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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure that they were average people? In my experience, average people only started to publish things on Web after blog platforms enabled them to do so. The only people who published in the web at that time were people with technical background (or people who had enough free time and will to learn). HTML is not easy for someone, who's not computer-savvy and a quest to publish and support your website might frighten experienced software developers even know.

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Not true. Plenty of non-technical people had a web page up like this one. Nearly all ISPs included some webspace, and enough instructions to get going. Lots of people put up something on user.demon.co.uk or geocities about themselves, their hobbies or their pets etc.

Having a web presence died off somewhat as people moved over to myspace and Livejournal then geocities and tripod started being abandoned. Then it started the rise of social, and guest books and web rings slowly became obsolete.

Yep. I miss the magic of FTPing into your ISP and having that little folder where you could drop simple HTML files.

You can still drop html files on GitHub!

If you're feeling extra fancy, you can switch to gitlab to write and publish static websites in any framework of your choice (including plain html of course but you can use any framework of your choice such as Jekyll or even Vue Nuxt) right from the browser thanks to the power of the gitlab-ci.yml file. As someone who very much dislikes installing node js on my computer, I think this is fantastic.

Anecdotally I know at least three people who gained literacy with computers through their efforts to publish personal web pages so it must be at least somewhat accessible. Incidentally it is not any harder to publish a personal web site with basic HTML than it was 15 years ago, there are just other ways to "publish" online now that are easier.

Agreed. I've lost count of how many people I've met that owe their web programming careers to the Pokemon webpage they built as a kid.

I recall kids who weren't computer geniuses would still start websites about their hobbies / interests using geocities or tripod. They have wysiwyg editors that were easy.

But of course, just having access to computers and the internet wasn't a given for many families

Yup, Dreamweaver and Frontpage were very much a thing in that era. Plenty of WYSIWYG options existed.

I knew a lot of people in school and work places that were using Netscape's built-in WYSIWYG editor, Composer. They couldn't build a site in raw HTML to save their life otherwise, but they could throw something basic together in Composer. Before that, if I'm not mistaken, Navigator 3 had some kind of simple page editor with it as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer

Yep. I built a page using a WYSIWYG editor sometime around 1995-1996, when I was in grade school. I knew the concept of nested HTML tags, but couldn't have written a page by hand (and I didn't have anyone to guide me).

A couple of years later, I re"designed" it. Both of them were about as cheesy as you'd expect a preteen's Star Trek fan page to be.

Didn't MS Word even have a "export as HTML" option? I feel like I might have used that initially to build the first version of my CounterStrike clan's website.

They did.

IIRC this site was made in Word: https://web.archive.org/web/20060414015434/http://easternsho... (on mobile, can't look at source to verify)

Hmm, and it renders better on mobile than some modern actual "mobile" websites

it allows to zoom to perfectly readable size, no half screen taken by "use the app" with tiny close button, no social share floaters overlapping part of the text, no functionality removed for mobile, ...

Yep, good old `<meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 9">`

You forgot hotdog professional. Hated how frontpage mangled the code!!

That's brought back some memories for me! This is the only screenshot I could find from a brief search: https://archive.org/details/tucows_194462_HotDog_Professiona...

I learned HTML in my first years of highschool building pages in Frontpage and Dreamweaver and inspecting the source code. At the time flash seemed more promising so it was only years later, during the CSS Zen revolution that I learned proper HTML and CSS. Until then I learned flash and ecmascript to make dynamic websites in flash.

As highschoolers with absolutely zero web experience, it was peanuts publishing to the web. You could find guides on how to publish to things like geocities or other hosts (silly things like 50meg.com) everywhere. Sure we had some time, but we didn't have to put much effort in learning.

I call them average. My buddies and I were all starting up our own sites and fan pages about our favorite cartoons using homestead and geocities before we were teens. Didn't know crud about HTML but WYSIWYG editors existed then too.

I started as a middle-schooler writing html and publishing stuff on the internet. It was my introduction to web development and I was completely non-technical when I started.

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