I'm a fucking webmaster
justinjackson.ca
justinjackson.ca
I remember making a ball bounce in Flash with some elasticity and people wanted it on their website no matter what their website was about. The 90's were such strange times. "Can you put that bouncing ball on my site?" I guess, but I'm not sure what it has to do with carpet cleaning....
I still get asked to disable the right mouse button, add background music, a counter, or make something blink or scroll, and every now and then... an animated gif (usually of a U.S. flag).
Luckily I've been doing this long enough now to say, no, please don't do this to yourself or your business. You've spent too much money and too much time to throw it all away with a tiny design disaster. But they insist. Ohhhh they insist.
I've noticed the people that insist on micromanaging everything like that with web technologies tend to not stay in business very long or don't want to do much besides pay for the website like people pay for refrigerators. Great for the web hosting companies that will take $30 / mo on a site that gets 1000 hits / month but terrible for web designers that need repeat business once in a while.
Or was that last year.
Seriously though, I loved reading this. Thank you!
Have you seen http://tomstrucking.net yet? ;)
(By which I mean: it's a thing of beauty!)
.. which ended up being the whole point.
Your page is a great read and they are as well, so thanks, had fun driving down history lane remembering all the various shenanigans MS went through to shove their browser down our throats.
If we are speaking of memories of the "old-ways" of developing websites I remind mostly one thing - rounded corners. I remember how many web devs were trying to make a table (3x3) and put content in the center cell, and fill corners with some gifs. Nevertheless, it was not the only one method which some webmasters were using - a hacky VML file [1]
>The world still needs some fucking webmasters. We might not all be making websites professionally anymore. But we should keep making websites. The passion, the freedom, the joy: we need to pass this on.
I appreciate the enthusiasm for wanting to empower people but the technology (e.g. simpler format of HTML, or open standards instead of walled gardens, etc) is not really the issue even though it looks that way. I've commented on this illusion before[1].
The underlying issue is the asymmetry between active participants and passive spectators. Most people don't care to make an HTML web page. On the other hand... Uploading a photo of a cat or plate of food to facebook or twitter? Or type a short response comment to a niece saying "love your new dress!"? Yes, a good percentage of people will conquer the threshold of complexity to do that... but it's still not the majority of users.
Even though I don't like it, I've come to terms with the fact that the human race is "wired" to make easy posts on Facebook rather than maintain an HTML web page on a server they control. Most people don't want to be "webmasters".
Creativity came in many forms, and still does. Webmasters were just the "left-brained" types (yes, i'm aware that's a pop-psych myth). Nowadays it's the "let's reinvent everything in a new language" types trying to shove an operating system into a web browser, versus the people making art, music, culture and community using technology.
Now that I think of it, I actually learned to program because my brother used Geocities' webpage-making template system to make his own site, and I wanted to know how he did it, so I read the source.
In the 1990s I had friends who literally knew nothing at all about computers but still managed to hack together their own sites with a text editor and some persistence.
It was so easy anyone of average and above IQ could do it.
Often the results were - let's say - not that great as graphic design. But they got the job done well enough to be useful.
So I don't think it's an illusion at all. I think the barriers to entry have become way too high. There's certainly
If the barriers were lower, I'm not convinced we'd need FB and Tumblr and the rest at all.
Websites are as easy to make now as they ever were. HTML from the 1990s still works fine. The barriers to entry haven't actually moved at all.
I absolutely agree.
People seem to forget that the fundamental nature of the web hasn't changed. Facebook hasn't destroyed the web, javascript and that framework you hate haven't destroyed the web, advertising hasn't destroyed the web (arguably, the web has destroyed advertising), the NSA hasn't destroyed the web (yet.) You can still open up the text editor of your choice and write some HTML and put it on a server. That still works, and it will probably always work - human readable, human writable, human accessible content. You can still write it all by hand if you want, you don't have to know how to code, you're not forced to conform to arbitrary standards, or use proprietary software.
In the end, no matter how much abstraction modern developers pile on to make it look and act like "legitimate" application programming, the web is just HTML, CSS, javascript and some embedded content, probably images, possibly of cats. Sometimes, in the midst of how homogeneous and corporatized the web can appear, I think it helps to be reminded of how revolutionary it still is because of its fundamental simplicity and accessibility.
...and of course, the ever lovely habit of "View Source" which leads to interesting things. Like finding the large "Never Forget" at the top of the linked page. Fun times.
But for sure, there was a certain aura and power around being able to not only navigate the web (OMG .WAV SOUNDS FROM MOVIES!) but put up a sign that other people could see. Then get good enough to get paid for work doing such things. A good reminder type essay methinks.
I don't look back at the 90's with rose-colored glasses. Web was often overlooked and we were considered 2nd rate citizens among `real` software developers. These days, the browser is a competitive alternative to native and it was years of struggle to get here. Over taking a decade of "web" understanding and convincing people that "web" is capable of more than just html.
The web is made up of people's decisions and their technology choices they choose to use. Which is basically written in every alistapart article since 1999. So let's not sit in nostalgia. Push forward with better technology because this thinking only makes it harder for those that invent and struggling for adoption from `thought leaders` who wish the world was just a series of hyperlinked XML pages.
> Do not do this. There are no shirts. This site is 20 years old. What's wrong with you?
https://www.spork.org/spork-gear.shtml
And this anti-IE site has some nice badges we can still add to our websites:
The convenience does not come at zero cost, though. This is putting power in too few hands. A few people decide how the web looks like, what is possible and what is not.
Facebook is now the new Internet Explorer, an unavoidable entity that dictates what the web experience is like.
His name should link to his homepage or about page, of which he has no links to from the article. These pages are IMHO a million times more interesting than the frankly awful mess Twitter has made of profile homepages. What with the big fonts on some tweets - I don't know why some tweets have large fonts. A good interface would instantly make it clear why.
You might have had me with 56k or even 28.8kbps (V.92!), but 1200 baud. When 1200 baud was fast - yes, everywhere was simple text on the screen (maybe ANSI colors), but more along the lines of Compuserve or a BBS. And yes, you had to download images. The best were the progressive scan ones where you could view the incomplete images as they downloaded.
Ah, the memories...
But my internet connection was rural, and 1200 baud. It was possible.
But around 1980, 1200 baud was considered lightning fast! Imagine the jump from 300 to 1200 baud. But back then, HTML wasn't even a consideration and network connections were completely text-based sessions. If you were lucky, you had some control over colors. If you were lucky...
I'm saying this as someone who swears a lot, too.
I think the rest of the essay does a great job of explaining why and how webmasters were so important and how they were/are the ultimate problem solver. No ego boosting qualifiers necessary.
The rest don't even blink when we see them -- especially from countries without a history of a prudish outlook on things.
One can see people getting slashed with knives and shot in the head on PG13 movies -- words like these are nothing compared to that.
I'm not shocked, I'm just bored of the "I'm a fucking <nostalgic or out of style thing>" or "This fucking <nostalgic or out of style thing>" trend. Just because swearing hasn't become so blasé to a person doesn't mean they have an "active puritan heritage".
http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
I wonder if it is the same guy.
Edit: Nope, @thebarrytone made mfw.com