I've been looking for a community of exactly this! This website layout/feel scratches a really deep itch. Let's make a hand-crafted web of enthusiasts and bring back 1999 all by ourselves! :)
I love this. My wife calls them “art projects”. It’s freeing.
Yes you build ideas and abandoned them. But so does an artist. Enjoy the creation even if it doesn’t turn into a business.
I love this, and I wish more people would just fire up a text editor and write HTML like it's 1994.
If you do this, it's a good idea to learn about the handful of meta tags you'll need so your page doesn't look weird in search results or social media. But word to the wise, it's easy to go overboard with HTML "best practices."
The thing that’s usually on my mind when people are lamenting how the Web has evolved is that all the tools are still there to build websites however you want. So the lamentation is really, “other people are doing things in a way I don’t like and that upsets my experience.”
Which is this mix of… yeah I guess that’s true. I feel the same. But also, I have absolutely zero right to really externalize that grievance. People can do whatever they want for good or bad reasons, whether I’m equipped to understand those reasons or not.
But what we can do is be the change we want. Just make my own little oasis. Find other oases and hook ‘em all up.
Which then got me thinking about if there could be a special Web Classic experience we could voluntarily hook into. Maybe someone runs a search engine that only indexes crawled pages that have a X-Web-Classic header or whatever. If people actually want it enough to put the work in, can’t we make it? I guess corporations would come to capitalize on its success if it became successful. But I’d be willing to fight that battle if we got to that point (ie. curation or tech limitations or whatever…)
I’d love a browser that I switch into Web Classic Mode and it pretty much only reaches these resources. Example.com doesn’t implement an X-Web-Classic header response? Give me a 404. Does it try to load cross origin resources that aren’t X-Web-Classic? 404. Straight to 404.
> But also, I have absolutely zero right to really externalize that grievance.
I’m not so certain. It’s like if one bought a nice house in the country, and enjoyed listening to classical music and going to sleep early, and then someone a quarter mile down the road built a concert stadium, and hosted heavy metal concerts every single night.
The mere existence of a heavy metal concert a quarter mile down the road interferes with listening to classical music and turning in early. Likewise, the mere existence of the ad-laden, Javascript-laden, MegaCorp™ Internet goes a long way to preventing one from experiencing the joy of ordinary life in the late 80s or early 90s when the Net was a haven for academics, technologists and hobbyists.
But what we can do is be the change we want. Just make my own little oasis. Find other oases and hook ‘em all up. Which then got me thinking about if there could be a special Web Classic experience we could voluntarily hook into.
> But also, I have absolutely zero right to really externalize that grievance. People can do whatever they want for good or bad reasons, whether I’m equipped to understand those reasons or not.
Hard disagree there. I mean, suspect even you wouldn't agree with that second sentence on its own, outside the context of building webpage. (Like, what if "whatever they want" is releasing a cloud of poison gas into the neighborhood?)
But there's another dimension to it too, which is that in many cases my belief is not just "other people are doing something I don't want", it's "other people are doing something they don't actually want, they just don't realize it". The classic example is drugs. If someone spends their whole life drugged out of their mind, even if they have the money to do so, I think many onlookers would think, "You know, if a magic wand were waved and that person could somehow look at their life from the outside, from the perspective of a person who wasn't already locked into that druggie life, they themselves would not want to re-enter that life."
It's just the tyranny of small decisions. We as humans are prone to painting ourselves into corners that we think we chose to be in, although if several choice-points before we had known where we would wind up, we likely would not have chosen to be there. This is doubly difficult to resolve because a sunk-cost fallacy often leads us to avoid admitting to ourselves that we actually made a mistake. And it's triply difficult because it often requires extra work to climb out of the hole we've gotten into.
But it's still good to do this sometimes. It's possible for individuals to make mistakes, and for societies to make mistakes, and for both individuals and societies to make mistakes that they either don't notice or don't fully acknowledge. And it's good for individuals and societies to take stock of where they are and genuinely consider whether it's where they want to be. And it's even good for people to nudge, encourage, or exhort other individuals or society to do that kind of sanity check.
To do otherwise is to accept the strange, fatalistic viewpoint that whatever did happen is what should have happened.
There's a "classic web" search engine / indexer / randomiser at https://wiby.me/; I put the 'surprise me' link on my bookmarks bar for a random peek into the classic web.
I just hit it though, and some are... kinda sad. Ended up here [0] and the last post from '03 seemed like the author was the last person that still checked in, they seemed quite dejected and sad. Looking further, their about page mentions them going to Rochester Institute of Technology to become an animator, and them being referenced a few times online as someone that was inspiring but who left the community / communities a while ago.
In my experience the issue with these ideas is that they are so niche that it ends up being a network of unstable or odd people who I cannot at all relate to. Of course when there is a selection effect towards enthusiasts you end up losing a lot of, for lack of a better word, socially "normal" people. And then, yes, it does become harder to enjoy. I'm sure this will be cast as my problem but it's a very real effect. Of course there was also some selection effect at the beginning of the internet but the net was still a bit wider than it is today. I'm not really interested in the 1000th furry rust hacker
I find it very enjoyable to build svelte 5 websites where all the JavaScript and css is inline and nothing is needed but the page. Complicated application logic that runs on virtually any platform with a ui in one document that can just be uploaded to a simple server. It’s beautiful :)
It's funny to talk about non-essential CSS and then to use a grey background.
I don't think any CSS should be essential, but I think tasteful changes to make your website look unique for those who have it enabled is totally appropriate.
What a bunch of crap. Everyone who lived these era remembers the horrors of optimizing for a bunch of different browsers. Ajax was barely understood. PHP was all over the place. No frameworks. No Stack overflow. No Vibe Coding. Nah. Nowadays i just have to prompt Claude "Hey, write me a html site for html hobbyists and upload it somewhere on the internet". voila!
It wasn't so much "horror" as "this designer wants rounded corners". AJAX was well-understood but not yet standardized or widely supported, which is down to slow standardization bodies and browser developers like Microsoft and nowadays Google doing their own thing.
Anyway, show us your HTML site, document how you built it - that's the kind of thing this page is advocating for.
I've noticed a bit of a divide in the small web, between those who:
A. Want to get back to the web's roots as a document network, keeping a clear structure and a focus on content,
B. Want to use the web's flexible presentation itself as a medium for expression through styling, interactive content and so on
The Gemini protocol is a good example of A taken to its extreme, while e.g. Neocities leans more toward the latter. The web is by its nature fractured - the independent web even moreso - but sometimes it seems the gap between the two philosophies is the biggest obstacle to more widespread adoption of small web practices, or at least more unified tools for discovery and networking.
It also seems like developers tend to favor type A, which has led to robust infrastructure and projects around it - like Gemini, or the site linked here. But I think a lot of people looking to make a break from big tech are doing so because of the limitations, and going from one set of awkward restrictions to another doesn't look like an upgrade.
Just my two cents. I'd be sad to miss out on the wacky creative sites people build, whether it's because they're stuck in big social media, or because they took the pledge from the linked page:
> make a simple, honest website with the proper use of HTML, the use of CSS only where essential, and the use of JavaScript only where it’s absolutely necessary.
The problem with traditional Websites is that search engines don't index them in a way that attracts visitors. I know this because my archaic, out-of-date, 34-year-old static-page Website https://arachnoid.com/ has no advertising or other features that might cause it to be given priority by a search engine.
My occasional use of JavaScript only supports technical animations, specialized calculators and real-time LaTeX rendering, not dynamic page generation or dark patterns.
From a modern perspective, my Website is actually a museum. The proof? While I once directed Website visitors to my YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@lutusp), I now find myself directing YouTube viewers to my Website.
I like this. I remember my first website. A collection of all the punk rock websites I could find. Then I started designing sites. That lead to a software career. But, even though I don’t do web sites anymore (way better qualified people for that), I have maintained a personal website for the last 20 years.
Right now it’s just a thing I did for fun. I’m always messing around with JavaScript. No frameworks, just fun.
I, too, lament the fact that some dude laments about others. ;)
Technically, the dude is right, but stating the obvious doesn't help. Simply saying "Let's do something like 1996 while appreciating 2025, because!" would have caught my sympathy.
I like projects like these, but lose sympathy when these people trash others as phony; The "purity is the ultimate sophistication" is a dogma.
Roll everything back? "Hey, stop doing Java or Go, let's go X86 Assembly instead because in the end your code is only an abstraction and the magic happens in the compiler and linker, which produce a gargantuan bloat of X86 machine language instructions."
We could say the same about "pure HTML". Which standard? Why not text files?
PS: Has someone already written a browser for HTML in pure X86 yet? It is about time, I guess.
(I love Assembler, do quite some 6510 and 68000 assembler stuff. But it is hard. Brutally hard. I am glad we evolved from there.)
Last week I wanted to quiz myself on German vocab words, and after searching in vain for a simple "flashcard" site without subscriptions or bullshit I ended up just making one myself. Very barebones, a single index.htm file with a little css and js in the header. Threw it on to a silly novelty domain I own ( ineptech.com/flash ) and bang, a useful (to me) webapp from zero to done in maybe two hours. And I'm a terrible programmer! It does feel sort of powerful in the way this site describes.
Still, I can't see buying a domain for it and putting it on this guy's webring, because while it's possible someone somewhere might find it useful, i don't think it's possible that person would be able to find it. They'd see the same 30 links to adware crap I saw and build their own like I did. In fact I'm probably the hundredth person to build this exact site for themselves. That part doesn't feel so powerful.
Sorry to have missed this, been traveling (naturally). You can see it yourself if you like, ineptech.com/flash. It is absolutely the bare minimum, but it worked fine for me.
Steps 1 and 2 are flipped. You should make the website _before_ you put your credit card in
Always use relative links like `../css/default.css`. Never use absolute links like `example.com/css/default.css`, never use domain-relative links like `/css/default.css`. Those will break your site when it moves between domains, between directories, or between schemas.
If you use relative links judiciously, you can prototype your site under `file://` and it will Just Work when uploaded
46 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 64.8 ms ] threadAnd yes domain collecting is real.
https://utraque.org/
If you do this, it's a good idea to learn about the handful of meta tags you'll need so your page doesn't look weird in search results or social media. But word to the wise, it's easy to go overboard with HTML "best practices."
Which is this mix of… yeah I guess that’s true. I feel the same. But also, I have absolutely zero right to really externalize that grievance. People can do whatever they want for good or bad reasons, whether I’m equipped to understand those reasons or not.
But what we can do is be the change we want. Just make my own little oasis. Find other oases and hook ‘em all up.
Which then got me thinking about if there could be a special Web Classic experience we could voluntarily hook into. Maybe someone runs a search engine that only indexes crawled pages that have a X-Web-Classic header or whatever. If people actually want it enough to put the work in, can’t we make it? I guess corporations would come to capitalize on its success if it became successful. But I’d be willing to fight that battle if we got to that point (ie. curation or tech limitations or whatever…)
I’d love a browser that I switch into Web Classic Mode and it pretty much only reaches these resources. Example.com doesn’t implement an X-Web-Classic header response? Give me a 404. Does it try to load cross origin resources that aren’t X-Web-Classic? 404. Straight to 404.
I’m not so certain. It’s like if one bought a nice house in the country, and enjoyed listening to classical music and going to sleep early, and then someone a quarter mile down the road built a concert stadium, and hosted heavy metal concerts every single night.
The mere existence of a heavy metal concert a quarter mile down the road interferes with listening to classical music and turning in early. Likewise, the mere existence of the ad-laden, Javascript-laden, MegaCorp™ Internet goes a long way to preventing one from experiencing the joy of ordinary life in the late 80s or early 90s when the Net was a haven for academics, technologists and hobbyists.
Webrings!
See "We need to bring back webrings", https://arne.me/blog/we-need-to-bring-back-webrings and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38268706
Hard disagree there. I mean, suspect even you wouldn't agree with that second sentence on its own, outside the context of building webpage. (Like, what if "whatever they want" is releasing a cloud of poison gas into the neighborhood?)
But there's another dimension to it too, which is that in many cases my belief is not just "other people are doing something I don't want", it's "other people are doing something they don't actually want, they just don't realize it". The classic example is drugs. If someone spends their whole life drugged out of their mind, even if they have the money to do so, I think many onlookers would think, "You know, if a magic wand were waved and that person could somehow look at their life from the outside, from the perspective of a person who wasn't already locked into that druggie life, they themselves would not want to re-enter that life."
It's just the tyranny of small decisions. We as humans are prone to painting ourselves into corners that we think we chose to be in, although if several choice-points before we had known where we would wind up, we likely would not have chosen to be there. This is doubly difficult to resolve because a sunk-cost fallacy often leads us to avoid admitting to ourselves that we actually made a mistake. And it's triply difficult because it often requires extra work to climb out of the hole we've gotten into.
But it's still good to do this sometimes. It's possible for individuals to make mistakes, and for societies to make mistakes, and for both individuals and societies to make mistakes that they either don't notice or don't fully acknowledge. And it's good for individuals and societies to take stock of where they are and genuinely consider whether it's where they want to be. And it's even good for people to nudge, encourage, or exhort other individuals or society to do that kind of sanity check.
To do otherwise is to accept the strange, fatalistic viewpoint that whatever did happen is what should have happened.
I just hit it though, and some are... kinda sad. Ended up here [0] and the last post from '03 seemed like the author was the last person that still checked in, they seemed quite dejected and sad. Looking further, their about page mentions them going to Rochester Institute of Technology to become an animator, and them being referenced a few times online as someone that was inspiring but who left the community / communities a while ago.
[0] http://aido.furvect.com/main.htm
I don't think any CSS should be essential, but I think tasteful changes to make your website look unique for those who have it enabled is totally appropriate.
E.g. https://kramkow.ski/
there was more personality from an era of tech-naivety. sadly thats almost all gone.
Anyway, show us your HTML site, document how you built it - that's the kind of thing this page is advocating for.
> Nowadays i just have to prompt Claude
The second behavior leads to the first statement.
A. Want to get back to the web's roots as a document network, keeping a clear structure and a focus on content,
B. Want to use the web's flexible presentation itself as a medium for expression through styling, interactive content and so on
The Gemini protocol is a good example of A taken to its extreme, while e.g. Neocities leans more toward the latter. The web is by its nature fractured - the independent web even moreso - but sometimes it seems the gap between the two philosophies is the biggest obstacle to more widespread adoption of small web practices, or at least more unified tools for discovery and networking.
It also seems like developers tend to favor type A, which has led to robust infrastructure and projects around it - like Gemini, or the site linked here. But I think a lot of people looking to make a break from big tech are doing so because of the limitations, and going from one set of awkward restrictions to another doesn't look like an upgrade.
Just my two cents. I'd be sad to miss out on the wacky creative sites people build, whether it's because they're stuck in big social media, or because they took the pledge from the linked page:
> make a simple, honest website with the proper use of HTML, the use of CSS only where essential, and the use of JavaScript only where it’s absolutely necessary.
I feel good about the future when I see... https://os.ryo.lu/ https://neal.fun/
Somewhere on a zip are my IE 5.5 bookmarks. I'll stumble upon them again one day and remember how excited I was to surf the web on my 233mhz G3.
My occasional use of JavaScript only supports technical animations, specialized calculators and real-time LaTeX rendering, not dynamic page generation or dark patterns.
From a modern perspective, my Website is actually a museum. The proof? While I once directed Website visitors to my YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@lutusp), I now find myself directing YouTube viewers to my Website.
Not our topic, but one reason is kids can't read: https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/american-childrens...
Apropos, here's one of my favorite jokes. I visit a bookstore. On the wall is a poster: "The tragedy of illiteracy -- now available as an audiobook."
Right now it’s just a thing I did for fun. I’m always messing around with JavaScript. No frameworks, just fun.
https://gabereiser.com
Technically, the dude is right, but stating the obvious doesn't help. Simply saying "Let's do something like 1996 while appreciating 2025, because!" would have caught my sympathy.
I like projects like these, but lose sympathy when these people trash others as phony; The "purity is the ultimate sophistication" is a dogma.
Roll everything back? "Hey, stop doing Java or Go, let's go X86 Assembly instead because in the end your code is only an abstraction and the magic happens in the compiler and linker, which produce a gargantuan bloat of X86 machine language instructions."
We could say the same about "pure HTML". Which standard? Why not text files?
PS: Has someone already written a browser for HTML in pure X86 yet? It is about time, I guess.
(I love Assembler, do quite some 6510 and 68000 assembler stuff. But it is hard. Brutally hard. I am glad we evolved from there.)
Still, I can't see buying a domain for it and putting it on this guy's webring, because while it's possible someone somewhere might find it useful, i don't think it's possible that person would be able to find it. They'd see the same 30 links to adware crap I saw and build their own like I did. In fact I'm probably the hundredth person to build this exact site for themselves. That part doesn't feel so powerful.
Always use relative links like `../css/default.css`. Never use absolute links like `example.com/css/default.css`, never use domain-relative links like `/css/default.css`. Those will break your site when it moves between domains, between directories, or between schemas.
If you use relative links judiciously, you can prototype your site under `file://` and it will Just Work when uploaded