Web 1.61803 or Web Golden

It's funny. I see a lot of folks who reminisce about how the Web was smaller, more personal, creative, and diverse in the early days. My recollection disagrees on the creativity and diversity part. I remember a web and internet generally filled with variations of the same constellation of interests: technically interested people, generally in STEM, mostly university educated, open to LGBT issues, liking metal music, with a large minority of folks that watched anime. This early web was certainly more personal as most sites, even large ones, were run by maybe a few folks at most.

Now as someone who grew up in a blue-collar, immigrant community this was a breath of fresh air to me. When most of my peers were more likely to ask the teacher why we needed to learn about geometry and multiplying large numbers together, I loved interacting with people that genuinely liked to think about things. But diverse this world was not. And while my professional and personal circles have over time essentially become a mirror of the folks I first met when I went online, I hesitate to call us diverse or creative.

We'll always have the early web as long as we don't let browsers go completely HTTPS only (HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 w/TLS required) and demand support for HTTP/1.1 (HTTP+TLS optional). These days modern websites have an unmaintained lifetime approximately equal to the duration between changes in ACME versions supported by LetsEncrypt. They're transient. But old websites without continually renewing certs and made of HTML and files can last forever... if our browsers lets us communicate with them.

> I do think that was the golden era of the web. It was quirky and yet beautiful. It was limited and yet diverse. It was the sweet spot between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. It was Web 1.61803! It was Web Golden!

I agree with this, while also wondering how much of it is nostalgia fueled rose colored glasses.

I’ve been doing professional web development since the late 90s. Most of my nostalgia is about how much easier things were in the web 1.618 days (though, honestly, I wouldn’t want to do without web 2.0’s Ajax or, later, fetch).

For me the big turning point was ES6. All of the sudden it was deemed necessary to transpile our javascript files, which led directly to the build toolchain hell we are in now.

These version numbers fail to stick because business people with no understanding of the technology keep trying to make it about the content. Going back 15 years ago people tried the term “Web 3.0” first as the semantic web and then some advertising nonsense. Last year it was about some cryptocurrency stupidity.

It’s not about the content. It’s about the experience. Web 2.0 were sites making use of XHR (asynchronous HTTP requests) to send/receive content without refreshing the page. Back in the 2000s this was a massive improvement because the experience was better over slow connections and there weren’t giant frameworks to dick it up. You actually had to know what you were doing and the experience was massively improved.

In that spirit “Web 3.0” will likely be a socket and event driven experience. Now the bottleneck isn’t the transmission but slow applications from poorly trained developers. When the application and the transmission are both fast a web application can perform faster than desktop applications doing everything in 50ms or less in response to user interactions. You aren’t going to achieve that with the overhead of HTTP round trips.

You are still allowed (as far as I know) to make websites with plain HTML, CSS and (optionally) normal JavaScript. I do it. People do use my web applications regularly (although not a lot by HN standards). Have not been put in jail yet.

Ooh, I like the idea of using "Web Pi" for next gen web standards as a way of one-upping the idiots who hijacked "Web3". Very geeky, as is expected of the web.

webπ, or webPi? wπ looks too small. And wwwπ looks like someone was typing WWII and something went horribly wrong with autocorrect.

(I refuse to spend the next decade saying, "No, I mean the real Web 3, you know three-point-0. Web 3.0 is different.")

At this point Web N is is basically just snappy advertising for a bundle of concepts which was useful precisely one time in history: Web 2.0.

[This is the space where I'd love to write a long message about why it was important, why it failed, what we can learn from the failure, and so on. But all of that is old news, and probably much better explained by someone else already.]