Web Dark Ages
pavellaptev.github.io
pavellaptev.github.io
Something I absolutely hate is when I want to learn more about a local business and search for them on Google, but all I find is a Facebook page with minimal info - what happened to websites?!
This reminded me the times of Mozilla Netscape, IE and Firefox. I remember having conversations in /. about how for "normal people" the big blue E icon is the Internet and that grandmas of the world cried that "the internet was gone" when that icon disappeard.
Then it was Google, and now it is Facebook.
Did you ever think that many businesses never had a website.
Even fewer had one that was up-to-date and useful.
What happened is that the masses found their way in to the web, and they did it the easiest way possible.
There is still many independent businesses that have a small website. You haven't proven that the number of such independent business websites has declined.
Most likely, the fraction of small businesses that has an online presence has increased. And this may have skewed the ratio of websites to Facebook pages.
But in absolute numbers, I doubt there's fewer small independent websites today.
I dislike targeted advertising, because I find it useless. I like context advertising much more: When I browse X then I find ads related to X sometimes useful. I use some of their products like gmail and drive sometimes. But for browsing and searching I use Firefox and DDG.
But as a web-dev I dislike Apple/Safari. They have become MS/IE 2.0. My not so generous assumption is that they try to restrict the web to make their app platform more appealing.
This issue is different from the things we criticize about Google. They neither restrict me as a user nor as a developer. I can avoid using their stuff and I can avoid aggressively targeted ads (in fact they have a psychologically negative impact on me).
As for personal sites and blogs: I still very much read personal blogs. The quality (whatever that means, but you know...) of articles on those is generally much higher than on medium/dev.to or whatever platform.
In fact there is so much good content on small/personal sites, that I don't have time to read it all.
This sentiment is inexact and incorrect. MS/IE was a problem once it achieved market dominance. Safari has never achieved such dominance.
More accurate is a comparison using Netscape 1.x-4.x and MSIE =< 6. Allow me to explain.
Prior to MSIE dominating with IE 6, MS was engaged in its campaign to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" Netscape. This is similar to where Google Chrome is now.
Google Chrome rolls in not-yet-ratified web "standards" before anyone, including Safari, has a chance to respond. Thereby, Google Chrome increasingly establishes its dominance.
Safari is in the position of Netscape, with a codebase that is increasingly perceived as inadequate when compared to Google Chrome.
Of course, such a comparison can only go so far.
My main point is that Safari is not flouting or disregarding established W3C/WHATWG web standards but, rather, being very careful about how it implements ratified standards, something that takes time.
Google Chrome, on the other hand, bakes in anything and everything to secure its advantage in the browser market, just as MS did with IE when Netscape was still around.
Once Netscape died, MSIE 6 was the problem.
I agree with you on your arguments about Chrome. I don't support Chrome specific features. They even have broken things in the past.
My perspective on this is that iOS locks out non-Safari browsers, so users are forced to use it and as a developer I'm forced to make workarounds for it.
With IE11 I don't have this problem anymore. We're at a stage now where I can convince my clients of "This is a browser, which is losing official support soon. I can make this feature work/look better on IE11 if you really want, which costs me this much time". IE is being faded out just by the fact that more new stuff looks worse and works worse.
With Safari this is not the case. There is no "Oh this website works better with Firefox, you should install it" which is likely the biggest factor for browser adoption and my gut feeling says that Apple knows and uses this.
This particular statement seems questionable:
> My main point is that Safari is not flouting or disregarding established W3C/WHATWG web standards but, rather, being very careful about how it implements those standards which takes time.
In some cases their actions simply don't make sense, except if you look at it from a perspective of protecting their iOS App platform. For example breaking localStorage in the name of privacy (which is ridiculously paradox) and not supporting obvious, simple UX improvements like scroll-anchoring.
Safari is in some cases stricter/more standards compliant than Firefox and especially Chrome. But in some cases like above the feature intersection of Firefox and Chrome is the one that makes the most sense for the web.
> In some cases their actions simply don't make sense, except if you look at it from a perspective of protecting their iOS App platform.
Agreed 100%!
My earlier comment was in the context of macOS and might have been very different had I also considered iOS/iPadOS.
iOS and iPadOS are restrictive and mobile Safari somewhat slows innovation. Your objections regarding mobile Safari's deficiencies are worth considering. Thank you. I also agree Apple does this to protect the iOS App platform (I might just say "iOS platform"). Reasonable arguments exist about why Apple's lock on mobile Safari is good and why it is bad. (I personally think Apple could do better here, but I am not knowledgeable enough to comment further.)
The IE6 concept i think is now something that transcends just the browser, because it describes very well a trick to maintain market dominance.
Once you get into a position of platform control, as Microsoft did in the IE6 days, together with Windows.. and note here how you have to circle around the whole platform, not just the browser to get the whole picture. To maintain your control, you keep others from telling what the next steps for that particular platform should be.
So its clear to me that its Apple with its OS market share that through Safari will try everything they can to stop the Web to become a competing platform to their "kits". And in their case, this strategy is more clear, when they dont let any other browser engine to be used except the one they control and will never let to become a competing platform to their own app kit.
Because they know that once developers create more multi-platform apps, their distinction as something different, unique and better starts to vanish.
They will play the card of security, and about how they are thinking in they users well-being (and this is whats Apple does best). And of course that "for the sake of security" will be also right, because more features means more ways to exploit. So this is a 'joker card' that they can always use to resort to some excuse their users will believe.
Chrome for instance also use a trick, but its the total reverse of 'IE6', they put in a lot of features, and with this 'platform bloat' its pretty hard for the others engines to follow, requiring a lot of engineering and money to keep playing this expensive and exhaustive game,
People complaining about Blink here, didn't see that other players let go the infernal mission to keep their web engines in sync with the "modern standards" that are mostly proposed by Google, and where almost only them have the engineering and money resources to spend in this "platform bloat" game.
Whatever Apple is doing with Safari, it seems much more resource efficient than Chrome on OS X. (Firefox is somewhere in the middle). Chrome can become unusable under a normal load, while Safari almost never does no matter how much I abuse it. Safari seems to hibernate background windows and tabs much better.
If the tradeoff for accomplishing that resource efficiency is not supporting all of the edge case features Google puts in its browsers, I'm ok with that. It's nice to have that option.
Nowadays the Internet is full of spam disguised as content, but really not containing any content. The majority of the content you see on the web is actually written by marketing agencies, and even "white papers", "case studies" or other similar articles are nothing more than marketing material.
That was my first thought too, when I read the headline.
I'm a self-taught developer with no professional experience, but for over a year I learned everything I needed to know to build a massive web application to fulfill my own need: a collaborative annotation wiki. I poured my freaking heart into it and could never get a single user.
I drew on Jimmy Wales' experiences founding Wikipedia for a lot of inspiration. But got nowhere near the traction he got. As in, I got zero users after nine months since launch. Now it's largely a portfolio piece as I try to search for a real job in tech, by leveraging the 14,000 lines of code in Python/Flask to prove that I know how to develop an app. ( https://anno.wiki is the url if you're curious).
I can only hope that the real reasons I haven't gained traction are that (a) the interface just isn't welcoming enough (I tried too hard to do progressive enhancement with almost no experience in UX) and (b) simply not advertising. After a nine month break I'm getting ready to start re-developing a new front end in React to maybe make it more welcoming to non-techie lit nerds, and then maybe target advertise on Facebook, but I just don't know.
My deepest fear is just that the web is not an interesting place anymore, and Wikipedia just wouldn't get a foothold now, and that's why I can't. I just don't know.
1. The contrast is way too low, I can barely read it.
2. The typesetting for Hamlet looks really nice.
3. Why would I want to use this?
The basic idea was (is) to create a definitive resource for annotations on literature. Annotated information on any text is spread sloppily across different editions, from Oxford World Classics to Norton, and generally don't focus on the same issues. Much of it is commentary on textual issues, or only identify certain things. Entire passages will be detailed in one copy, but not in another.
Basically I just feel like there should be a definitive resource for deep reading. An ever more detailed pool of analytical interpretation. It's a dream, I just don't know that others are as interested in it as me.
There are certain resources, like Infinite Jest Page by Page[1] that were essentially a single book version of what I'm trying to accomplish and were super effective, but not very normalized or formalized. I really just hope to do something like that, on a larger scale, with more literature. My dream would be to also include copyright texts, viewable either through a token provided by a purchase of the text from the publisher, or by just searching for lines to see annotations. I really just want to create a super massive body of exhaustive and quasi-definitive annotations to all of the world's literature.
And yeah, the color scheme is apparently not very popular. It's really just my own implementation of Ethan Schoonover's light version of solarized[0], which is supposed to be what it's like to read a book in the shade on a bright summer day. But however romantic that sounds, it's not very popular.
[0]: https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/ [1]: https://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/david-foster-wallace/in...
You might find some interested parties in academia. I happen to have met a postgraduate once whose entire thesis was in the form of annotations. Apparently it's a big deal in lit academia, maybe you could become their Arxiv. Maybe when it comes time to market you could cold email a bunch of grad students.
90s web was a wild west, but it was a far cry from its "dark ages".
I may get my Photoshop in the browser dream, but it is another nail in coffin for the free and open web.
Also, before Atom and VS Code, Adobe worked on Brackets, which was a text editor built with web technologies (pre-Electron) with a lot of the same goals.
All this to say… it still wouldn't have been my preference (I love "View Source") but there's plenty of evidence they made attempts to engage the broader developer communities and do a fair bit of work in the open.
I could make a frameset page today, all browsers still support it. I could make a strict xhtml 1.0 page, browsers still support it.
Stop using Google-agenda driven features, and they'll perish.
(Remember how FF went against the monopoly of IE6? It's doable.)
I believe microblogging is reshaping the way we approach public discussion as a whole. Limited capacity for expression and implicit ability to take everything out of context can lead to frustration and miscommunication.
Now that every marketer, "growth hacker", "entrepreneur" and their dog are on there it's the opposite. Medium is now a signal that some idiot is trying to build credibility in an unrelated field by rehashing basic facts/existing content and peppering it with stock images and "sign up for my newsletter" forms.
But so do personal pages and other pages.
I was tasked with dealing with a old webapp based on some old technology. When googling the sheer amount of "here's the answer" with a link that is now dead ... and that same link spread across dozens of sites is very common.
The web is ephemeral by default.
If you dig through the HTML, the article content is all there, and it could be fixed with changes to Zotero's Medium and Substack translators[1], but that it should even been necessary to do what amounts to a site-specific hack is a problem in itself.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-file/
Censorship as opposed to moderation?
In any case, the corporations exacerbate the problems of dredge going viral, prioritizing engagement over information.
Our corporate overlords choose what to display, and thus they choose what to take away.
Somehow even highly technical interfaces, e.g. DNZ zone editors are now made mobile-first. I wonder, is the majority of people really editing zone files on their phone? don't people value their time anymore?
I think the sweet spot is mobile-compatible controls and progressively enhanced design that can scale up or down. Preferably using the simplest tools, even if unfashionable.
Unless you're just reading a text-only article, there's a big difference between what a mobile interface can and should offer, and what a desktop interface can and should offer. I agree that we've sacrificed desktop for the sake of mobile.
I understand why this is done for sites whose goal is to show advertisements. If the majority of the users are mobile and you get most of your money from them, it becomes harder to justify creating a proper desktop experience.
I suppose I wish more people spent the time to build desktop-class interfaces regardless.
I'd join that movement. The modern web is such a disappointing mess.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-low... https://theconversation.com/yes-websites-really-are-starting... https://twitter.com/QuestForTori/status/1211561864326332416
# of bytes the page downloads.
# of scripts/stylesheets the page downloads.
# of ads the page downloads.
# of http requests the page does.
If that happens, the minimalists will typically choose the most efficient page because competition has already ensured that content quality will be top notch in almost all of them for most popular searches.
What roles does the web serve that benefit humanity? Some of the most important are: 'literary', 'research', 'educational', 'financial service', 'commercial service', 'audio/video'.
Then we have a 'typesetting/graphic-design' role, which is 99% of the reason the web 'requires' JS and CSS. As long as we were happy with a "one-size-fits-all" design, we could enable the other roles via (existing, and future) HTML tags alone (the way we did prior to the introduction of JS).
Now, what are the trade-offs we make to gain the 'typesetting/graphic-design' role? They are a loss of: security, privacy, legibility, compatibility, accessibility, ease-of-use, and page load speed. To be fair, we also gain fantastic abilities for web developers to innovate, but we could probably find some workaround, without 'AJAX', to allow devs to experiment.
The world would be better off, in may ways, if we scrapped the web's dynamic features, created a few new HTML tags, and re-implemented them using HTML alone.
The point I wanted to make with my comment is that the dullness also has advantages.
You also don't need JS to support it, although you may have to give up on the idea that your site has to look the same in all browsers, because not all browsers can do things like automatic hyphenation.
And frankly I am happy that I don't have to read source code in Courier just because it is the only available monospace font.
> There is absolutely no reason great
> typography should come at the expense of privacy
However CSS is not benign. There are features that bad actors regularly exploit. For example, setting the opacity of an evil button to 0, and positioning it above an innocent button.
Also, CSS, as currently designed, is a barrier to reuse. The model I like is one where users are at liberty to display web content however they (the user, not the website) prefer. Since CSS is basically reusable only in theory, it inhibits that.
> I am happy that I don't have to read source code in
> Courier just because it is the only available monospace font.
This is partly because HTML has its own competing presentation features, and partly because there is an infinite number of cases for which a designer would have to write rules (eg: many html elements, that can also be nested)
I want an internet that helps to enlighten society, not mainly induces it to pump out memes, insults and prank videos.
The hegemony you're referring to is Blink, and it doesn't help the "toppling" effort when you lump WebKit in with it. WebKit is an effective check against Google's power, but not if folks continue imagining that two distinct projects that diverged years ago are one and the same.
Is completely wrong; Even today the most popular desktop screen resolution by a country mile is 1366x768. All the budget laptops sold in supermarkets etc. still use that resolution and most people simply can't afford to drop ~1,000 GBP/USD on the 'family computer'.
Fun fact... 1366x768 exists because it was trivial for far-east manufacturers to switch from 1024x768 4:3 to 1366x768 16:9, as the latter could still use 90% of existing LCD controller design, thus making it really cheap to switch their fabrication over.
https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/
It's super interesting to look at and filter for various categories. For desktop 1366x768 wins out slightly ahead of 1920x1080. But for mobile, devices report a lot of 360x640. Fascinating.
Here's the mandatory stackexchange discussion on why that is:
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/98985/why-the-360x640...
In fact its display is remarkably good.. Much better than the 1366x768 TN crap of my company Thinkpad. Embarassingly for Lenovo.
I'm curious of that's a 2x, 4x, etc version of high ppi devices; it's not impossible.
If you filter to the US, the most common resolution is 1920x1080.
Weird resolutions like this are starting to appear since android manufacturers are using notched screens these days, even for a cheap $50 phone.
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10+furlongs+in+attopar...
For a long time I have thought of it as a period where all our data was stored in decaying media that would be lost to future historians, much like the real dark ages. My source for this idea comes from sci-fi author Charles Stross:
>In the future, the 20th century will be seen as a dark age — while previous centuries left books and papers that are stable for centuries with proper storage, many of the early analog recordings were stable enough to survive for decades, but the digital media and magnetic tapes and optical disks of the latter third of the 20th century decay in mere years. And if they don't decay, they become unreadable: the original tapes of the slow-scan video from the first moon landing, for example, appear to be missing, and the much lower quality broadcast images are all that remain. So stability is important, and I'm not even going to start on how we store data and metainformation describing it.
From here: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping...
Our consensus was that the persistence of digital information is extremely fragile compared to physical media and oral tradition.
This is kind of scary. Our biological niche is very much dependent on culture and passing on information.
To be continued?
Things have changed a lot for me personally and for technology. In general, I feel my enthusiasm has dwindled somewhat in the way tech's role has played out in society. In my opinion the big "Web 2.0" and social rush was more about bending the Internet to the wills of private enterprise rather then private enterprise bending to the wills of the Internet. Or maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon now, a salty junior level graybeard.
I do have hope, though. It's probably that my youthful enthusiasm has given way to cautious optimism.
PS: I don't think tables are a bad layout option. It's not as flexible as CSS obviously but you could make it scale really well to vastly different UI sizes with a combo of fixed and percentage based dimensions. Most "modern" sites just dump everything in a column in the middle. And scale everything as if everyone is on a fat-finger touch interface.
And I do miss the gradient button designs, I hate today's obsession with flatness. Bt that's a matter of taste I suppose. Maybe I don't have any :)
PS It should realllly have mentioned the <marquee>!
What css will work on what element of a table or won't work and why feels like an endless rabbit hole for me.
It's an exaggeration, I know. The web was visually unpleasant those days. Techwise too. Flash?! IE-only? OGM... But almost all information was opened and text-search-ready.
Now information is behind walls (facebook, google) and hidden in videos. Websites lost control with amp-fication of the web, and we're seeing more and more Chrome-only signs.
Ads? everywhere. I remember long time when people despised the idea of using a computer with always-on ads display if it was cheaper. Now we have exactly that.
The web did evolve, but mainly in the wrong direction.
A big chunk of modern websites lack character and look nearly the same to me. I know - consistency, principle of least surprise, et al. Maybe it is just me, but designing a website engaged more of my creative juices and certainly felt like more fun 20y ago.
Say what you will about the Flash website boom of the early 2000s, creative design did peak at the time. Discovering a new site and wowing over the unique design and interactions is an experience lost in time.
Where's my vertically centered div? Where is my elastic newspaper column layout? How much Javascript exists because people couldn't figure out how to position things the way they wanted?
And many websites have the div version of the "table nightmare", especially Facebook and Instagram. It's also popular to put a transparent div over images to prevent people casually saving them.
- Java applets
- metacrawlers
- IE conditional stylesheets
As a side note, I've never understood "tag clouds". They're definitely not "dark ages" because they're still used unfortunately. I think they're the intersection between business-speak gibberish and graphic design and the represent the dangers of mixing product managers with graphic designers.
but yeah...a lot of people got paid a lot of money to do things that are so trivial nowadays, that there's a whole industry of workers who get paid to NOT do them.
And i dont get the hate for tables, they are really handy to center stuff vertically/horizontally, and to scale an interface gracefully (e.g. image column takes up 15% of width), in a way that 12-grid systems fail. HN is tables.
One thing that responsive design does is it makes the zoom out/in gesture useless, while tables can preserve that.
From Wikipedia:
> The "Dark Ages" is a historical periodization traditionally referring to the Middle Ages (c. 5th–15th century) that asserts that a demographic, cultural, and economic deterioration occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire.
If you're trying to keep with how "Dark Age" I don't think the periods you're referring to are at all "Dark". The cultural output of the web back then was _massive_, novel, and growing. It's even more massive now, and growing at a faster rate than before. Whether that output is quite as novel now is up for debate, but what I'm saying is that if there is such a thing as a "Web Dark Age", we haven't seen it yet.
Back then, it was the early days and things were still being worked out. It wasn't a deterioration, since there was nothing to deteriorate.
Nonetheless, I like the website and it's a nice snapshot of some design trends of the time.
I'm certainly glad a standardised way of handling custom fonts emerged though, I remember SIFR being particularly painful.
That said, this site could almost do with a "Best viewed in Chrome" sticker, as the removal of -webkit-font-smoothing does some weird things to text in desktop Safari for me.
In a broader sense, I'd like to see sections on Altavista, Lycos, Geocities, the rise and decline of Myspace and how Paypal and IE sucked.
IE and Paypal still sucks.
Or, conversely, the evolution of Facebook from "bulletin board system for college students" to "a lumbering behemoth that's competing with Google to gobble up the web."
Even tumblr and blogger were better in the sense that there was some diversity and of course GeoCities while centralized, allowed people much greater content control.
The Dark Ages are the fact that Twitter and public Facebook pages eT al, won’t be backed up by Archive.org and decades of human culture will vanish one day when these sites go the way of GeoCities.
The rising appification of everything behind app stores also mean the death of content preservation. I can still load the first Web page ever published, I can still run spacejam.com, but tens of thousands of 32bit apps have disappeared from app stores never to be runnable again.
I can run 8bit and 16bit apps on emulators from my childhood, but can’t run games I enjoyed on iOS just a few years ago. Death of culture.
Bronze Age might be better, I guess. Nothing wrong with it, just a simpler time.
For most sites, I’d say the near-ubiquitous mega footer pattern has supplanted the site map.
It was just content. Blissfully simple, visually compelling content.
Those icons are for the Flash authoring tool which isn't the one being killed. The flash player is.
I have vivid memories of making websites during secondary school. First for free on Geocities and then later on my first paid hosting (Lycos if I recall correctly) so that I could host my PHP projects. At some point I started making websites and animations in Macromedia Flash and those glassy buttons easy but cool to make at the time.
And then I found some things I forgot to mention, like Guestbooks (wow) and Sitemaps. Gonna tour her right now!
I don't want to bother with the binaries groups, though.
I was talking about this to someone the other day. In fact I wrote a script after the conversation to simulate loading porn as a joke.
It is missing some <marquee> elements and flashing ad banners...
I even had one such notebook myself, but it always felt to me like a one-off thing, because I already had full HD displays on desktop for years.
Historically, this was the start of an important process. That of turning a fully functional multimedia access and delivery network (the WWW) into a money-extraction system.
But Web 2.0 was just around the corner to solve that problem . . .