Welcome to url.town, population 465
url.town
url.town
(I don't think this detracts from such sites, to be clear; they're adopting new technologies where they provide practical benefits to the reader because many indieweb proponents are pushing it as a progressive, rather than reactionary, praxis.)
Are they going out of their way to recreate an aesthetic that was originally the easiest thing to create given the language specs of the past, or is there something about this look and feel that is so fundamental to the idea of making websites that basically anything that looks like any era or variety of HTML will converge on it?
The CSS on the page is only to make modern browsers behave like old ones in order to match the rendering.
The guestbook has some javascript if you notice to defeat spam: https://bootstra386.com/guestbook.html but it's the kind of javascript that netscape 2.0 can run without issue.
Unfortunately it won’t, at least not when you’re serving it with that configuration.
It uses what used to be called “name-based virtual hosting” (before it became the norm), which looks at the Host request header to determine which site to serve. Internet Explorer 3, released in 1996, was the first version of Internet Explorer to send a Host header. I think Netscape 3, also released in 1996, might’ve been the first version to support it as well. So, for instance, Internet Explorer 2.0, released in 1995, will fail to load that site at that URL. If you test locally with localhost, for instance, then this problem won’t be apparent, because you aren’t using named-based virtual hosting in that situation.
If you need to support early-1996 browsers and older, then your site needs to be available when you request it without any Host header. In most cases, you can test this by using the IP address in your browser location bar instead of the hostname.
Edit:
At one point around 1998, it wasn’t possible to directly install Internet Explorer 4 on Windows NT 4, because it shipped with Internet Explorer 2 and microsoft.com used name-based virtual hosting, or at least their downloads section did. So the method to install Internet Explorer 4 on Windows NT 4 was to use Internet Explorer 2 to download Netscape Navigator 4, and then use Netscape Navigator 4 to download Internet Explorer 4.
In the modern world, one common probe performed by attackers is to see whether a site responds with its own IP address in the Host: header, or the address-to-name lookup result of the IP address in the DNS, or the well-known defaults of some WWW servers.
What they're relying upon, of course, is people/softwares allowing IP addresses and the reverse lookup domain names, but forgetting to install security controls for those as virtual hosts.
Or, equally as bad, the fallback if no Host: header is supplied being a private/internal WWW site of some kind.
In practice, it's going to be tricky to know without measurement; and the shifting of the default at the client end to from 0.9 and 1.0 to 1.1 began back in 2010. Asking the people who run robots for statistics will not help. Almost no good actor robots are using 0.9 and 1.0 now, and 0.9 and 1.0 traffic dropped off a cliff in the 2010s falling to 0% (to apparently 1 decimal place) by 2021 as measured by the Web Almanac.
* https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2021/http
If a modern HTTP server stopped serving 0.9 and 1.0, or even just had a problem doing so to decades-old pre-1.1 client softwares, very few people would know. Almost 0% of HTTP client traffic would be affected.
And, indeed, http://url.town/ is one of the very places that has already turned 0.9 off. It does not speak it, and returns a 1.1 error response. And no-one in this thread (apart from edm0nd) knew.
https://portal.mozz.us/gopher/gopher.somnolescent.net/9/w2kr...
with these NEW values in about:config set to true:
security.ssl3.ecdhe_ecdsa_aes_128_gcm_sha256
security.ssl3.ecdhe_rsa_aes_128_gcm_sha256
security.ssl3.ecdh_ecdsa_rc4_128_sha
security.ssl3.ecdh_rsa_rc4_128_sha
security.ssl3.ecdhe_ecdsa_rc4_128_sha
security.ssl3.ecdhe_rsa_rc4_128_sha
security.ssl3.rsa_rc4_128_md5
security.ssl3.rsa_rc4_128_shaWhat do you mean by that? Especially the "social" part?
Isn't that https://subreply.com/ ?
For example, I do this with my website. I receive comments via email (with the sender’s addresses hashed). Each page/comment-list/comment has its own rss feed that people can “subscribe” to. This allows you to get notified when someone responds to a comment you left, or comments on a page. But all notifications are opt-in and require no login because your rss reader is fetching the updates.
Since I’m the moderator of my site, I subscribe to the “all-comments” feed and get notified upon every submission. I then go review the comment and then the site rebuilds. There’s no logins or sign ups. Commenting is just pushing and notifications just pulling.
example https://spenc.es/updates/posts/4513EBDF/
I plan on open sourcing the commenting aspect of this (it’s called https://r3ply.com) so this doesn’t have to be reinvented for each website, but comments are just one part of the whole system:
The web is the platform. RSS provides notifications (pull). Emailing provides a way to post (push) - and moderate - content. Links are for sharing and are always static (never change or break).
The one missing thing is like a “pending comments” cache, for when you occasionally get HN like traffic and need comments to be temporarily displayed immediately. I’m building this now but it’s really optional and would be the only thing in this system that even requires JS or SSR.
I like your thinking. Beautiful website, by the way!
Do you think think this would work: a little icon that opens a pure html disclosure element with instructions and a design with text laid out sort of in the shape of an email.
“(Text only instructions) Send an email like this:
To: <site>@r3pl.com
Subject: <page_or_comment_url>
Body: <write your comment here, be careful to not accidentally leave your email signature>”
(For the youth, this is basically what Yahoo was, originally; it was _ten years_ after Yahoo started before it had its own crawler-based search engine, though it did use various third parties after the first few years.)
(I recall too that when Yahoo did add their own web crawler, all web devs did was add "Pamela Anderson" a thousand times in as meta tags in order to get their pages ranked higher. Early SEO.)
2010 archive of dmoz: https://web.archive.org/web/20100227212554/http://www.dmoz.o...
Even if it was $10/year, people would still cry foul.
There was a time where "willing to pay for access" was a decent spam control mechanism, but that was long ago
As you say, those coffees seem to keep on selling…
If on the other hand, you spent the $200k on leasing an omg.lol domain in perpetuity, you could hold the domain for 10 millenniums.
If we were in the Dune universe, that means your omg.lol domain would expire roughly around the same time as the Butlerian Jihad starts and the thinking machines are overthrown.
X is just one cappuccino, Y is just 3.5 bagels, Z costs not more than a pint, A costs almost as much as a nice meal … and so on. God's sake! :)
We're always discussing something along "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" in the context of social media, yet now we're presented a solution and criticize that it's not free.
You can also roll your own webring/directory for free on your ISP's guest area (if they still offer that) and there's no significant network effect to url.town yet that would make you miss out if you don't pay.
What is (was) it? I can't find anything with a search (too many unrelated results).
(Whether for this or comparable projects.)
Information, is basically is about relating something to other known things. A closer relation is being interpreted as location proximity in a taxonomy space.
The US Library of Congress is an interesting case study to my mind. The original classification scheme came from Thomas Jefferson's private library (he donated the collection to the US Government after the original Library of Congress was burned in 1812. The classification has been made more detailed (though so far as I know the original 20 alphabetic top-level classes remain as Jefferson established them), and there's been considerable re-adjustment, as knowledge, mores, and the world around us have changed. The classification has its warts, but it's also very much a living process, something I feel is greatly underappreciated.
At the same time, the Library also has its equivalent of keywords, the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Whilst a book or work will have one and only one Classification assigned to it (the Classification serving essentially as an index and retrieval key), there may be multiple Subject Headings given (though typically only a few, say 3--6 for a given work). These are used to cross-reference works within the subject index.
The Subject Headings themselves date to 1898, and there is in fact an article on the ... er ... subject, "The LCSH Century: A Brief History of the Library of Congress Subject Headings, and Introduction to the Centennial Essays" (2009), I'm just learning as I write this comment:
https://web.archive.org/web/20191117161738/http://shirky.com...
(As a bit of meta, one would notice how in making this argument it itself has to use the classifying approach, but that does not defeat the point and is rather more of a pre-requisite for communicating it.)
Notably, the classifying mode was shown in other animals (as this is common to probably every creature with two eyes and a brain) to engage when seeking food or interacting with friendly creatures. This highlights its ultimate purposes—consumption and communication, not truth.
In a healthy human both parts act in tandem by selectively inhibiting each other; I believe in later sections he goes a bit into the dangers of over-prioritizing exclusively the classifying part all the time.
Due to the unattainability of comprehensive and lossless classification, presenting information in ways that allows for coexistence of different competing taxonomies (e.g., tagging) is perhaps a worthy compromise: it still serves the communication requirement, but without locking into a local optimum.
[0] I don’t recall off the top of my head exactly how Iain gets there (there is plenty of material), but similar arguments were made elsewhere—e.g., Clay Shirky’s points about the inherent lossiness of any ontology and the impossible requirement to be capable of mind reading and fortune telling, or I personally would extrapolate a point from the incompleteness theorem: we cannot pick apart and formally classify a system which we ourselves are part of in a way that is complete and provably correct.
Anyone with an account already that wants to take requests for URLs to add?
(Hey, charge $1 a request and you should be able to break even on your $20 domain purchase before the day is up.)
I'll take requests, but I don't guarantee I'll add just anything.
https://www.simonstalenhag.se/
^ The link is for the sci-fi art, not the hookers.
Lol, just kidding, that link is someone whose talent greatly exceeds my own.
... Possibly I'm missing something, but currently it has four categories under "Hobbies"; folklore, Pokemon, travel and yarn craft. Are you suggesting that if someone added "car stuff", that would be, well, basically complete, the big five hobbies represented?
It's clearly extremely new and has almost no content as yet.
Times is really not adapted for the web and is particularly bad on low-resolution screens. How many computer terminals used Times for anything but Word processing?
Verdana was released in 1996 — is that too recent?
Also, the website styles don't specify font-family at all, so you are complaining about your own browser defaults.
Good pickup on the font being the default browser choice, I didn't notice that!
But that's not true at all! Maybe the point was that web should use sans-serif instead of serif, but that statement (and I hope I'm not making a straw man here) is as a blanket invalid as well (in my opinion, ofc).