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.
I see there being two related but distinct issues:
- The desire for a simpler, quaint looking Web
- The desire for discoverability on the Web that isn't so driven by algorithms
I love what the Web once was, aesthetically speaking, but to me the real problem is that of discoverability.
There was a time where, if you built it, the audience would come. Today that is not so much the case, especially for written content which has become so heavily devalued. I would never write a blog today (especially one that is self-hosted) because I know I would spend most of my time begging for scraps. If you really want a large enough audience that your creative efforts are worthwhile, you have to churn out content. I don't want to churn anything out. One can churn out snippets, which is effectively what one does on sites like X, but then your writing has to either by pithy truisms or cringey drama. Besides, more and more people just want to consume content passively through audio and video. But then now I have to essentially put on a big production just to get my ideas out there, and for an audience that is probably less intellectually curious than those who would actually read an article.
The classic Web isn't coming back until something changes about the way people discover new things. The web is no longer a place where one goes to seek information; it's where information comes to you through word-of-mouth and so-called algorithms putting content in front of you.
Golden-era web was great. Now I'd just rather do my job, comment on HN, and go fishing. Actually trying to bring back the old web is like trying to bring back Jazz clubs hoping everyone will come to their senses and dance the Charleston again. No, it will always be a niche thing.
> I would never write a blog today (especially one that is self-hosted) because I know I would spend most of my time begging for scraps. If you really want a large enough audience that your creative efforts are worthwhile, you have to churn out content.
Why assume you need to seek an audience at all? I have been periodically writing blog posts for about 15 years about whatever I feel like. I may only post a few times a year. I don't have comments turned on. I still enjoy going back periodically to see what I was up to in 2015, and occasionally I get a really nice email from someone who stumbled on a post they found worthwhile.
I don't think that discovery without algorithms is possible, because the Web is essentially unstructured. Any means of discovery needs a way to organize all of that information, and then present it in a relevant way. People forget that Google was actually good at this.
The problem isn't algorithms per se, but how those algorithms are implemented. Unfortunately, people coming up with alternatives tend to lean too far in the other direction - we have alternative search engines designed to exclude all sites using Javascript, for instance, which cater to people who don't want to interact with any part of the modern web, but we don't have an alternative that does what Google used to do before search became big business and simply attempt to catalog the entire web (including the parts that HN hates) and display relevant results to the end user.
> All the tools are still there to build websites however you want.
No, they're not. The good tools all died off.
I wish there was still something good that just edited HTML and CSS locally and uploaded it. Mozilla Composer died long ago. Its spinoffs, Nvu, Kompozer, and Blue Griffon are all dead. You can still buy Dreamweaver, but Adobe wants $300 or so a year now, and they really want to sell you their whole "creative cloud". Brackets has been abandoned and converted to something called Phoenix, which now does more things less well.
I don't want a whole "content management system" that assembles pages on the fly from a database. Just a decent WYSIWYG editor that can also manage uploads. I don't want something controlled by the hosting service. I'm using a Dreamhost account for this site, and its main purpose is to host some API endpoints implemented in Go. The human-readable web part is just the documentation. There are many images, so I need more layout than Markdown supports. It's not a blog, so Wordpress is the wrong tool for the job.
You'd think there would be something good. As far as I can tell, no. Anybody know of anything?
It looks like RapidWeaver still exists, though last I used it, it wasn’t a typical WYSIWYG editor like classic Dreamweaver. I found it has a higher learning curve than I’d like.
Most WYSIWYG editors have become text editors. Panic’s Coda has become Nova (a text editor). Even what I last saw of Dreamweaver, it was very code-forward.
I think the less technical users just use platforms. More technical users have historically turned up their noses as WYSIWYG editors, so it left a gap in the market.
Looking at AlternativeTo, there are some options out there.
> Just a decent WYSIWYG editor that can also manage uploads.
There is your problem.
Any such editor will invariably be heavily limited to what its developers envisioned the user’s use cases as being, and therefore WYSIWYG software is fiendishly complex as a result for even simple layouts and designs (as opposed to straight code editors).
Plus, web frameworks (HTML, CSS, JS, etc.) are still evolving on a yearly basis, requiring constant updates to any WYSIWYG that demand either a paid product or something that rides on the well-funded coattails of another service or product.
If you want a piece of software that lasts, learn how to code directly. If you can picture a soccer ball in your mind, you can (mostly) reliably envision what code will appear like on the screen before you even test it. It takes practice and experience, but building the WYSIWYG aspect into your own mind is eminently doable unless you have aphantasia.
And honestly, that’s how I view WYSIWYG editors: as accessibility tools for people whose legitimate disability is aphantasia.
For everyone else, WYSIWYG tools are a skills-nerfing crutch, as it isolates the user’s use of code from its direct consequences. By working directly with code, you are forced to envision the output of each element and its relationship to everything else on the page.
And honestly, the only major exception I can come up with is desktop publishing, where the underlying “code” is typically restricted to that master file on the designer’s computer, and has no effect beyond it… once the file is printed out (and the content leaves the designer’s control) everything is cemented ‘in stone’ and the underlying “code” no longer has any impact. Because the system is radically more constrained, with markup standards that are limited to the software and not world+dog, a WYSIWYG program makes sense. And yet… most are still paid products.
WordPress isn't just for blogs and I think it might fit your use case for documenting a set of API endpoint. There is likely a free swagger plugin in WordPress that would help you, although I hadn't really looked.
Other than that, you could look at using a static site generator like MkDocs or Docusaurus. It'll generate a site of HTML pages, and you could either manually upload them to your host, or you could set up an automation that updates your host when you merge changes into git.
I think my response illustrates another problem with modern tools compared to the 90s - there isn't any single tool that edits HTML/CSS and upload them. You now have to glue together several tools.
> So the lamentation is really, “other people are doing things in a way I don’t like and that upsets my experience.”
Well put. Personally I have zero issues with SPAs and the amount of Javascript we are facing in the web industry right now. And if you try to build some kind of business that wants to present itself successfully to potential customers, on the web, there is no way to write a appealing website without Javascript.
Most target demographics at this point and in the future have grown up with beautiful websites and the internet being really interactive. I highly doubt they'd be interested in what you have to say if you wrote your page in a way the web was supposed to be used.
I think it could even be perceived in simpler terms: All website authors have a goal. They can choose whatever approach they want in trying to achieve that goal.
Inside that idea are all the nuances of what's your goal? Who is your audience? What do they care about? What do they want? What do they tolerate? Etc. If you achieve your goal and reach your audience, but a different audience hates that you're using JavaScript or React or whatever, do you really care?
Agreed. There are a lot of people complaining about how things used to be better. But not a lot of them succeeding in building better stuff that others actually want to use out of the handful that actually lift a finger to do anything at all (most don't). And in the end that's the only thing that makes a difference.
There is no "way the web was supposed to be used". It was all just improvised and messy and open ended. Just some browser developers going "Sure, let's add a blink tag. Why the fuck not. Enjoy!". The only intention for that was to make stuff blink obnoxiously. Javascript was just a thing that they bolted on around the same time.
The default state of the web in the nineties was unstyled, fugly, and obnoxious. Just as it is today. You give people any kind of tools and they'll abuse them. Nothing has actually changed that much. The web people pine for, never really existed. It's just their lost youth that they are pining for.
>> there is no way to write a appealing website without Javascript.
This has always made me wonder if anybody really builds anything from scratch any more. With so many frameworks, even for basic static sites, I wonder who's out there writing HTML, CSS and JS from scratch.
Or is something that has been regulated to the dustbin of history?
Scripting heavy sites do provide a good signal; you can be sure the people behind them are prone to bad designs and aesthetics over functionality. It is disheartening to see how popular that stuff is, but at least it draws attention to itself.
> 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.
This is nostalgia for the world before a series of "Eternal September" events. In my opinion, it's essentially longing for an internet dominated by a different kind of user than today's majority and no amount of technical solutions will solve that.
It's not necessarily nostalgia nor a feeling that the thing is mainstream so we are not special anymore.
These heavy websites and apps have many consequences:
- security: supply chain attacks. For the user, difficulties to check what runs in the browser (yeah, most users don't know how to do this and/or will not take the time - all the more reason, I'd say).
- software freedom: you end up running a crazy amount of non-free software in your browser, or you are just barred from basic things
- environment: it's a disaster: this stuff requires powerful devices, and probably leads to the disposal of many perfectly capable phones / computers. CIs are spending crazy CPU ticks building and building the app. Complex CDN-based setups to mitigate a bit the bloat.
- cost for the users: after having to buy newer hardware better have a strong data plan for all these heavy wannabe app websites!
- wait time for the users: it's awful the amount of time we collectively waste looking at loaders and slowly loading pages despite crazy bandwidths of today.
- convenience: all this memory and cpu usage leads to worse battery time. If your network is spotty, you'll need to spend a lot of time retrying to load the thing
- inclusion: if you happen to live in an area where you can only afford slow network access, things will be barely usable.
Environmental costs and user costs for developer convenience. As usual, companies externalize costs.
It's not only irrational feelings like nostalgia, it's solid reasons as well.
I do have hope that we figure out at least more lightweight SPAs at some point though.
I wouldn’t say the internet is dominated by a different kind of user nowadays. In the past it was dominated by a bunch of nerds, now it is dominated by Google, a company founded by some old-school nerds. Sure, a much smaller subset of the original nerds that now control it, but is not really a different kind of user.
I dunno. I have zero interest in World of Warcraft Retail, but there's also a smaller World of Warcraft Classic community that I'm thoroughly enjoying a 20-year-old nostalgia boost from.
We cannot make Retail turn itself back into Classic but we can have choices.
To be fair, they could be entirely disjoint sets of people, but I’m surprised by the simultaneous 1) hate for JavaScript[0] and the “modern web” and 2) praise for all the Flash-based websites from the ‘90s–‘00s. To be fair, my first interactions with the web were largely after the “Flash for everything” era, so I might be out-of-the-loop: Did corporate Flash-based homepages get the same reaction then that SPAs do now?
[0] I do strongly dislike JavaScript myself, but specifically from the perspective of language design.
Oh, I remember a lot of developers hated Flash back in the olden days, especially those that focused their efforts on usability or who wanted to advance web standards. Case in point:
Heck, I'm sure at least some people celebrated when Adobe pulled support for Flash, just like some people probably would now if the likes of React went away forever.
I don’t want to impose my preferences on other random people. I think sites loaded up with JavaScript are garbage and the people who make them are bad at their jobs, but whatever, that’s their business. I can hold negative opinions about things without suggesting we ban them.
But I do think it should be considered totally unacceptable for things like government services to be gatekept by JavaScript. Same for entities that receive lots of public funds, like universities.
While i am not aware of a browser that behaves like you described exactly, i vaguely recall that there is a browser plugin that is similar to what you described....but can't find it right now.
That being said, there is a search engine named Wiby [https://wiby.me] that focuses "...building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet.", so maybe that be nice to check out?
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.
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.
> 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.
The neat part of the late 90s/early 2000s web was that, when you did something vaguely interesting, people actually came to see it and engaged with it. Obviously you can still create a weird webpage but it doesn’t matter if you publish it, as it will attract exactly zero traffic anyway.
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.
While I agree with everything you wrote, the nuance is that not everyone can make their own little oasis. That doesn't make a complaint about a lack of oasis invalid.
And even for those who can, the vast majority of time spent on the internet is consuming content, not creating it, so it's perfectly logical to lament the lack of the little oasis that used to exist.
I’d love a browser that I switch into Web Classic Mode and it pretty much only reaches these resources.
That's absolutely ridiculous and I'm surprised this is a thought taken seriously.
The Web isn't some sort of optional little playground anymore; it's literally the "cyberspace" that affects us all, whether we like it or not. Going full Ted K. isn't an option for normal people. As such, not only isn't criticizing it allowed -- NOT criticizing it when you know about it is irresponsible.
Please, everyone, continue to EXTERNALIZE THE HELL OUT OF THIS GRIEVANCE.
The website cost next to nothing but a bit of prompting time, it loads almost instantly on my 2021 smartphone while on network broadband (4G), it uses parallelism extensively to optimize perfs with cascade loads, it is very responsive, and it's objectively quite nice to the eye.
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 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, 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.)
Part of me wants to build one of these "here is my infodumping about hobby X", but... I don't have any unique hobbies, nor any deep knowledge of any particular subject, but I think the main thing is competition.
Example. I bought and built a Gundam model the other day, cool stuff, could make a website for that... but there's already a wiki [0] that has a painstaking log of the franchise, everything ever published, etc. I have nothing to add to that, let alone do I have any right to build a website about it.
Of course, I shouldn't take it so seriously; it could be a simple blog post about "this is what I did this weekend, this is what I found, here's some pictures and some links". That'd have its own charm, I'm sure.
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.
Readit News
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.
- The desire for a simpler, quaint looking Web
- The desire for discoverability on the Web that isn't so driven by algorithms
I love what the Web once was, aesthetically speaking, but to me the real problem is that of discoverability.
There was a time where, if you built it, the audience would come. Today that is not so much the case, especially for written content which has become so heavily devalued. I would never write a blog today (especially one that is self-hosted) because I know I would spend most of my time begging for scraps. If you really want a large enough audience that your creative efforts are worthwhile, you have to churn out content. I don't want to churn anything out. One can churn out snippets, which is effectively what one does on sites like X, but then your writing has to either by pithy truisms or cringey drama. Besides, more and more people just want to consume content passively through audio and video. But then now I have to essentially put on a big production just to get my ideas out there, and for an audience that is probably less intellectually curious than those who would actually read an article.
The classic Web isn't coming back until something changes about the way people discover new things. The web is no longer a place where one goes to seek information; it's where information comes to you through word-of-mouth and so-called algorithms putting content in front of you.
Golden-era web was great. Now I'd just rather do my job, comment on HN, and go fishing. Actually trying to bring back the old web is like trying to bring back Jazz clubs hoping everyone will come to their senses and dance the Charleston again. No, it will always be a niche thing.
Why assume you need to seek an audience at all? I have been periodically writing blog posts for about 15 years about whatever I feel like. I may only post a few times a year. I don't have comments turned on. I still enjoy going back periodically to see what I was up to in 2015, and occasionally I get a really nice email from someone who stumbled on a post they found worthwhile.
The problem isn't algorithms per se, but how those algorithms are implemented. Unfortunately, people coming up with alternatives tend to lean too far in the other direction - we have alternative search engines designed to exclude all sites using Javascript, for instance, which cater to people who don't want to interact with any part of the modern web, but we don't have an alternative that does what Google used to do before search became big business and simply attempt to catalog the entire web (including the parts that HN hates) and display relevant results to the end user.
No, they're not. The good tools all died off.
I wish there was still something good that just edited HTML and CSS locally and uploaded it. Mozilla Composer died long ago. Its spinoffs, Nvu, Kompozer, and Blue Griffon are all dead. You can still buy Dreamweaver, but Adobe wants $300 or so a year now, and they really want to sell you their whole "creative cloud". Brackets has been abandoned and converted to something called Phoenix, which now does more things less well.
I don't want a whole "content management system" that assembles pages on the fly from a database. Just a decent WYSIWYG editor that can also manage uploads. I don't want something controlled by the hosting service. I'm using a Dreamhost account for this site, and its main purpose is to host some API endpoints implemented in Go. The human-readable web part is just the documentation. There are many images, so I need more layout than Markdown supports. It's not a blog, so Wordpress is the wrong tool for the job.
You'd think there would be something good. As far as I can tell, no. Anybody know of anything?
What's wrong with launching a file watcher, opening the page in a browser, and editing away with any IDE of your choice?
https://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/
Most WYSIWYG editors have become text editors. Panic’s Coda has become Nova (a text editor). Even what I last saw of Dreamweaver, it was very code-forward.
I think the less technical users just use platforms. More technical users have historically turned up their noses as WYSIWYG editors, so it left a gap in the market.
Looking at AlternativeTo, there are some options out there.
https://alternativeto.net/software/adobe-dreamweaver/?featur...
There is your problem.
Any such editor will invariably be heavily limited to what its developers envisioned the user’s use cases as being, and therefore WYSIWYG software is fiendishly complex as a result for even simple layouts and designs (as opposed to straight code editors).
Plus, web frameworks (HTML, CSS, JS, etc.) are still evolving on a yearly basis, requiring constant updates to any WYSIWYG that demand either a paid product or something that rides on the well-funded coattails of another service or product.
If you want a piece of software that lasts, learn how to code directly. If you can picture a soccer ball in your mind, you can (mostly) reliably envision what code will appear like on the screen before you even test it. It takes practice and experience, but building the WYSIWYG aspect into your own mind is eminently doable unless you have aphantasia.
And honestly, that’s how I view WYSIWYG editors: as accessibility tools for people whose legitimate disability is aphantasia.
For everyone else, WYSIWYG tools are a skills-nerfing crutch, as it isolates the user’s use of code from its direct consequences. By working directly with code, you are forced to envision the output of each element and its relationship to everything else on the page.
And honestly, the only major exception I can come up with is desktop publishing, where the underlying “code” is typically restricted to that master file on the designer’s computer, and has no effect beyond it… once the file is printed out (and the content leaves the designer’s control) everything is cemented ‘in stone’ and the underlying “code” no longer has any impact. Because the system is radically more constrained, with markup standards that are limited to the software and not world+dog, a WYSIWYG program makes sense. And yet… most are still paid products.
Other than that, you could look at using a static site generator like MkDocs or Docusaurus. It'll generate a site of HTML pages, and you could either manually upload them to your host, or you could set up an automation that updates your host when you merge changes into git.
I think my response illustrates another problem with modern tools compared to the 90s - there isn't any single tool that edits HTML/CSS and upload them. You now have to glue together several tools.
Well put. Personally I have zero issues with SPAs and the amount of Javascript we are facing in the web industry right now. And if you try to build some kind of business that wants to present itself successfully to potential customers, on the web, there is no way to write a appealing website without Javascript.
Most target demographics at this point and in the future have grown up with beautiful websites and the internet being really interactive. I highly doubt they'd be interested in what you have to say if you wrote your page in a way the web was supposed to be used.
Here's some information. Take it or leave it.
Inside that idea are all the nuances of what's your goal? Who is your audience? What do they care about? What do they want? What do they tolerate? Etc. If you achieve your goal and reach your audience, but a different audience hates that you're using JavaScript or React or whatever, do you really care?
There is no "way the web was supposed to be used". It was all just improvised and messy and open ended. Just some browser developers going "Sure, let's add a blink tag. Why the fuck not. Enjoy!". The only intention for that was to make stuff blink obnoxiously. Javascript was just a thing that they bolted on around the same time.
The default state of the web in the nineties was unstyled, fugly, and obnoxious. Just as it is today. You give people any kind of tools and they'll abuse them. Nothing has actually changed that much. The web people pine for, never really existed. It's just their lost youth that they are pining for.
This has always made me wonder if anybody really builds anything from scratch any more. With so many frameworks, even for basic static sites, I wonder who's out there writing HTML, CSS and JS from scratch.
Or is something that has been regulated to the dustbin of history?
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.
These heavy websites and apps have many consequences:
- security: supply chain attacks. For the user, difficulties to check what runs in the browser (yeah, most users don't know how to do this and/or will not take the time - all the more reason, I'd say).
- software freedom: you end up running a crazy amount of non-free software in your browser, or you are just barred from basic things
- environment: it's a disaster: this stuff requires powerful devices, and probably leads to the disposal of many perfectly capable phones / computers. CIs are spending crazy CPU ticks building and building the app. Complex CDN-based setups to mitigate a bit the bloat.
- cost for the users: after having to buy newer hardware better have a strong data plan for all these heavy wannabe app websites!
- wait time for the users: it's awful the amount of time we collectively waste looking at loaders and slowly loading pages despite crazy bandwidths of today.
- convenience: all this memory and cpu usage leads to worse battery time. If your network is spotty, you'll need to spend a lot of time retrying to load the thing
- inclusion: if you happen to live in an area where you can only afford slow network access, things will be barely usable.
Environmental costs and user costs for developer convenience. As usual, companies externalize costs.
It's not only irrational feelings like nostalgia, it's solid reasons as well.
I do have hope that we figure out at least more lightweight SPAs at some point though.
We cannot make Retail turn itself back into Classic but we can have choices.
The good news is that we're headed right back to the old days before there was an "internet."
Back then, all information was paywalled and siloed in CompuServe, GEnie, Delphi, Quantum Link, American People Link, and a dozen other services.
Today, all information is quickly migrating back into paywalls and silos. Only the names have changed.
[0] I do strongly dislike JavaScript myself, but specifically from the perspective of language design.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flash-99-percent-bad/
Heck, I'm sure at least some people celebrated when Adobe pulled support for Flash, just like some people probably would now if the likes of React went away forever.
But I do think it should be considered totally unacceptable for things like government services to be gatekept by JavaScript. Same for entities that receive lots of public funds, like universities.
That being said, there is a search engine named Wiby [https://wiby.me] that focuses "...building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet.", so maybe that be nice to check out?
This is kind of like what the Gemini protocol is trying to do.
https://geminiprotocol.net
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
Well, not exactly, but this is the next best thing:
https://www.marginalia.nu/
The author is a HN regular.
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
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.
Perfectly said and I think this is applicable far beyond websites.
While I agree with everything you wrote, the nuance is that not everyone can make their own little oasis. That doesn't make a complaint about a lack of oasis invalid.
And even for those who can, the vast majority of time spent on the internet is consuming content, not creating it, so it's perfectly logical to lament the lack of the little oasis that used to exist.
I’d love a browser that I switch into Web Classic Mode and it pretty much only reaches these resources.
Be the change you want: https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox
We have zero right to externalize it?
That's absolutely ridiculous and I'm surprised this is a thought taken seriously.
The Web isn't some sort of optional little playground anymore; it's literally the "cyberspace" that affects us all, whether we like it or not. Going full Ted K. isn't an option for normal people. As such, not only isn't criticizing it allowed -- NOT criticizing it when you know about it is irresponsible.
Please, everyone, continue to EXTERNALIZE THE HELL OUT OF THIS GRIEVANCE.
Some vibe coder saw nothing wrong with this. This is the future of the web.
The website cost next to nothing but a bit of prompting time, it loads almost instantly on my 2021 smartphone while on network broadband (4G), it uses parallelism extensively to optimize perfs with cascade loads, it is very responsive, and it's objectively quite nice to the eye.
What do you think is wrong with the site?
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.
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."
And yes domain collecting is real.
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.)
Example. I bought and built a Gundam model the other day, cool stuff, could make a website for that... but there's already a wiki [0] that has a painstaking log of the franchise, everything ever published, etc. I have nothing to add to that, let alone do I have any right to build a website about it.
Of course, I shouldn't take it so seriously; it could be a simple blog post about "this is what I did this weekend, this is what I found, here's some pictures and some links". That'd have its own charm, I'm sure.
[0] https://gundam.fandom.com/wiki/The_Gundam_Wiki
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.
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/