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Comment by danielovichdk | Hacker News Reader

Looking at these older websites (for me thats 1996—2002) I remember spending a lot of my time on figuring out how they really worked underneath it all.

It was truly an exciting time where the differences in design and style for websites were big.

Today, you don't really see personal websites anymore, and things have somehow become streamlined and pretty much just standard. There is hardly any wow effect on the web anymore, and that's sad I think.

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I don't think you follow the right people/channels. I see a wow effect every week.

Edit: some examples...

http://taotajima.jp/ http://mathis-biabiany.fr/ http://robinmastromarino.com/ https://demos.littleworkshop.fr/track

Which Channels Should I follow ?

https://www.awwwards.com/ is a good start.

I really enjoyed taotajima.jp until I tried to use my ‘back’ button.

Think there is a way to get the same effects without turning a page scroll into a page load?

People still have personal websites, but they are rarely designed in any special way. Easier to use something that works.

And the distribution networks greatly penalize personal websites. Anything to stop your friends and followers from clicking away from The Platform. It's sad and I believe has killed many a promising blog.

Also this joke has a lot of truth to it: Which of the 2 possible websites are you currently designing? https://twitter.com/jongold/status/694591217523363840?lang=e...

"you don't really see personal websites anymore, "

we can thank blogs (blogspot/blogger/etc)and then social media for that.

Yeah, maybe also mobile...and the "news feed"-ification of the web, too.

On the other hand, Web standards makes it easier to use the Web.

That must be why I have 3 dofferent browsers installed in case a website doesn't work on one of them.

When was the last time you really needed that? I haven’t had to in years, and I work in .gov. The only thing I see is needing to enable Flash and that was awhile ago.

I see it frequently in testing. But then, I'm on the web dev side.

Sometimes if I see a web site I think might be too ambitious, I'll open it on each of my testing machines in different browsers, and about 70% of the time, my hunch is right, and it either fails on one or more, or the output looks significantly/unusably different.

It’s interesting because I also do a lot of web development and have really been enjoying being able to develop in Firefox and not need to worry much about things working in Chrome/Safari, with a little care checking caniuse.com for the newest things.

Firefox-first definitely seems to be the way forward for web developers. We fell into the trap of Chrome-first and ended up having to fix everything for FF and IE, creating a lot of work. Soon discovered that if we just developed for Firefox everything would generally "just work" in the other browsers.

I generally also find the devtools to be better but both Chrome and Firefox have years-old bugs involving source maps, breakpoints, etc. so I end up cycling between the two during any given day.

Last week. For some reason just over the past month or so, a couple times Google Hangouts has randomly decided it doesn't support Firefox one day, then work fine the next.

A bit further back (maybe a year or so?), I've also had issues with Youtube and my bank's website. Both of those seem to have been fixed, though.

That’s probably just Google’s aversion to paying for QA. I get the same kind of problems in Chrome and their apps which randomly go away after clearing the cache, resetting the app, etc. I suspect the root cause is that most of their developers want to work on cool things rather than fixing the previous round.

It's easy for the masses, but less interesting for people who are interested in how things work.

But have we really reached the end of evolution in web design now? The best looking sites now look mostly the same. Nice fonts, spacey, elegant color scheme.

Maybe the next big trend is command line interfaces on the web. :)

Sure... and during getting a reasonable HTML5 and CSS3, Javascript went mad, and it still lacks an stdlib...

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