Yeah, I noticed too. Weird how your “more-correct” URL isn't the one used in the previous submission.
If I may, how did you end up on that article ? I like to notice patterns in post submissions and I wonder what led two different people to post the same content in a short window of time.
As others have noted, the issue isn't a lack of ways to build your own website, it is the capture of the web by the likes of facebook, google, apple.
It feels like a lifetime ago but people forget that one of the things that made myspace so appealing was the ability to "pimp" one's profile page. It was an aesthetic and security disaster but it was also AMAZING.
People who wouldn't know what HTML meant if their lives depended on it were willing to learn the basics in order to personalize their profiles. Then facebook happened.
Even facebook at first was receptive to the idea of some degree of personalizing with facebook apps, but as they grew bigger and powerful it became obvious that total control was the best for their bottom line.
Now people have full blown computers in their pockets all the time and all they can think of doing with them is scrolling down and clicking "like" button. This is great for our "AI" revolution because user interaction/engagement with computers has been dumbed down to its stupidest form thus by comparison the "AI" seems very smart.
> The idea that our current recommendation AI is somewhat useful,
is it ? I really really hate every recommendation system so far, on shopping websites, on spotify, on netflix... are there people who actually... go along with the flow of what the AI gives them ?
It's very important to remember that Facebook's standardized UI played some role in making it successful. I don't think it would be as successful were it as customizable as MySpace.
You could also define success as enabling many, many people such as my parents who aren't proficient in English or computers and would never be able utilize the internet for communication if it weren't for the standardization offered by Facebook, WhatsApp, Facetime, iOS, etc.
Just like 99% of people want cars with an automatic transmission and take it to the mechanic for any issues, 99% of people just want a tool that gets out of their way and lets them achieve the goal. Whether it's driving to their destination or seeing photos or video calling their friends/family.
If you asked my parents, their goal never was to create anything on the internet, or browse niche websites and learn their layouts. They're not going to learn it in their advanced years, and perhaps they would rather spend their time on other interests they have such as gardening, cooking, etc.
+1 I for one don't long for the days of crappy hard-to-parse pages created by MySpacers and wanna-be web devs on FrontPage. Social media platforms exist because they organize and format information for efficient consumption and discovery. That's the reason they've overtaken Geocities or MySpace.
I think there's some rose-tinted nostalgia going on with MySpace (which still exists). I remember being assaulted visually and aurally on so many pages that I stopped visiting them. I want there to be sites where people can let their html freak fly but it's not going to make the internet a much better place.
People have also forgotten how to maintain a filesystem of data and keep it up to date and well organized, themselves, locally.
They don't have the patience to have to copy that data to another server to get it published.
And they also don't seem to have what it takes on their own local systems (e.g. properly run email tools) that allow them to maintain a social network with ease - i.e. without involving a third party.
All of these things are the fault of the operating system vendors, who have fallen asleep at the wheel and sublimated themselves to the web.
Now, what if that same OS knew how to talk to other users of the same OS without hassle or fuss, and sync stuff to each other?
And then, don't you think by then, that OS would have decent social-media services onboard, which don't require any third party other than actually confirmed friends ...
Imagine an OS that allows you to properly maintain a nice timeline of everything you do with your device(s), locally. Its an OS - it'll function without 'the Internet' .. but of course if you plug one in, it'll do all the above.
> Now people have full blown computers in their pockets all the time and all they can think of doing with them is scrolling down and clicking "like" button.
Despite knowing this... still crazy depressing when I read it.
They created the most common device for consuming the web, which happens to work best as a read-only device, or for taking videos/photos. If we had ended up with something with a real keyboard, I suspect the web would have a lot more written content.
In a lot of ways Apple dumbed-down the web by forcing people into using app store apps on their ios and mac app store. Also safari is by far the worst web browser in existence and apple forbids anyone to use anything else at least on ios
One of the most common stats cited on HN to demonstrate that Apple has a supposed monopoly is StatCounter. StatCounter uses web browsing to measure the prevalence of given clients, in which we find that iPhone users make up more than 50% of US mobile devices.
Only in actual sales data, iPhone devices are far below 50%. It just turns out that users on iPhones browse a lot more than users on other platforms. In just about every country the representation on statcounter significantly exceeds the actual sales metrics of the device.
No, Apple doesn't "force" people into app store apps, and by actual empirical data, facilitates browsing the web even more than alternatives.
As to Safari being the "worst web browser in existence", after chuckling at what I assumed was some sort of parody, I realized some people actually believe this noise. Usually because someone, at some point, stomped their feet and had a fit because Apple didn't immediately support whatever their pet proposal was, and this got spun into a fantastic conspiracy about invented motives.
Yet in the actual real world, Safari is the most performant browser by a country mile. It's the most privacy focused. It supports everything and its brother. For all the pissing and moaning about edge conditions of standalone web applications, Safari was far and away the earliest mobile browser to actually support them! Long before Chrome on Android did.
> Safari is the most performant browser by a country mile
We all get carried away, given to hyperbole. Its neither the worst nor best. It's average.
As a web developer, I have a special hatred for it. As a person I understand its a browser for rich folk. Its faster than chrome but dusted by edge and firefox. It feels like an afterthought like IE and yet it might not be.
For some nuance: Safari is the best browser by far in terms of performance, memory, battery, and privacy, and as of late they are showing signs of change in terms of finally rolling in long needed features.
It definitely is the worst in terms of limiting all features that would make the web competitive with apps.
Well of course you need to debug them on an Apple device. But by nature of you not developing with Safari you likely are highly biased to see bugs because.. you aren’t developing for it.
The IE6 claim just isn’t true at all. Safari has a few quirks but in terms of rendering bugs it’s quite close to spec on everything, with a couple CSS Grid issues. Comparing to IE6 is a ridiculous exaggeration, Chrome with the many non-spec features and codecs it throws in is more comparable. Firefox has as many quirks.
I’ve built many large sites including one right now. I develop in Chrome for the dev tools, then check in Firefox and Safari at intervals. Neither is usually broken by much. You have to polyfill a bit more for Safari (usually those features Chrome has been throwing at the wall, IE6 style), but usually fix more rendering differences for Firefox. In terms of consistency, the three have converged greatly. I used to dev for IE6/Mozilla and it was absolutely nothing like it is today.
Safari is nowhere near IE6, but it's the closest when you compare it to all other modern browsers. We could say it's new IE11. Just this month I came across the following Safari-only bugs/compat issues:
- document.hidden can be initially true even if the user is in foreground tab
- visibilitychange event was not bubbling to window until Safari 14
- ReferenceError when you have a const + hoisted function inside a block scope
Using anything newer than 2010 APIs, I always first check caniuse and MDN to see an inevitable list of Safari bugs and missing compat (and contribute myself when I find new ones).
Still nowhere near as comparable, and cherry picking doesn't really make a great case.
Safari is updated on a super-regular schedule. In accordance with specs, they aren't very weird at all, they just support a few less than others. But in terms of quirks in rendering, they are arguable ahead of FF.
IE11 was known for way behind in every aspect, that's not the case for Safari. It's maybe a little behind in specs, but way ahead in other areas. Here's an arbitrary list of things it supports that Chrome doesn't:
- better css filter() support, blur support
- font-variant-alternatives
- various font values: ui-rounded, ui-serif, etc
- improved selector list CSS
- Audio Tracks, Video Tracks, Web Share
- HTTP/3 live in big sur
- better position: sticky / display: contents
- Better web animations api support
And again, it literally feels about 2-3x faster than Chrome, battery lasts significantly longer, UI responsiveness is way ahead.
Safari feels far better than any other browser, supports a number of important features others don't, and what it does support it renders as nearly as consistently as others.
I fully agree it's dragged it's feet on a few features, but that's also partially in relation to Chrome tossing in the kitchen sink.
All browsers on iOS are just wrappers around the Safari engine/web view. This lets them add certain features at the app level but they can't modify anything about the web browsing and rendering part, apart from what they can ask Safari to do.
Apple wholly and solely decides what a web browser is and can do on iOS. Which is fine for some people.
Apple's more prescriptive than most large companies when it comes to pulling the plug on support for legacy technologies. But Flash was on its way out; Apple just (arguably) hastened its demise by proactively dropping it on a major platform. Others are more inclined to wait until almost no one cares any longer even though something is really a boat anchor.
The absence of creative personal sites is less about the lack of FrontPage than the abundance of outlets like Facebook, Medium, or Tumblr. Before, if you wanted to say something, you had to create your own site, with all the work that entailed. Now you just have to create an account.
You've endorsed the article writer's lament as well. The decline of personal sites is worrisome and everyone getting silo'ed into megacorps is not a healthy alternative. Even if most social media users are okay with it, the same way that most humans are okay with increasing the use of fossil fuels or forest products. The average of humanity is unable to see beyond a short-range horizon, and in this case the tech community has failed to present attractive alternatives that might have helped slow the onslaught of corporate Internet takeover, even though stuff like Krita prove the community is capable, if only there was sufficient motivation and organisation. But somehow this area has languished.
The web used to have parity between creation of content and consumption when desktop access was the way the world surfed the web. Since smartphones took over, the web has been about consumption of media, requiring most contribution to be through apps. What sadist would edit HTML on a phone?
Maybe of HTML but certainly not of content in general. People post Instagrams, TikToks, Tweets, Youtube videos, Unity Games, etc... I'd argue content creation is up, way up. It's possible just not content that personally interests you (or me)
I think there's even an argument. During the heyday of the "Read/write Web"/Web 2.0 which was supposedly in part about the mainstreaming of content creation, the reality was that relatively few people had blogs etc. (and there were far fewer podcasts in the first wave than today).
Is there less long-form thoughtful writing and personal websites today? Possibly. Certainly it's a much smaller part of the overall mix. But there's more content (both quality and otherwise) than ever.
I don't know if I agree... Ok, UI creation has gone down, but never the web had so much user created content. From tweets to videos and long texts it's easier to create content on mobile and in a much bigger volume than ever it was created.
And sometimes rivers over flow and change the landscape, what's your point? The medium and message interact together and have pros and cons to different methodologies. Is painting a bad art form because the canvas is too restrictive to convey a message?
I think there's some rose colored glasses here about the "good ole days" where everyone had a personal site. In 1999 almost everyone's so called "personal site" was hosted by either Yahoo (Geocities) or Lycos (Angelfire/Tripod).
In fact most ISPs offered free web hosting and an email account, with optional domain naming, as part of their deal.
Geocities and Tripod were prominent but they were a long way from being the only option.
And the hosting usually allowed CGI and PHP and often included shopping carts and other ready-made services. So it was ridiculously easy and cheap to set up a small business if you wanted to - or just create some basic pages if you didn't.
Is there a decline in absolute numbers of personal sites? Or is there a relative increase in people posting stuff on non-personal sites? I suspect the latter as it’s easier than it’s ever been to have a personal site.
Easy for us. I can spin up a create react app, one of those minimalist CSS frameworks, netlify and I have a site in about 15 minutes.
But take the average joe that doesn't know about these tools, they don't know about netlify, CSS or HTML for that matter. For them it's a whole lot easier to create an account.
Look, if 25 years ago 100k people had personal website and today 3m people have personal website and also 3 billion have social media accounts, are we worse off than we were then? The personal website concept isn’t dying. It’s just that it’s no longer the only kind of web presence an individual can have and others are more popular.
Also, are you really looking out for the average Joe here? Really? You think that same average Joe that’s currently reposting a two year old meme on his Facebook suddenly will have something worthwhile to say if it’s hosted on his own domain? You think crazy aunt Sue will go from screaming about chem trails to engaging in polite discourse just because she got off Twitter and registered a domain? You think uncle Buddy will do anything but make the background, logo, and font of his site based on the confederate flag because he can host it on BuddyMerican.com instead of on Facebook?
I believe we should all have the ability to have a website of our own with as little control lost as possible. And I believe just like it’s a lot easier today than it was 25 years to have a personal website, that it will be even easier 25 years from now. But when people reminisce about the good old days what they like is essentially that it was hard to have a personal website so only the smart people could do it. That isn’t to say that only smart people had websites, but that websites were primarily run by smart people and that was because you couldn’t buy one, you had to build it yourself. And that meant that when you found a personal website that it was likely of high quality. Is that how you feel today when you discover a random abandoned mom blog about how hard it is to decide between different types of formula?
What Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, et al did was that they made it super easy for the average Joe to have a pseudo-personal website. It’s your moniker on their platform, you generate content, they host it and make money. And people wanted it by the billions. But at the end of the day do you really believe that all their content would be better if they simply moved from one kind of public platform to another?
But it's still easier than it has ever been to create their own website. There are video tutorials with step by step instructions. People just don't want to. Which is okay, people are free to allocate their time to different interests.
I agree. Months (or years ago), when influencers started to populate the internet, I often asked myself "What's their website?" after visiting their Instagram/Twitter/YouTube profile. The truth is, they don't need a website anymore.
I am not talking only about teens influencers. Does a restaurant need a website, or a presence on Instagram/Facebook/{delivery app} is enough? I think the later. Sadly we have evolved into this.
It sucks that we depend on Facebook/Instagram and others to get information about a local business like a restaurant we want to visit.
But years ago if you wanted information about a restaurant on the web... was it even there? If they even had a website it was built by the owner's nephew or maybe used some wix template, then if it does exist you're going all over the place to find contact information, opening hours are probably missing, menu might be anything from another page to a download of a photographed PDF.
I like the fact that I can go to a social network profile and there's a big button with contact information in the same place for all businesses.
>But years ago if you wanted information about a restaurant on the web... was it even there?
Yes, it was. ~10-20 years ago, local restaurants and businesses would pay high school / college kids a pittance set up a simple website for them. No online ordering, but they would usually have a menu, phone number, and hours.
The result was that the pages didn't all look like SquareSpace templates, and a lot of young people got their first leg up into a tech career.
Remember there use to be celebrity websites, fans use to create websites for their favourite celebs? Not anymore. Now you only see celebrity profiles and bunch of fanpages posting same content all over again.
Yet, you have full blown communities with people creating art for their role models / artists. Take like pewdiepie and his subreddit, the creations there are nothing more than amazing, from video to even handcrafted art. Several artists have fun communities like this and they can interact with them directly.
Great point. Most people can create an old-school website with a little effort using few or basic tools, but creating something that can host a community is/was much harder. phpbb was about the limit.
It's almost an inversion - instead of many community sites, there are many users together on a smaller number of community groups, which are generally built on social platforms such as reddit and Facebook which make it easy to create them. It's not necessarily a bad thing, except that the most invested people in the communities don't have ownership of the platform or the data, so the communities that matter to them are vulnerable to any arbitrary changes in what the platform owners choose to do.
It goes even deeper than that. Take the term "X Twitter" or "X Youtube" where X is literally any subject, or group you can think of.
I frequent Youtube a ton and I noticed there are distinct communities on there like "Car Youtube" or "Gaming Youtube", hell there's entire communities built up around busting scammers on Instagram (those guys posting with stack of cash and a Lambo).
You start watching one channel and realize these guys do colabs with others in that space. Just a few months ago 3-4 Car Youtubers I watch got together and created "CarTrek" which is like a full blown TopGear esque car show.
There are a multitude of restaurants. I am personally familiar with many of them, some with websites, others without. That's not the situation I'm writing about.
If I am considering patronizing an unfamiliar restaurant, and my only source of information about it is some untrustworthy third party platform, I'm moving on. Like I said, many restaurants exist, I'm losing nothing by going somewhere trustworthy.
And again, I cannot emphasize this enough: I do not want some third party asserting itself into my relationship with the restaurant.
With regard to restaurants, this perspective doesn’t make sense to me, primarily because reviews are found on third party services and not on the restaurant’s website. If I’m going to a new area, I rely on ratings and reviews to know if I want to try the restaurant.
Then you don't really know what has been going on with reviews. Some are legits of course. But more and more the bulk is paid humans from the other side of the world mastering their art for writing a review, with the tone of a local.
Possibly, yes. If I am unfamiliar with the restaurant, or I have a question regarding their menu or my dietary restrictions, if they do not have a website with an email address or contact form AND they do not react in reasonable time, I will not eat at that restaurant.
Without question if I can’t find a menu online I will not visit the restaurant. Doesn’t mean they need their own website though, just need to show up on some aggregator when I google food near me and peruse the results to pick something.
Why stop there? Please allow me to note others with technical middleman status: speaker/microphone manufacturers, cable manufacturers, chip foundries, silicon and copper smelters, the people who make the machines that make the smelters, on and on until we get to the first fusion of hydrogen to create helium soon after the Big Bang.
Neutral carriers and infrastructure providers have shown decades of tolerable neutrality [0], and are obviously a much different (and lower) threat model for contacting restaurants than the "Instagram/Facebook/{delivery app}" third party platforms to which I referred. These platforms have proven, year after year, to perform despicable acts of surveillance and experiments in psychological manipulation. They're called out for it, and they sometimes apologize and promise to "do better" in the future. Then they immediately go back to performing their creepy shit without remorse, and the cycle repeats.
"Fool me once..."
[0] Carriers and infrastructure providers certainly have unacceptable problems selling data+metadata to third party platforms, and I also note with righteous fury their enabling of illegal, unethical, and creepy-as-fuck government wiretapping and eavesdropping. They do not, for example, intercept my orders by showing some phone number other than the restaurant's. They don't disguise their call center as a restaurant's phone line. Their creepy psychological profile on me is less granular.
Someone might claim, "Oh, but Facebook has never done anything like that." Neither did Yelp or GrubHub or the others, until they did. These platforms have shown, over and over, they cannot be trusted. I'm not going to trust these middlemen. I can have a relationship directly with my food providers, and it benefits the provider and me, without worry that some asshole will someday decide they will manipulate me or the restaurant, simply because they possess that dubious ability.
Sure, it's the easiest way for small businesses, but in doing so, they are giving away too much of their marketing and branding - until they become hostages. Not good, specially for online businesses.
It's like selling a product on marketplaces: inevitably, that fateful day comes when the platform decides to change the rules – against your best commercial interests – and the only two options you have are: stay, keep your head down and obey... or leave and start almost from scratch.
Whatever nice things one can say about platforms (and there are many) people are going to get kicked off. Of course the majority of the time they did something that was not allowed. No one can be mr perfect 24/7 365 days of the year, the rules can be totally idiotic too of course, at the scale the big platforms work false positives are [sadly] impossible to avoid.
But it doesn't matter. The platforms have to do house keeping, its unavoidable. If one deserved to get kicked off is entirely besides the point: It is not your website, you are a guest.
Your own website is an entirely different story. You have to break actual laws and you may deserve your day in court.
Compared to the cyborg-kangaroo court this is the superior deal. You can down vote me all day long, I have not broken any laws. You cant persecute and silence me for stating the obvious. On HN however this is how things work, you feel the statement lacks effort, is off topic or whatever other reason you can think of and then people get silenced.
I sure as hell hope HN doesn't implement an internet kangaroo court room (like wikipedia has, woah the walls of text generated by tiny issues!) but you can expect people not to speak their mind, not share their version of the story, to attempt to live up to your expectations and learn to survive your judgement.
Yeah. Centralized content silos defeated personal websites by being more attractive to both creators ("all viewers in one place") and viewers ("all content in one place"). It's a tough nut to crack.
The content silos handle creation and hosting well, but they're generally mediocre at promotion unless you're already hot (though this did not used to be the case). The only nut that needs to be cracked to pull off content creators is no-strings creation/hosting along with decent visibility in SERPs.
You end up promoting a page where the competitor is 1 click away. You are investing in facebook first, your own business second. That people click follow doesn't mean you just get to send out messages. That you have a lot of likes doesn't mean people clicked the like button. Then there is the privacy of your audience. They might not care about it, you should set higher standards.
FB is making billions for a reason, there has to be something that works there. I'm an optimist too, I believe its just that people are still naive enough to use FB. I hope it implodes sooner rather than later so that things can go back to normal. :-)
I mean in the early 2000s there was MySpace, LiveJournal, Blogger, etc. That’s not all that different from Facebook, Medium, Tumblr in the way you’re saying. Those older platforms were way more customizable though, and frontpage definitely helped. You also had sites like geocities and angelfire that got a lot of non technical people interested in making websites.
From a consumer perspective, the big difference is that back then, the content on MySpace, LiveJournal, Blogger, etc. was discoverable. It could be found entering relevant search terms into Google or another secarch engine and the more useful content was self-curated by the creator(s) via prominent internal links, WordPress pages, stickied posts on forums and the sites themselves often had useful site-specific searches.
The two big problems with modern social media silos is that
1. content is ephemeral and that older content is not easy – or possible – to find.
2. they optimise for content that will push emotional buttons to drive “engagement” so they can sell viewers to advertisers
MySpace might have been a visual mess but I found it useful for finding out about a band or musician and listening to sample music (all without having to create an account on the platform). I came across all sorts of interesting niche content and communities on blogs, LiveJournal and web forums. These sites were all a lot more open; in most cases, you could easily view the content without having to have an account. If you liked a community and wanted to contribute you could create an account without having to worry about the site owners tracking you across the Internet.
Back in the day, setting up my own site was the best thing I did. And the skills I learned by doing so have evolved into a 25 year professional career.
You're right about Social networks etc. They ate bloggers' lunch.
Far too many people aren't prepared to teach themselves how things work these days and do things for themselves.
One of the greatest regrets I have as a webdev/designer was to give in to constant requests to make things 'fool-proof' in the name of growth.
Users never 'learned' anything. Like how to follow instructions or use a new UI/UX. Everything got dumbed-down.
Now look where we are on those networks. It's mostly an absolute mess of utter drivel. 'posted' (not created) by those 'fools'.
Starting out with a dumb UI shouldn't be a problem as long as you are free to progress to greener pastures. It shouldn't be that you have to learn how to take apart a type writer before you can write a book, the technology doesn't require it.
A clear road beyond will also take down the walls around the silos since effort to control the user would come at a price (force them off the platform(s) faster)
We could perhaps start by separating the API from presentation? Have A scalable chunk of FOSS at first hosted by a megacorp but easily moved some place else and A presentation platform where people build their gui that is as easily moved.
(Just thinking out loud, didn't put much thought in it.)
edit: your own domain should be an obvious ingredient. Which seems to suggest that domains should be free?
Exactly what I thought. He's thinking about the internet of the old. People have different expectations today. They expect reposts, shares, comments etc. He'd need a Frontpage that can trivially build servers and services. You can live without these, but in my opinion people would not want to be perceived as an antisocial weirdos. Soon they will expect neural network powered features like in their mobile apps.
So basically we need a frontpage style static CMS (perhaps something like GUI around gatsby) that publishes to one of a bunch of providers that have APIs, such as DigitalOcean.
The project could be backed up somewhere transparently, but the key thing would be that it wouldn't be tied to any one provider. If DO were to delete your content, you could just pick a different one.
Pretty much. Also, WHOIS privacy is such a mess that I really don't know if I recommend people set up too much stuff themselves what with all the awful people in the world.
Almost every domain registrar nowadays offers (usually for free) WHOIS Guard, which throws a very imposing barrier between your contact info and any random person.
FrontPage was a nightmare. I still wake up screaming...
I do see some pretty good stuff, from Wix. The new static generators create great sites, but they are way too technical for most users. Wix and Weebly are -sort of- like that.
I am not a fan of sitebuilders in WordPress. I think they are just reincarnations of FrontPage. I've had to fix a couple of borked sitebuilder sites, and the "fix" was a complete, top-to-bottom rewrite, without the sitebuilder.
They all were. HTML was so limited that producing it visually from a WYSIWYG editor was guaranteed to be totally wrong or exceedingly verbose.
With flex and grid I imagine creating such an editor is easier today, but I also imagine those consumers are happy to work off of templates and people who work on front and know HTML and spend most of their time building react components.
HTML was never the problem. It is simple enough to be taught to non technical people. The issue is styling it, making it looks beautiful. And this is where the truth appears: HTML was not designed for building magazin-like pages but hypertext paper books. The very recent introduction of CSS grid shows it.
If HTML could be used as a collection of widget akin to Windows Forms, with an easy grid system (somewhat like XAML), there building an UI page creator would be easy, and user could edit the output unlike with the current tech.
A bit tangential, but Wix lost all reputation in my eyes with the dumpster fire that is the redesigned DeviantArt after their acquisition. They took a nicely functional website and created an unusable monstrosity that takes tens of seconds of whirring fans to display a single image. My mind boggles at how a company focused on building websites could release something like that.
I've spent weeks trying to speed up a Wix site, and I barely succeeded. The amount of requests it made... no, Wix websites are all insanely badly done. I'm not surprised at all.
I remember being c. 12 and writing webpages in FrontPage on a windows98 pc.
I have no idea how i had frontpage, but i'm sure it lead into acquiring "real skills".
There's a lot more to apps like dreamweaver, frontpage, etc. than it seems. They are bad tools, but also comes with a linear learning curve that has its advantages.
why is/was dreamweaver bad, now? I got a tremendous amount of web stuff done many years ago. it all worked well and I couldn't have done it as quickly or well without it...
It was generally considered bad because it (and other programs like it) often generated bad markup with a lot of overhead, spurious tags and what you might call "bloat". While there's certainly bloat today too it was a different experience on dialup, especially in the early days when you paid not only for the phone call but were also often charged a steep hourly rate by the ISP.
There was also quite a bit of elitism and protectionism about it, because for a while a lot of people were actually more or less making a living from writing nothing but plain HTML. If anyone can make a web page, what good are HTML skills? Quickly, let's find something bad about it and save our jobs!
> often generated bad markup with a lot of overhead,
I just looked into the nightmarish tree of nested div's and span's (of which FrontPage and DreamWeaver are innocent) that's a Twitter feed. JFC, I don't want to ever have to scrape one.
I mostly used it for its preview capabilities and as a text editor, for which it worked pretty well, building my own templates by hand. If you actually knew HTML, CSS and a smattering of JS, it was a great tool for organizing the small bits and pieces of a web site. If you didn’t, things could get ugly pretty fast.
I never used Dreamweaver but I did use Adobe GoLive for a time. As I recollect it was better than doing things by hand (or I wouldn't have used it) but it generated such complex and ugly HTML that you were effectively locked into the tool. The HTML was such a mess that doing hand patching was very hard.
Dreamweaver was quite ok, actually. The issue was that it was limited, and it wasn't a good fit for every kind of website.
Want to write documentation, or a personal website full of text and pictures? Maybe a simple text site for your restaurant or small business without much fluff? Then it's alright.
Want to do a professional-looking site that looks like the ones you pay money for? Maybe look for something else, or at the very least start with a handcrafted template, instead of "faking it" with sliced images and javascript hover.
The reaction against Dreamweaver was IMO understandable because there were definitely some people in the industry who were convinced that Dreamweaver was enough for anything.
>"The new static generators create great sites, but they are way too technical for most users."
Just like to add that from what I've found they're also generally way "too technical" for technical/programming users too. Each time I try to set one up, I waste 1-2 hours of my time trying, git pulling, refreshing, testing, reading docs, etc before realizing what a ginormous time sink it is with their various weird DSL's and hierarchical organization methods and templates and whatnot.
I second this. FrontPage was simple to used, produced ugly, but static and fast sites, everyone was happy. Wix is a monster to use, and it spits CPU eating offsprings.
Fun fact: I believe Berkshire Hathaway's website is a frontpage site from back in the day. I kind of imagine an old pentium multimedia PC that a secretary boots once per quarter to update it. It's much better than most holding companies' sites.
Anyway... I feel like this article answers its own question at the start...
"many corporations such as the Dow Jones, Bloomberg, Apple, etc. were sinking millions into building their own, completely incompatible dial-in Internet services."
"They" eventually succeeded, by using the www as a platform 10 years later rather than outcompeting it in 1995. Frontpage, Dreamweaver and such are tools. The internet-era equivalents (youtube, FB, IG, etc.) aren't tools. FB is a "platform." More comparable to the WWW itself than to frontpage. You don't need tools to post on FB, so no frontpage.
In the abstract, a FB-like platform does a similar job to a Frontpage-like tool. Publish stuff online. The FB-like platform is a 1000X better business proposition. A FB doesn't have to charge. It can attract users with access to other users. No hosting/files/responsibility. Advertising is worth more than software licenses, etc.
So the real question is "why did the www not succeed competitively against FB/Youtube/Etc?" Why don't we do what we do online via www and other open standards/protocols instead of through platforms like FB?
OTOH, the WWW obviously did succeed. We all use it every day, but with a third party platform like FB between us and other people. I also think it's remarkable that the www exists at all. No one owns it. It's not property, doesn't have a share price... Quite unusual.
Tim Berners Lee is highly regarded. Zuck is one of the most powerful and wealthy people on earth. He made many other people very wealthy. Tim too, but more indirectly. It's remarkable that a Tim can ever beat a Zuck. ... But history proves they can.
I don't know why but I love looking at the historical "crudge" that builds up in situations like this! Especially from people that don't specialize in software.
I have never had a look at their website, so thanks for posting that. Buffet's recommendations for GEICO and Borsheim's [0] are funny and not something I would have expected from him...
FrontPage was the reason I eventually got into technology and software development. No joke. I took a whole class one semester my first year of college on learning FrontPage. I never really liked the WYSIWYG aspect of it but I understood its power. I was more interested in what happened underneath. Took me more than a decade to eventually learn to code after that, but FrontPage was definitely one of my first catalysts.
I think we need Macromedia Flash more. The animation creativity authoring tool, not the plugin. Drag drop shapes, curves and vectors, editable timelines, and streamable format.
Macromedia Flash was so intuitive, you’d get someone designing and animating things in a couple of hours, contrast that with Adobe Illustrator, where you’d spend a couple of hours telling someone how to draw a circle then they would forget how to access the right menu to join two circles and get stuck while the person on Flash was creating complex shapes that morphed...
I didn't read the article, so feel free to downvote me for talking over the author...
A "modern Frontpage" may help, but these days it seems:
- creators (including your mum on Facebook) don't want to worry about design, only content
- creators want to see feedback from the widest range of people possible as soon as possible, so it feels like conversation
- consumers (who are the same people) want to see updates from all their friends, family and the brands they follow right there alongside one another and the feedback to their own stuff
So to "reclaim the web" you ALSO need a decentralised commenting system that doesn't require any investment on the part of the user. We have ActivityPub and WebMentions now, but they all require accounts, hosting and management... and they don't come with original content creation.
If you put every creator in their own silo (under their own domain name, say), they won't feel so connected, unless that domain also provides near-instant access to the feeds from all their contacts. Facebook and Insta give you a feed of your whole village plus the folks from the village over that you like, instantly. I'm sure the IndieWeb crew do feel connected, but how much effort have they all made to join that party? LOADS, compared with your mum on Facebook.
So sure, modern Frontpage, but also easy RSS/Atom + WebMentions + ActivityPub (or equivalent).
Personally, I really like Scuttlebutt for this. It has all this stuff, and is offline-first, and will work with interplanetary travel, and you can build calendars and events and stuff on top of it. But it's yet another protocol (and a complex one at that), and getting into the network is a big hurdle still.
But isn't scuttlebutt User centric vs. content centric? So I will only easily find content from people I already know?
And I guess I can find new people if they are somehow connected to me, but can I search just for content on the "whole" network?
Does this really provide a network effect like medium or facebook, or google search, who offer a large existing network for discovery?
Last time I used it: yes-ish. "Tags" are public and posts can be set public (perhaps scoped to the server you're connected to. I don't recall). You can tag bits of content pretty easily (IIRC you prepend a # to any word you like). You then explore the contents of tags like channels. Public posts with tags then show up under those tags.
The SSB/Patchwork creators were discussing a while ago that the network was actually content-centric. They described it as "islands of content" around which people navigated. I'm not gonna try to defend that, only to repeat it.
Anyway... I think this is distracting from the main point. It doesn't _really_ matter if SSB wins out over HTML+CSS+JS+HTTP+RSS+ActivityPub+WebMentions or not. What matters is encouraging people to leave social media walled gardens by giving them tools and reasons to do so. Or, at the very least, somehow giving the content they create an easy means of escape, and bullying the gardens to open windows onto the wider world that don't involve one-way tactics like OpenGraph.
A key feature of FrontPage were "WebBots", which in today's terms would be like drag and drop PHP snippets. It would be easy for such a system to allow for a comments section or whatever is necessary.
The greater point about the benefits of some sort of feed, some sort of follow/boost system, etc. is valid though.
Not all creators want a conversation though. There are plenty of personal pages out there receiving regular updates (in the form of articles) which don't have a comments section. I suspect the same probably goes for a lot of projects on Github.
"Html for common folk" is just a particular instance of "programming for common folk". There isn't one solution for it, there should be many different solutions.
It's been a long time we want to make programming simple. And we've tried a bazilion solutions already: easier languages (e.g.: Basic), specific purpose languages (e.g.: Cobol, R, Logo), visual programming (e.g: LabView, Scratch, Lego Mindstorms), dozens of IDE's and CASE systems, programming courses for everyone, specific purpose tools (Access, Excel), etc...
So far, the one solution that I've seem coming close to success is teaching Python to kids in schools. That might be the best approach: make a simpler solution for a simpler problem and make education a little smarter.
Now, regarding grown-ups, just forget them. They're a lost cause, like teaching new tricks to an old dog. In general, grown-ups are allergic to learning, they think they know everything.
WebFlow is something like this. It's basically a Photoshop quality UI on top of the CSS specification with one click static site generation and CMS features.
Webflow is great, but it's quite expensive to host a simple static website there. They used to allow exporting a website on the free plan, but that's gone now.
There are other Webflow-ish options that doesn't require to keep a subscription, like CoffeCup Site Designer, Bootstrap Studio and Blocs app.
This is the quintessential example of solving a legal, cultural and regulatory problem with a technical solution.
Take the example of social media space, companies like Google/YouTube, Twitter, Facebook were wholly uninterested in policing political speech but they were forced to do so by political activists and Democrats and self-serving mainstream outlets (self-serving because when social media de-platforms, or demonetizes thousands of dinky little conservative or progressive outfits, they automatically raise traffic to conglomerate news. Similarly when Twitter banned political adverts, where do you think political adverts dollars went to?).
The crypto community is another community that suffers from this delusion. They think that they can build a technical platform to get around AML laws and regulations. Sure. My good friend worked in the San Fran ICO space and through her I met a ton of crypto people and they were all deluded like this (one of them though he could create a mesh network with drones to get around government control of the internet). Their perspectives were endearing and I appreciate their existence ... but delusional.
What do you think you're going to solve by introducing yet another platform (centralized or decentralized)? You think you're going to be left alone from those in positions of power (whether it be the mainstream media who want to reassert their traditional gatekeeping or governments and their regulatory bodies)?
> What do you think you're going to solve by introducing yet another platform (centralized or decentralized)? You think you're going to be left alone from those in positions of power (whether it be the mainstream media or government bodies)?
The idea is to envision an internet where there is no specific target to leave alone or not leave alone.
If publishing and consuming content are low-friction events, and censoring that content is impossible, then the internet will have achieved a substantial milestone in solving the legal, cultural and regulatory problems you correctly identify as underlying causes.
Is it a complete solution? No, of course not. But it's worth the time and effort of our species, and is an important part of facilitating the emergence of ever more genuine human rights in the information age.
>If publishing and consuming content are low-friction events, and censoring that content is impossible
I no longer believe that. Your page is going to be hosted somewhere. Some registrar will need to maintain your domain. Your DNS records will be registered by someone. You're going to be interacting with payment processors. You're going to buying power from some utility company. Your spouse may be working in a brick-and-mortar location. All of those (and more) are vectors for attack for censors whether they be government or activists. They just need to label your speech as dangerous or evil or something ridiculous and publicly shame you, your spouse, your spouse's employer and anyone that does business with you to see how little protection a new technical platform gives you.
We've gotten away with this up to now because of the meteoric rise of the internet, but it's been figured out now.
It wouldn't exactly be hard to run the web on anonymous and/or distributed hosting.
But content censorship is a social and political issue, not a technical one. And it has many problems, from organised political manipulation to dealing with bad actors of various kinds.
Absolute free speech is an interesting goal but solves none of those problems. (Everyone is for it until a radicalised kook firebombs their house.)
>It wouldn't exactly be hard to run the web on anonymous and/or distributed hosting.
Uh huh.
This requires a little qualification. We have all the technical pieces to enable individuals to communicate, with some effort, with privacy almost guaranteed (you'll never beat, for example, a government agent with immense resources that targets you specifically). But these methods are neither mainstream, nor scalable - which is what this article is about. You can't create a large-scale platform to democratize speech and content without running into the same walls that social media is now running into. Worse for you, the big guys (governments and media conglomerates) are no longer ignorant on how to control a new platform like the Web. Put another way, the internet was figured out and now we're in a persistent decline where control and censorship mechanisms are incorporated into every part of the infrastructure, from DNS, to registrars, to caching proxies, to cloud providers, to social media companies, etc.
>But content censorship is a social and political issue, not a technical one.
My point exactly. So the creating of another technical solution will do approximately nothing.
>Absolute free speech is an interesting goal but solves none of those problems.
Nobody is talking about absolute free speech. That's a straw man of my argument or at least a red herring. What we're seeing is big media backed by corporate conglomerates reasserting their traditional status as gatekeepers. We're seeing an entire American political party push for censorship of their opposition under the guise of protecting the public from 'fake news'.
I have no solutions. The only way this works is you have societal agreement that news democratization is good, but we don't have that, especially after the moral panic that set in with Trump's election. A moral panic which targeted social media for control and increased censorship to stop unvetted information dissemination.
There's nothing wrong with solving legal, cultural, and regulatory problems with technical solutions. It happens all the time.
British colonists solved the legal, cultural, and regulatory problem of unfair taxation with the technical solution of firearms.
The legal, cultural, and regulatory problem of a literate elite dominating culture was very satisfyingly solved by the technical solution of the printing press.
Technology is socially disruptive. Governments and corporations are more than willing to take advantage of this, with CCTV, Great Firewalls, adtech. But they aren't omnipotent - why should we give up on fighting back?
Legal, cultural, and regulatory solutions require convincing large groups of people, or already occupying a position of social influence or legal/regulatory power. Technical solutions have a lot of positives, one of which is that often one person or a small group can implement them. There's just a lot more potential leverage.
I don't see Frontpage coming back anytime soon. The space is now filled with all in one marketing platforms for businesses. Hubspot, Mailchimp, etc all now allow you to build websites.
Creating your site is only one small piece of the puzzle, hosting, email, security and all the other stuff that's being pilled on top of the growing complexity these days.
I see platforms as enabling more people to build more, not less. After all, content is what matters most and what drives visitors and value to a site.
It seems that everybody understands that Facebook/Twitter/etc have to change or go away in order for this to happen. I'm personally in favour of making social networks just things for people who know each other talk to each other. Maybe a physical proximity thing too.
That's a crushing blow to free speech but I think this experiment has clearly shown what happens when you encourage idiots (of all political views!) to mix with like-minded simpletons. They don't reason with each other, they degrade into lynch mobs, and they're scarily easy to manipulate.
So yes, when —not if— the revolution comes, it'll be nice to see independent thought being fostered out onto the wild internet with Frontpage 2030, and I won't get some algorithm mixing "POTATOES ARE RACIST TRACKING BEACONS" posts in with updates from my family.
> If I wanted to do that on my hypothetical WordPress site, I'd be out of luck.
Well, they are working on a new feature that will (hopefully) change that. It's called Full Site Editing (FSE), and will basically transform the WordPress editor into a complete website builder that, considering the WordPress's market share, may become a thing. It's arriving next year. Ref: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/20791
You can easily export your website to a free static hosting using with a free plugin, after creating it on your desktop computer. No online PHP hosting required.
An average user can do this, for sure. But, yea, some sort of instruction is necessary, as it is not something that the platform itself offers by default.
For example: the user needs to be aware of this possibility to begin with and also need to know which plugin to install, even it isn't difficult to work with.
In addition, as the site will no longer be dynamic, some adjustments must be made, such as disabling comments - or adding an alternative like Disqus.
I'm always amazed libreoffice doesn't just pack up and call it quits when you ask it to open something like reddit or news.google.com. Just type in the full URL with the protocol in the file open dialog and it will put in a noble but ultimately futile effort.
The goal's not completely achieved yet, but my project's goal is to turn Microsoft Word into a WordPress like site builder for ordinary users. Here is a quick GIF demo: https://docxmanager.com/features/website-generator.html
Who is WE? We software/web/website developers as opposed to common folk? Then we don't need this, as it would take our jobs away...
Anything else like doctors saying "I want patients to operate on themselves." or "I want patients to vaccinate themselves.". What is it about the software world that created this notion of giving everything away?
I am just going to assume that this is a troll comment due to the sheer ignorance of the statement made.
But let’s assume it’s not. First of all, if someone with FrontPage can take your job away, you probably have bigger problems to solve involving the qualifications required for engineering. Second - you can’t compare surgery to website building. Putting together some CSS and HTML is nowhere near as complex as operating on a human being. Case in point - most of us were doing it since the MySpace days or earlier. I don’t know any 12 year olds who were doing surgeries at that time.
Lastly - what’s with this scarcity mentality? Just because someone has the skills and ability to do something does not preclude you from doing the same thing. Should we ban books and tutorials because god forbid it might teach others to do the jobs we do?
Tag: Controversial comment.
I am glad for social platforms. They are bottomless pit. In my simple logic when something has low entry barrier and high friction the efficiency of information flow is lowered and result is meaningless noise. People will start personal blogs again for logical reasons. Give it time.
1. Creating web-pages is like creating music, we should create tools that make it as easy as possible for anyone to create them
2. Creating web-pages is engineering, like building a house or a car. We don't want anyone without qualifications being able to create these, given their increasing complexity.
yeah as there are two main applications of the web: static content delivery, like a billboard and; web applications which are replacements of traditional desktop applications. for the first it's "content is king" and the second UX is king
I'm working on adding ActivityPub protocol which will enable Mastodon/Pleroma (i.e. the Fediverse) to it. But that platform is more about content than pretty styling.
You can find a lot of that functionality in Sharepoint today. Sharepoint still aims to have non-programmers build useful web pages. Where I work most folks prefer something like Confluence. Of course non of that is aimed at home users making personal web sites.
There were two parts to this. Something to "design" (build) websites, and somewhere to host it that wasn't tied to a grid. I learned to build web pages in Netscape. It came with a free html editor. And then I hosted on Geocities and Xoom for free.
I think we instead need a simple hosting solution wrapped into your phone plan or internet service like it was way back when. It is the hosting upkeep that killed old internet.
I miss simpler and more visual tools. Things you use not to create a billion dollar startup but a personal website. Not a complex web application but a little flash game.
Squarespace is a monthly fee, forever. I would love to buy a tool that lets me generate the static html that squarespace does and then add that into my $20/year for as many web sites as I want to host hoster.
I kind of long for Frontpage because as nasty as it was, you could at least host wherever you want, archive for decades, and was much cheaper in the long run.
> I would love to buy a tool that lets me generate the static html that squarespace does.
Some options are: Bootstrap Studio, CoffeeCup Site Designer and Blocksapp. They have shortcomings, but all of them allow to export a complete HTML site.
I do not have the version of FrontPage shown in the screenshots, but one that was included with Visual Studio 6 which is a bit older - however it doesn't look really that different.
And TBH i cannot see that ease of use. To me FrontPage looks weird and "disconnected" - the editor even is a separate program - and the hierarchy it makes feels unintuitive.
I've used simpler programs.
FrontPage Express is basically the editor (though i think it is actually a separate program that uses the same name but i'm not 100% sure) so it doesn't handle a full site, but for very simple stuff it is fine (e.g. [0]) Adobe Page-Mill is another alternative from the time that has some form of site support. I actually use that sometimes for very simple pages - and it also happens to create very clean code (e.g. [1]).
IMO iWeb is by far the simplest and easiest website builder i've used. I haven't used anything that approaches it - other builders, even some that claim to be alternatives, do not have the full WYSIWYG element (ie. you're not editing articles inside the page itself but you use a separate editor). Its biggest issue was that it created pages that were a bit "heavy" (...though nowadays i've seen much heavier sites) and that the themes were almost hardcoded (there were 3rd party themes but the program never seemed to be designed to allow that). I didn't use it much myself, though i have an old page made with it [2] (note that the links do not work).
Two other programs that i found easy to use though both were too "raw", with very blatant missing features and bugs are WebsitePainter and RocketCake by the developer of the Irrlicht (and later CopperCube) 3D game engine. RocketCake is basically WebsitePainter but with a more restrained editor for making "responsive" sites. Both can be found at [3] and [4], though i only played around with them a bit. I wanted to buy WebsitePainter, but it was too buggy and the author seemed to be focused more or RocketCake, which i didn't like as much, so i never used any of these for anything i actually uploaded anywhere.
For a more "modern" take, one very easy tool i found is Publii [5]. This is a bit more restricted in that it is mainly for blog and blog-like stuff (it says it is a CMS but realistically, this feels like how people used blogs years ago instead of CMSs because blogs were popular). TBH i am not a big fan of its output or theming since i find both practically impossible to customize, but it is easy to use and does provide a WYSIWYG editor (for content, you still need to build the site to see how it'd look in a browser). I've used it for [6] but only because i haven't found anything simpler that still provides WYSIWYG editing and graphical site management.
As a sidenote, i see most technical people complaining about the code these tools produced, but for me that is completely missing the point - one would use such a tool so they do not have to mess with the code at all. The produced code doesn't matter (and never mattered to me when judging these programs), it is how the final result looks and behaves in a browser that matters.
> FrontPage wasn't exactly easy to use and needed special hosting
And WordPress is easy to use and doesn't need special hosting? If I remember correctly, FrontPage-generated sites (not using server extensions) could be just uploaded by FTP to any server.
