the nostalgia goggles off though... the old web was more colorful, certainly less uniform, but I wouldn't call it "amazingly creative." Most of those sites tended to look a lot alike as well, especially on Geocities.
226 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 246 ms ] threadIn all seriousness though, people designing websites should be given the shittiest connections possible and old computers (between 5 and 10 years old). Maybe then we'll end up with websites that haven't got more JS than content, broken CSS and images that push the page download over several megabytes.
Installing NoScript and blocking external CSS was the best decision I ever made. Now use <25% of the RAM and <10% of the CPU I used to for the same number of tabs (in Firefox) - with a better experience because the browser isn't constantly trying to die.
The UK Government site team is my go to for a good web design philosophy: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles (Hell, if they could run the actual Government like this we would be in a lot better shape!)
and, in particular, to the post on the front page as of today, "9/11 and Vernacular Web" http://blog.geocities.institute/archives/5983, which catalogs Geocities pages updated on 9/11. Pretty haunting.
It was startling to see how many messages various people had written in the thick dust that covered everything. The most common message was one word: "Revenge!"
Outside of the silly nostalgia, I do appreciate the personal blog/websites that are very minimal in their theming, while still looking modern and clean.
The silly old geocities days were fun but, it's nice to have readable text too.
Indeed.
http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html
to an entire business division for a while. Might have.
Today you can make any Mac's display turn upside down with a few clicks in System Preferences. Someone in my office may or may not make this happen on machines that haven't been properly logged out when someone goes on vacation.
(A quick Command-Option-8 is also good for some fun.)
Stupid Intel driver programmers, thanks for nothing, really. Still wondering if this came to life as an internal joke.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
I know of shift and command, emacs and vi don't require you hold down any key. What system uses ctrl+alt?
God, I miss Web 1.0.
LOL, laters
[1] ex. http://fastcashmoneyplus.biz
Regardless, this is art.
I view it more as a donation-based project than an investment, so if you feel like buying me a beer, you should buy some fastcash :)
Web 1.0 was peak internet, when creativity was alive before normies and corporations started making every website 200MB of ad-loading javascript.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Shouldn't this literally be a single page, hand-built HTML file with inline CSS? Is this trying to be self-ironic or something?
> Shouldn't this literally be a single page, hand-built HTML file with inline CSS? Is this trying to be self-ironic or something?
Yes?
I can't be certain but I think that was the point.
Yes, I'm going to assume that is a parody. However, signs of FrontPage or Word as an editor would be cool.
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/500
https://www.bloomberg.com/500
Their error pages are still quite funny (and epic shit).
[1] http://stephdavidson.com/ [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/richard-turley-2011-4
https://www.crikey.com.au/zxy
The tools we use are insignificant, what's important is the result. If the result is a HTML file with inline CSS, who cares how it was created? You can use punchcards and a 20ton 'computer' for all I care.
Leave it to an internet forum to get all gripey about something someone did for fun.
Theodor Adorno said about philosophy that, "Philosophy is the most serious of things but then again it is not that serious".
I'm pretty sure we can say the same thing about web development.
https://twitter.com/NikkitaFTW/status/995670345624555520
I will tack on my own opinion that building sites that only function with javascript is a massive disservice to everyone. From disabled people with accessibility needs, to old hardware/software, and even to security/privacy conscious people the JS paradigm is a massive problem. The trend for "new shiny" has become ridiculous and I find most modern websites to be pretty but rather useless. I have to scroll forever past slices with massive images and marketing lingo just to find something that seems potentially helpful but just goes on to more marketing bullshit.
Want to get my buy-in for your tools? Stop making them a hard requirement and make sure you have a non-JS fallback that works.
(For those who don't care about society in general, consider that this also means your users' batteries last shorter, making their days worse.)
EDIT: An article on brutalism and antidesign: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/brutalism-antidesign/
Web 1.0 was full of excess. We’re talking 3D rotating words on fire when bold would suffice. Lots of drapery, lots of window dressing.
A brutalist site would be more like the sites that have a structure, but the seams are not made seamless, and excesses are avoided... Like craigslist.
But we tend to make simple things very complex in order to make them perfect.
The complexity then becomes the problem.
And we are back where we started for another attempt at perfection.
The wheel goes round and round.
Making the perfect knife, or the perfect cup of tea, can be done by one person with just two or three tools. But you have to know how to get everything just right, and that requires a lot of knowledge and experience.
You can make a machine or abstractions to handle most of these things, but rather than reach perfection, they just reach a reliably satisfactory facsimile. We keep tinkering, like an amateur sculpter carving out a mountain, because we're still hoping for perfection.
Although i understand Voltaire was using an cracked version of HoTMetaL Pro to make his web pages, so the whole premise is a little questionable.
What’s the solution here?
I recently got to watch someone spend nearly a full week fiddling with building a React app for filling out a form for submitting a batch job on an intranet site. It's a lot of code, and it's non-trivial to understand how it works, what with all the async methods and clever state management and whatnot. It needs to be built, which is a thing, and building it requires having the right environment setup. (Its build speed reminds me of my C++ days, too.) I wouldn't be surprised if someone's already talking about incorporating Docker into its future.
At least to me, that's a rather arresting amount of time and money to see being sunk into a job that could have been accomplished with a simple HTML form on a static page.
On the other hand, obscene overengineering is probably a good way to build a portfolio. Nobody will get hired for demonstrating that they can build an HTML form on a static page.
We're just starting. IMO, if we started from a better language than JS, we would take stuff like data-binding in react for Granted, since it would be much easier to this stuff it in other languages.
> It's complicated on porpuse btw, I wanted to do it in ReasonML and Graphql but didn't have time as this was done in an afternoon hackathon
And yeah probably the ironic thing. This sort of page should be simple, much as a wide portion of websites out there.
"MySpace" websites were not "Fun", and they weren't "fun" because they looked like shit, either. They looked like shit because the tools for people who couldn't be bothered to learn HTML were shit.
Now the tools are better. There is a specific word or phrase to describe the site we're discussing, but I lack that... it'd be like someone saying "Remember when cars were suicide cages? Let's get rid of seat belts and have FUN again!". I can't say anything nice about it.
https://brucewillis.sexy/
Eventually I will get midi music playing correctly with mouse-tails.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WpMlwVwydo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qN72LEQnaU
SFW
The possibilities are endless.
I seem to recall that every web site in existence in that time period was eternally "under construction".
[1]: http://digitalfolklore.org/
[2]: http://art.teleportacia.org/olia.html
[3]: http://blog.geocities.institute/
It's nostalgic and definitely different from what we are used to today, but I don't really miss animated gifs, dozens of font styles and colors smashed together into a html. For me a cherry on the top was changing status message when hovering a link from target url to some custom text.
1. click "Set up camp in www" 2. make an account 3. choose your camp name 3. add your html / images etc.
edit: visit https://hackernews.hypertext.town (by TeMPOraL)
If anyone wants to play, I've made a town for us.
https://residents.hypertext.town/join/hackernews
https://hackernews.hypertext.town/camps :)
I didn't touch any web development in at least 10 years so it was a lot of fun. I hope even more interesting towns will appear!
I regret to report though, but something is broken - nothing above the SUPERHOT videos section is clickable :(.
Just fixed it, I had invisible div over whole page.
Considering how much google search results dictate whether you come across information or not though, I wonder if webrings could make a lot of the web more visible these days?
You just missed out on $2.99
Does this work outside of the land of the 'free'?
I think the current equivalent is a "blogroll."
I know this is just some little tongue in cheek joke, but I can't help but vehemently disagree with this.
Never did we only make websites just "because it was fun" any more or less than we do now.
"Commerical internet" existed 'back then' as well.
The early internet was incredibly frivolous. Commercial activity was completely banned on ARPANET and NSFNET. SSL didn't come along until 1995. There was a brief but significant period before the first browser wars and the dot-com bubble, when lots of people were interested in this new internet thing but nobody knew what it was for.
I don't want to return to those days, but it's hard to overstate the extent to which the internet was just a toy for geeks.
EDIT: Now I made this[1] to make it easier to publish these kinds of frivolous sites.
[1]: https://hearth.eternum.io/
I wonder what social sciences have to say about this. About public opinion swinging from one extreme to the other, never seeming to be able to land on the sane middle.
Today's "usable" websites seem to consist mostly of gigantic irrelevant photos, huge expanses of whitespace, and navigation consisting of buggy JavaScript puzzles for the user to trick into showing correctly.
[1] http://fox-toolkit.org/