The HTML Hobbyist (2022)
htmlhobbyist.com
htmlhobbyist.com
Which is this mix of… yeah I guess that’s true. I feel the same. But also, I have absolutely zero right to really externalize that grievance. People can do whatever they want for good or bad reasons, whether I’m equipped to understand those reasons or not.
But what we can do is be the change we want. Just make my own little oasis. Find other oases and hook ‘em all up.
Which then got me thinking about if there could be a special Web Classic experience we could voluntarily hook into. Maybe someone runs a search engine that only indexes crawled pages that have a X-Web-Classic header or whatever. If people actually want it enough to put the work in, can’t we make it? I guess corporations would come to capitalize on its success if it became successful. But I’d be willing to fight that battle if we got to that point (ie. curation or tech limitations or whatever…)
I’d love a browser that I switch into Web Classic Mode and it pretty much only reaches these resources. Example.com doesn’t implement an X-Web-Classic header response? Give me a 404. Does it try to load cross origin resources that aren’t X-Web-Classic? 404. Straight to 404.
This is kind of like what the Gemini protocol is trying to do.
That being said, there is a search engine named Wiby [https://wiby.me] that focuses "...building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet.", so maybe that be nice to check out?
Well put. Personally I have zero issues with SPAs and the amount of Javascript we are facing in the web industry right now. And if you try to build some kind of business that wants to present itself successfully to potential customers, on the web, there is no way to write a appealing website without Javascript.
Most target demographics at this point and in the future have grown up with beautiful websites and the internet being really interactive. I highly doubt they'd be interested in what you have to say if you wrote your page in a way the web was supposed to be used.
Here's some information. Take it or leave it.
This has always made me wonder if anybody really builds anything from scratch any more. With so many frameworks, even for basic static sites, I wonder who's out there writing HTML, CSS and JS from scratch.
Or is something that has been regulated to the dustbin of history?
I've seen someone build furniture from literal trees and wooden tools. I guess they didn't smelt their own metal, but they're not using power tools. Is that a viable business? probably for a very small bespoke traditional furniture audience. Most furniture these days is built using layers upon layers of technology. (and just like with the Web, people, including myself, have strong opinions on furniture quality and source)
He ended up doing a two year apprenticeship to learn how to hand make wheels and other instruments they needed. Before he graduated, he already had a very lucrative niche company and woodworking business selling his wares and delivering them to the families.
There is still a strong demand for well built wood furniture but most people never realize there are economies that rely on this stuff for their livelihood.
I do it, for my blog at least.
However, I use a proprietary framework of my own for commercial software development with the only f/end dependency being materialcss (although, I won't be using that soon, either). Backend dependency is PostgreSQL.
[1]: https://g5t.de
Inside that idea are all the nuances of what's your goal? Who is your audience? What do they care about? What do they want? What do they tolerate? Etc. If you achieve your goal and reach your audience, but a different audience hates that you're using JavaScript or React or whatever, do you really care?
It's not that I disagree with the premise, but you should understand that the "informational website" scenario tends to apply only to a subset of a website's requirements. As soon as you stumble upon any need that goes beyond what static HTML can provide, you are faced with the decision to either create tech sprawl and a patchwork of ad-hoc solutions, or you just bite the bullet and onboard a framework that handles all your needs.
> Customers won't care about all that. […]
Looks like we’re on a similar page.
I do think people are generally frustrated with how shit everything is nowadays, but have trouble spotting the root cause.
A suspicion of mine (I have no data) is that part of the problem is that most of the folks who could handle complexity and who pay attention to detail (people who could be designing QA tests for devices) have instead been funneled into building and testing complex websites. Or building website building frameworks and then testing the frameworks, the websites themselves rarely seem to actually get tested.
It is also hard to price the cost of all this nonsense, because the main way of paying for it is that companies buy ads on social media sites. The price of those ads has to be factored into the price of their products eventually, but it is all really diffuse.
What can we do? Not buy stuff from companies that engage in all this. I don’t buy much, as a result.
There is no "way the web was supposed to be used". It was all just improvised and messy and open ended. Just some browser developers going "Sure, let's add a blink tag. Why the fuck not. Enjoy!". The only intention for that was to make stuff blink obnoxiously. Javascript was just a thing that they bolted on around the same time.
The default state of the web in the nineties was unstyled, fugly, and obnoxious. Just as it is today. You give people any kind of tools and they'll abuse them. Nothing has actually changed that much. The web people pine for, never really existed. It's just their lost youth that they are pining for.
Perfectly said and I think this is applicable far beyond websites.
These heavy websites and apps have many consequences:
- security: supply chain attacks. For the user, difficulties to check what runs in the browser (yeah, most users don't know how to do this and/or will not take the time - all the more reason, I'd say).
- software freedom: you end up running a crazy amount of non-free software in your browser, or you are just barred from basic things
- environment: it's a disaster: this stuff requires powerful devices, and probably leads to the disposal of many perfectly capable phones / computers. CIs are spending crazy CPU ticks building and building the app. Complex CDN-based setups to mitigate a bit the bloat.
- cost for the users: after having to buy newer hardware better have a strong data plan for all these heavy wannabe app websites!
- wait time for the users: it's awful the amount of time we collectively waste looking at loaders and slowly loading pages despite crazy bandwidths of today.
- convenience: all this memory and cpu usage leads to worse battery time. If your network is spotty, you'll need to spend a lot of time retrying to load the thing
- inclusion: if you happen to live in an area where you can only afford slow network access, things will be barely usable.
Environmental costs and user costs for developer convenience. As usual, companies externalize costs.
It's not only irrational feelings like nostalgia, it's solid reasons as well.
I do have hope that we figure out at least more lightweight SPAs at some point though.
I find it pretty annoying that people mischaracterize the dislike of the modern web as nostalgia. The modern web is a big wasteful resource hog that expects users to just randomly download and run JavaScript programs.
And another thing: A modern web browser has to be incredibly performant because of all the bloat, and also have a robust enough sandbox to just download JavaScript programs from the Internet and run them. So we’ve ended up in a situation where only Google can (plausibly pretend to) have a good enough sandbox for this use-case.
This isn’t just nostalgic grumpiness, we’ve gone from a diverse ecosystem to a hugely fragile tech monoculture run by an ad company.
We cannot make Retail turn itself back into Classic but we can have choices.
The good news is that we're headed right back to the old days before there was an "internet."
Back then, all information was paywalled and siloed in CompuServe, GEnie, Delphi, Quantum Link, American People Link, and a dozen other services.
Today, all information is quickly migrating back into paywalls and silos. Only the names have changed.
Some vibe coder saw nothing wrong with this. This is the future of the web.
I'm impressed it took only 6 seconds. Would hire.
My idealism of what a good website ought to look like or how it should communicate doesn't have to correlate to reality for my opinion to be valid.
What do you think is wrong with the site?
The website cost next to nothing but a bit of prompting time, it loads almost instantly on my 2021 smartphone while on network broadband (4G), it uses parallelism extensively to optimize perfs with cascade loads, it is very responsive, and it's objectively quite nice to the eye.
Well, not exactly, but this is the next best thing:
The author is a HN regular.
While I agree with everything you wrote, the nuance is that not everyone can make their own little oasis. That doesn't make a complaint about a lack of oasis invalid.
And even for those who can, the vast majority of time spent on the internet is consuming content, not creating it, so it's perfectly logical to lament the lack of the little oasis that used to exist.
I’d love a browser that I switch into Web Classic Mode and it pretty much only reaches these resources.
Be the change you want: https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox
But I do think it should be considered totally unacceptable for things like government services to be gatekept by JavaScript. Same for entities that receive lots of public funds, like universities.
- The desire for a simpler, quaint looking Web
- The desire for discoverability on the Web that isn't so driven by algorithms
I love what the Web once was, aesthetically speaking, but to me the real problem is that of discoverability.
There was a time where, if you built it, the audience would come. Today that is not so much the case, especially for written content which has become so heavily devalued. I would never write a blog today (especially one that is self-hosted) because I know I would spend most of my time begging for scraps. If you really want a large enough audience that your creative efforts are worthwhile, you have to churn out content. I don't want to churn anything out. One can churn out snippets, which is effectively what one does on sites like X, but then your writing has to either by pithy truisms or cringey drama. Besides, more and more people just want to consume content passively through audio and video. But then now I have to essentially put on a big production just to get my ideas out there, and for an audience that is probably less intellectually curious than those who would actually read an article.
The classic Web isn't coming back until something changes about the way people discover new things. The web is no longer a place where one goes to seek information; it's where information comes to you through word-of-mouth and so-called algorithms putting content in front of you.
Golden-era web was great. Now I'd just rather do my job, comment on HN, and go fishing. Actually trying to bring back the old web is like trying to bring back Jazz clubs hoping everyone will come to their senses and dance the Charleston again. No, it will always be a niche thing.
The problem isn't algorithms per se, but how those algorithms are implemented. Unfortunately, people coming up with alternatives tend to lean too far in the other direction - we have alternative search engines designed to exclude all sites using Javascript, for instance, which cater to people who don't want to interact with any part of the modern web, but we don't have an alternative that does what Google used to do before search became big business and simply attempt to catalog the entire web (including the parts that HN hates) and display relevant results to the end user.
You need another level of abstraction over the web to make discovery work, as you do with any application to make data useful. It's little different than making queries in a database.
Given that you're on Hacker News, it's likely your use case for the web isn't typical.
And let's not forget that if you have high quality content and submit your pages to Google, they will put you very high in the organic search results.
Fair enough, but I think the problem is the same regardless of the perspective. You as a webmaster wanting to be discovered and me as a user wanting to discover you implies an optimal interface between the two to facilitate that discovery.
Unfortunately, the web is no longer old fashioned. Most links are being posted to social media platforms or link aggregators like HN and Reddit. Most pages only link to other pages if it helps their SEO.
And unfortunately Google no longer ranks content based on quality because they sell rank space and because search is no longer about discovery so much as it is advertising. Which is why I think we do need search engines and algorithms, but we need the kind of search engines and algorithms we had when Google started and before they monetized search and before SEO ate everything when it actually did surface relevant content based on organic links.
I'm not arguing that hyperlinks don't solve the problem of discovery, just that they only solve it at a small scale, and we need a larger scale solution as well.
Why assume you need to seek an audience at all? I have been periodically writing blog posts for about 15 years about whatever I feel like. I may only post a few times a year. I don't have comments turned on. I still enjoy going back periodically to see what I was up to in 2015, and occasionally I get a really nice email from someone who stumbled on a post they found worthwhile.
...which is probably the most succinct way of describing where our dear Old Net has gone: swallowed up by the razor-thin margins of the professional creative economy.
[0] I do strongly dislike JavaScript myself, but specifically from the perspective of language design.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flash-99-percent-bad/
Heck, I'm sure at least some people celebrated when Adobe pulled support for Flash, just like some people probably would now if the likes of React went away forever.
No, they're not. The good tools all died off.
I wish there was still something good that just edited HTML and CSS locally and uploaded it. Mozilla Composer died long ago. Its spinoffs, Nvu, Kompozer, and Blue Griffon are all dead. You can still buy Dreamweaver, but Adobe wants $300 or so a year now, and they really want to sell you their whole "creative cloud". Brackets has been abandoned and converted to something called Phoenix, which now does more things less well.
I don't want a whole "content management system" that assembles pages on the fly from a database. Just a decent WYSIWYG editor that can also manage uploads. I don't want something controlled by the hosting service. I'm using a Dreamhost account for this site, and its main purpose is to host some API endpoints implemented in Go. The human-readable web part is just the documentation. There are many images, so I need more layout than Markdown supports. It's not a blog, so Wordpress is the wrong tool for the job.
You'd think there would be something good. As far as I can tell, no. Anybody know of anything?
What's wrong with launching a file watcher, opening the page in a browser, and editing away with any IDE of your choice?
They're probably larger in number than devs.
OP literally said "I wish there was still something good that just edited HTML and CSS locally and uploaded it."
How much good music would we have if you were forced to build a guitar in order to play it?
The power of CSS has increased to the point that you don't really need Javascript for layout any more.[1] So WYSIWYG tools could work again. Probably faster.
[1] https://codingstella.com/15-advanced-web-development-techniq...
If you want any Javascript, it has to be in a separate .js file, not mixed in with the document.
https://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/
Most WYSIWYG editors have become text editors. Panic’s Coda has become Nova (a text editor). Even what I last saw of Dreamweaver, it was very code-forward.
I think the less technical users just use platforms. More technical users have historically turned up their noses as WYSIWYG editors, so it left a gap in the market.
Looking at AlternativeTo, there are some options out there.
https://alternativeto.net/software/adobe-dreamweaver/?featur...
- Silex. "It is designed for no-code developers with basic HTML/CSS knowledge". That's an oxymoron. Silex looks interesting, but the documentation is confusing. It used to be a desktop application.[1] That was discontinued in 2022. Now it seems to be more closely tied to Gitlab. Worth a look.
There are some commercial products, but most are cloud-dependent.
There is your problem.
Any such editor will invariably be heavily limited to what its developers envisioned the user’s use cases as being, and therefore WYSIWYG software is fiendishly complex as a result for even simple layouts and designs (as opposed to straight code editors).
Plus, web frameworks (HTML, CSS, JS, etc.) are still evolving on a yearly basis, requiring constant updates to any WYSIWYG that demand either a paid product or something that rides on the well-funded coattails of another service or product.
If you want a piece of software that lasts, learn how to code directly. If you can picture a soccer ball in your mind, you can (mostly) reliably envision what code will appear like on the screen before you even test it. It takes practice and experience, but building the WYSIWYG aspect into your own mind is eminently doable unless you have aphantasia.
And honestly, that’s how I view WYSIWYG editors: as accessibility tools for people whose legitimate disability is aphantasia.
For everyone else, WYSIWYG tools are a skills-nerfing crutch, as it isolates the user’s use of code from its direct consequences. By working directly with code, you are forced to envision the output of each element and its relationship to everything else on the page.
And honestly, the only major exception I can come up with is desktop publishing, where the underlying “code” is typically restricted to that master file on the designer’s computer, and has no effect beyond it… once the file is printed out (and the content leaves the designer’s control) everything is cemented ‘in stone’ and the underlying “code” no longer has any impact. Because the system is radically more constrained, with markup standards that are limited to the software and not world+dog, a WYSIWYG program makes sense. And yet… most are still paid products.
Everyone should be writing their documents in LaTeX, not using Microsoft Office or Google Docs as a crutch to understanding formatting.
Other than that, you could look at using a static site generator like MkDocs or Docusaurus. It'll generate a site of HTML pages, and you could either manually upload them to your host, or you could set up an automation that updates your host when you merge changes into git.
I think my response illustrates another problem with modern tools compared to the 90s - there isn't any single tool that edits HTML/CSS and upload them. You now have to glue together several tools.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
The publish command supports FTP, but not, apparently SFTP.
We have zero right to externalize it?
That's absolutely ridiculous and I'm surprised this is a thought taken seriously.
The Web isn't some sort of optional little playground anymore; it's literally the "cyberspace" that affects us all, whether we like it or not. Going full Ted K. isn't an option for normal people. As such, not only isn't criticizing it allowed -- NOT criticizing it when you know about it is irresponsible.
Please, everyone, continue to EXTERNALIZE THE HELL OUT OF THIS GRIEVANCE.
I’m not so certain. It’s like if one bought a nice house in the country, and enjoyed listening to classical music and going to sleep early, and then someone a quarter mile down the road built a concert stadium, and hosted heavy metal concerts every single night.
The mere existence of a heavy metal concert a quarter mile down the road interferes with listening to classical music and turning in early. Likewise, the mere existence of the ad-laden, Javascript-laden, MegaCorp™ Internet goes a long way to preventing one from experiencing the joy of ordinary life in the late 80s or early 90s when the Net was a haven for academics, technologists and hobbyists.
Webrings!
See "We need to bring back webrings", https://arne.me/blog/we-need-to-bring-back-webrings and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38268706
Hard disagree there. I mean, suspect even you wouldn't agree with that second sentence on its own, outside the context of building webpage. (Like, what if "whatever they want" is releasing a cloud of poison gas into the neighborhood?)
But there's another dimension to it too, which is that in many cases my belief is not just "other people are doing something I don't want", it's "other people are doing something they don't actually want, they just don't realize it". The classic example is drugs. If someone spends their whole life drugged out of their mind, even if they have the money to do so, I think many onlookers would think, "You know, if a magic wand were waved and that person could somehow look at their life from the outside, from the perspective of a person who wasn't already locked into that druggie life, they themselves would not want to re-enter that life."
It's just the tyranny of small decisions. We as humans are prone to painting ourselves into corners that we think we chose to be in, although if several choice-points before we had known where we would wind up, we likely would not have chosen to be there. This is doubly difficult to resolve because a sunk-cost fallacy often leads us to avoid admitting to ourselves that we actually made a mistake. And it's triply difficult because it often requires extra work to climb out of the hole we've gotten into.
But it's still good to do this sometimes. It's possible for individuals to make mistakes, and for societies to make mistakes, and for both individuals and societies to make mistakes that they either don't notice or don't fully acknowledge. And it's good for individuals and societies to take stock of where they are and genuinely consider whether it's where they want to be. And it's even good for people to nudge, encourage, or exhort other individuals or society to do that kind of sanity check.
To do otherwise is to accept the strange, fatalistic viewpoint that whatever did happen is what should have happened.
I just hit it though, and some are... kinda sad. Ended up here [0] and the last post from '03 seemed like the author was the last person that still checked in, they seemed quite dejected and sad. Looking further, their about page mentions them going to Rochester Institute of Technology to become an animator, and them being referenced a few times online as someone that was inspiring but who left the community / communities a while ago.
A. Want to get back to the web's roots as a document network, keeping a clear structure and a focus on content,
B. Want to use the web's flexible presentation itself as a medium for expression through styling, interactive content and so on
The Gemini protocol is a good example of A taken to its extreme, while e.g. Neocities leans more toward the latter. The web is by its nature fractured - the independent web even moreso - but sometimes it seems the gap between the two philosophies is the biggest obstacle to more widespread adoption of small web practices, or at least more unified tools for discovery and networking.
It also seems like developers tend to favor type A, which has led to robust infrastructure and projects around it - like Gemini, or the site linked here. But I think a lot of people looking to make a break from big tech are doing so because of the limitations, and going from one set of awkward restrictions to another doesn't look like an upgrade.
Just my two cents. I'd be sad to miss out on the wacky creative sites people build, whether it's because they're stuck in big social media, or because they took the pledge from the linked page:
> make a simple, honest website with the proper use of HTML, the use of CSS only where essential, and the use of JavaScript only where it’s absolutely necessary.
My occasional use of JavaScript only supports technical animations, specialized calculators and real-time LaTeX rendering, not dynamic page generation or dark patterns.
From a modern perspective, my Website is actually a museum. The proof? While I once directed Website visitors to my YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@lutusp), I now find myself directing YouTube viewers to my Website.
Not our topic, but one reason is kids can't read: https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/american-childrens...
Apropos, here's one of my favorite jokes. I visit a bookstore. On the wall is a poster: "The tragedy of illiteracy -- now available as an audiobook."
And yes domain collecting is real.
Technically, the dude is right, but stating the obvious doesn't help. Simply saying "Let's do something like 1996 while appreciating 2025, because!" would have caught my sympathy.
I like projects like these, but lose sympathy when these people trash others as phony; The "purity is the ultimate sophistication" is a dogma.
Roll everything back? "Hey, stop doing Java or Go, let's go X86 Assembly instead because in the end your code is only an abstraction and the magic happens in the compiler and linker, which produce a gargantuan bloat of X86 machine language instructions."
We could say the same about "pure HTML". Which standard? Why not text files?
PS: Has someone already written a browser for HTML in pure X86 yet? It is about time, I guess.
(I love Assembler, do quite some 6510 and 68000 assembler stuff. But it is hard. Brutally hard. I am glad we evolved from there.)
Example. I bought and built a Gundam model the other day, cool stuff, could make a website for that... but there's already a wiki [0] that has a painstaking log of the franchise, everything ever published, etc. I have nothing to add to that, let alone do I have any right to build a website about it.
Of course, I shouldn't take it so seriously; it could be a simple blog post about "this is what I did this weekend, this is what I found, here's some pictures and some links". That'd have its own charm, I'm sure.
I feel good about the future when I see... https://os.ryo.lu/ https://neal.fun/
Somewhere on a zip are my IE 5.5 bookmarks. I'll stumble upon them again one day and remember how excited I was to surf the web on my 233mhz G3.
I don't think any CSS should be essential, but I think tasteful changes to make your website look unique for those who have it enabled is totally appropriate.
E.g. https://kramkow.ski/
I don’t think there are any good places on the internet. They either suffer from the aforementioned problem or are bad in other ways
Enjoy! :-)
If you do this, it's a good idea to learn about the handful of meta tags you'll need so your page doesn't look weird in search results or social media. But word to the wise, it's easy to go overboard with HTML "best practices."
Still, I can't see buying a domain for it and putting it on this guy's webring, because while it's possible someone somewhere might find it useful, i don't think it's possible that person would be able to find it. They'd see the same 30 links to adware crap I saw and build their own like I did. In fact I'm probably the hundredth person to build this exact site for themselves. That part doesn't feel so powerful.
Not sure my site qualifies as hobbyist enough. It is the work of an enthusiast (me) but I used Bootstrap for styling and layout. I use some JavaScript. The site also starts with an animation I made using Tumult Hype. All this is probably too much for a true hobbyist site. Still, I regard my site as my hobby.
Always use relative links like `../css/default.css`. Never use absolute links like `example.com/css/default.css`, never use domain-relative links like `/css/default.css`. Those will break your site when it moves between domains, between directories, or between schemas.
If you use relative links judiciously, you can prototype your site under `file://` and it will Just Work when uploaded
Right now it’s just a thing I did for fun. I’m always messing around with JavaScript. No frameworks, just fun.
They are soooo simple, but still feel like web applications I've seen significant businesses built around. I hope to drive more projects this direction when I'm at work again.
[1] https://mr-prince.com/ [2] https://yungztrunks.de/ [3] https://vvesh.de/
and an unintentional lesson in how hard to update this approach is.
https://github.com/nelilly/html-hobbyist/commit/8658b0ac0023...
Proportionally it kind of works but has problems
there was more personality from an era of tech-naivety. sadly thats almost all gone.
Basically, the web, today, is roughly 99.999% spam. This wasn't the case in 1995. In 1995 it was mostly ham.
Spam is any media that is created with a higher importance placed on making money than on making the media enjoyable.
For me, this is the essence of the World Wide Web: it is open and accessible to everyone. It makes knowledge accessible to everyone in the world, regardless of how poor, educated, or disabled you are. It's kind of a communist utopia, where everyone can participate and contribute.
Now, why do I write this and use the term "communist utopia"? Because I think that the World Wide Web is a great example of how open standards and open technology can create a better world. Even when capitalism tries to take over the web, it is still a place where everyone can participate and contribute.
And this brings me to the point of this article: Telling people what not to do and what to do when sharing content is, in my opinion, not the way to go. Instead, we should focus on how to make the web a better place for everyone. We should focus on how to make it more accessible, more inclusive, and more open. We should focus on how to make it a place where everyone can participate and contribute freely. And by freely, I mean without losing your autonomy or paying with private information.
Anyway, show us your HTML site, document how you built it - that's the kind of thing this page is advocating for.
> Nowadays i just have to prompt Claude
The second behavior leads to the first statement.
Most are missing the point that this heavy use of js or new frameworks like tailwind creates a polarising experience. These things don’t open in older browsers or OS(iOS, android).
This is a problem that few seem to grasp. Now I need a new phone or latest OS just to view my bank website because somebody thought giving new animations within the dashboard is a good idea, because those frameworks are only supported by new browsers, and management need to adopt modernity every quarter.
Web is unnecessarily bloated.
Suspended in bitter ice
I cannot return