The thing that’s usually on my mind when people are lamenting how the Web has evolved is that all the tools are still there to build websites however you want. So the lamentation is really, “other people are doing things in a way I don’t like and that upsets my experience.”
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.
I see there being two related but distinct issues:
- 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.
> 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.
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.
To each their own. At that point, I'd rather just write to myself without publishing so that I can be 110% candid, which I already do by journaling.
My blog is essentially my journal; no one else reads it. However, knowing someone else _might_ read it is making me spend the effort to write in better style, to watch my language, so I would not be embarrassed by myself. That's the value of blog over journal for me.
It sounds like the presumption that you would do this for money is the problem here—you don't have to "beg for scraps" if it's just a hobby done for fun.
...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.
I don't think that discovery without algorithms is possible, because the Web is essentially unstructured. Any means of discovery needs a way to organize all of that information, and then present it in a relevant way. People forget that Google was actually good at this.
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.
How about hyperlinks?
Hyperlinks alone don't work for discovery as a general problem, and on a smaller scale they just push the problem up a level because you still need to discover the hyperlink. The web is just too vast and complex and they don't contain necessary semantic information. This is why the "web portal" failed and gave way to search engines, which were objectively better for the task.
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.
I find that hyperlinks work very well currently. You read something of interest on one page, and discover more information through hyperlinks to other pages. That also works great for books. Almost every book I read mentions other related books within the content, and from there you discover more and more.
Hyperlinks don't help for discovering that page to begin with, or related material not specifically being linked to from that page.
Given that you're on Hacker News, it's likely your use case for the web isn't typical.
Well how would you discover Google? Everybody starts somewhere
It's much easier to discover Google once and let it do the rest of the work than it is to discover an arbitrary page and manually follow an arbitrary chain of hyperlinks across an arbitrary set of other pages hoping they just happen to lead to what you want.
Yes, but I understood the discussion about discoverability to be in the perspective of the webmaster. And in those cases, if you have published good information, other websites can link to you for discoverability. That's how an old fashioned web can be built: Pages linking to other good pages. I see it all the time.
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.
>Yes, but I understood the discussion about discoverability to be in the perspective of the webmaster.
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.
> All the tools are still there to build websites however you want.
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?
> I wish there was still something good that just edited HTML and CSS locally and uploaded it.
What's wrong with launching a file watcher, opening the page in a browser, and editing away with any IDE of your choice?
Not everyone makes websites by hand. I know people that strictly use WYSIWYG editors to make static content. My friend uses this very archaic looking program to make his static content. They all look like design straight taken from geocities but it's what they use. I doubt they're a small co-hort.
They're probably larger in number than devs.
> Not everyone makes websites by hand.
OP literally said "I wish there was still something good that just edited HTML and CSS locally and uploaded it."
That's writing HTML and CSS by hand, which is a pain.
Sure, if only people who are programmers should have the right to express themselves online. The old school internet was completely destroyed when all wysiwyg tools where killed for no reason about 15 years ago. And now the same hackers who killed it and banished all normal people to social media are wondering "where did my good old internet go?".
How much good music would we have if you were forced to build a guitar in order to play it?
> The old school internet was completely destroyed when all wysiwyg tools where killed for no reason about 15 years ago.
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...
That suggests a new kind of WYSIWYG editor. It only does declarative HTML/CSS, no Javascript. Maybe it edits the DOM, not the source. When you save to a file, the HTML and CSS are generated. Maybe use Webkit to do the rendering.
If you want any Javascript, it has to be in a separate .js file, not mixed in with the document.
It looks like RapidWeaver still exists, though last I used it, it wasn’t a typical WYSIWYG editor like classic Dreamweaver. I found it has a higher learning curve than I’d like.
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...
- Rapidweaver. Nice, but MacOS only. Seems to be on the way out, too. It's called "Classic" now, and they want users to migrate to "Elements", which comes with "cloud storage".
- 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.
> Just a decent WYSIWYG editor that can also manage uploads.
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.
> WYSIWYG tools are a skills-nerfing crutch
Everyone should be writing their documents in LaTeX, not using Microsoft Office or Google Docs as a crutch to understanding formatting.
I assume you know how to drill out a cylinder then if you drive a car? Because people who don't know how to reassemble their engine shouldn't be allowed on the roads.
Use SeaMonkey Composer. It's still alive and I use it.
That's still alive! Sort of. Last updated in June 2025. I downloaded it, and created a page.
Haven't seen that in a while.<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">The publish command supports FTP, but not, apparently SFTP.
WordPress isn't just for blogs and I think it might fit your use case for documenting a set of API endpoint. There is likely a free swagger plugin in WordPress that would help you, although I hadn't really looked.
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.
SeaMonkey is still actively maintained, and still has Composer.
> So the lamentation is really, “other people are doing things in a way I don’t like and that upsets my experience.”
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.
Agreed. There are a lot of people complaining about how things used to be better. But not a lot of them succeeding in building better stuff that others actually want to use out of the handful that actually lift a finger to do anything at all (most don't). And in the end that's the only thing that makes a difference.
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.
The whole idea of target demographics seems kind of antithetical to the premise here.
Here's some information. Take it or leave it.
This approach doesn't work nowadays. We have 3 apps for everything. If your app sucks people will go to one of the other 2.
It works as well as it ever did for its purposes. There's an implicit framing that we need to drive engagement and increase user base. Your comment is doing it too. In the old web, hobby sites existed on their own terms, and didn't have a prime directive of increasing metrics. If someone likes another site better, there's no problem for them to just use that instead.
I think it could even be perceived in simpler terms: All website authors have a goal. They can choose whatever approach they want in trying to achieve that goal.
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?
>> there is no way to write a appealing website without Javascript.
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'm sure some do.
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)
When I was in college studying to be an anthropologist, of one my professors told about his TA who just happened to be studying one of the local Mennonite groups and they were complaining when the wheels on their buggies and other stuff would break or go bad, they really didn't have any local carpenters who could or would help them. It was kind of a big issue in their communities.
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.
All of my canvas library's demo pages are hand-coded HTML, CSS and JS. Including the site navigation. Is it worth the effort? Probably not; I just do it this way because I'm too lazy to pull together a sensible tool chain.
> With so many frameworks, even for basic static sites, I wonder who's out there writing HTML, CSS and JS from scratch.
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.
I would if I was building something for my own purposes. And I wouldn't claim it to be the most efficient or beautiful. But if I did it for my own purposes, I wouldn't need to justify it. I just like the process.
Shameless plug: My own website[1] is mostly handwritten, although I use PicoCSS as a CSS framework.
[1]: https://g5t.de
I’m building a Google docs style platform from scratch. No js html css libs of any kind. (But also, not canvas, it does use contenteditable)
I don't think I buy that. It's hard to build a nice web app without JS, but an informational website doesn't need JS to be beautiful.
> I don't think I buy that. It's hard to build a nice web app without JS, but an informational website doesn't need JS to be beautiful.
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.
That's why I wrote business. Wikipedia works for ages now.
craigslist too! that's a business. definitely an exception, though.
Scripting heavy sites do provide a good signal; you can be sure the people behind them are prone to bad designs and aesthetics over functionality. It is disheartening to see how popular that stuff is, but at least it draws attention to itself.
Customers won't care about all that. You may be right from a engineering view but thats not where the money is.
I think that’s where you’re misunderstanding the intention of this. It’s not about money or customers, or even engineering for that matter
> It is disheartening to see how popular that stuff is […]
> 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.
> But also, I have absolutely zero right to really externalize that 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.
If i listen to my favorite classical music radio channel, it doesn't matter what is on the other channels.
It does if the other channels transmit so strongly that they drown out yours.
And that never happens on the radio, and never happens with TCP/IP. It's your own choice what you listen to.
This is nostalgia for the world before a series of "Eternal September" events. In my opinion, it's essentially longing for an internet dominated by a different kind of user than today's majority and no amount of technical solutions will solve that.
It's not necessarily nostalgia nor a feeling that the thing is mainstream so we are not special anymore.
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.
Nailed it.
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.
I wouldn’t say the internet is dominated by a different kind of user nowadays. In the past it was dominated by a bunch of nerds, now it is dominated by Google, a company founded by some old-school nerds. Sure, a much smaller subset of the original nerds that now control it, but is not really a different kind of user.
Google is not the user.
It is a user. The one that dominates.
I dunno. I have zero interest in World of Warcraft Retail, but there's also a smaller World of Warcraft Classic community that I'm thoroughly enjoying a 20-year-old nostalgia boost from.
We cannot make Retail turn itself back into Classic but we can have choices.
This is nostalgia for the world before a series of "Eternal September" events.
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.
spot on
To be fair, they could be entirely disjoint sets of people, but I’m surprised by the simultaneous 1) hate for JavaScript[0] and the “modern web” and 2) praise for all the Flash-based websites from the ‘90s–‘00s. To be fair, my first interactions with the web were largely after the “Flash for everything” era, so I might be out-of-the-loop: Did corporate Flash-based homepages get the same reaction then that SPAs do now?
[0] I do strongly dislike JavaScript myself, but specifically from the perspective of language design.
Oh, I remember a lot of developers hated Flash back in the olden days, especially those that focused their efforts on usability or who wanted to advance web standards. Case in point:
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.
Flex was amazing. It was flash based app builder for enterprises with a robust ecosystem of “components”. It was the React of Flash.
An alternative exists to Flex. It is called Apache Royale [https://royale.apache.org/]. Here is a components showcase [https://royale.apache.org/tourdejewel/]
Yeah, no, HTML won. Sorry.
I don’t want to impose my preferences on other random people. I think sites loaded up with JavaScript are garbage and the people who make them are bad at their jobs, but whatever, that’s their business. I can hold negative opinions about things without suggesting we ban them.
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.
While i am not aware of a browser that behaves like you described exactly, i vaguely recall that there is a browser plugin that is similar to what you described....but can't find it right now.
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?
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.
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
>Which then got me thinking about if there could be a special Web Classic experience we could voluntarily hook into.
This is kind of like what the Gemini protocol is trying to do.
Because it’s kind of hard to find the URL with the Google thing out there:
There's a "classic web" search engine / indexer / randomiser at https://wiby.me/; I put the 'surprise me' link on my bookmarks bar for a random peek into the classic web.
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.
> Maybe someone runs a search engine that only indexes crawled pages that have a X-Web-Classic header or whatever.
Well, not exactly, but this is the next best thing:
The author is a HN regular.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Perfectly said and I think this is applicable far beyond websites.
The neat part of the late 90s/early 2000s web was that, when you did something vaguely interesting, people actually came to see it and engaged with it. Obviously you can still create a weird webpage but it doesn’t matter if you publish it, as it will attract exactly zero traffic anyway.
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.
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
What?
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.
Ted K. externalized his grievances more than most, in the end.
What a load of rubbish. We absolutely can criticise other people's choices. It's insane to think you should only be allowed to choose your own
I think the answer to "classic mode" browsing is at the bottom of the site: web rings.
Even this article links to login-walled Twitter when talking about "1000 zines" instead of linking to web ring or some of those zines.
Take this website for example. https://www.adaline.ai/
Some vibe coder saw nothing wrong with this. This is the future of the web.
Why would you think it is bad?
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.
> Some vibe coder saw nothing wrong with this.
What do you think is wrong with the site?
Frankly I think it's badass that people can author such incredibly rich and different websites. We truly are spoiled with choice.
I disagree. It's badass, revolutionary even, to communicate with simple html, javascript and css in 2025!
Both is good. The linked page is a marketing page built to impress. The OP is an content page built to inform. Sometimes you want marketing pages built to inform [0]; sometimes you want content pages to impress [1]. It's always a tradeoff, but I can guarantee that your idealism doesn't correlate with harsh reality.
That adaline.ai link is not just a marketing page. If you had scrolled further down this would be immediately clear to you. And even if it was a purely marketing page, it would have missed the mark by a long shot.
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's wrong with that?
Open the network tab on F12. Or for giggles try accessing that UI from mobile.
365 requests 77.2 MB transferred 79.8 MB resources Finish: 5.71 s
I'm impressed it took only 6 seconds. Would hire.
I mean that's the kind of website I would have been done by Flash and I would played around for ages on. Now it's just stupid scroll jacking and poor HTML.