Make front end shit again(makefrontendshitagain.party) |
Make front end shit again(makefrontendshitagain.party) |
is my contribution.
Web 1.0 was peak internet, when creativity was alive before normies and corporations started making every website 200MB of ad-loading javascript.
I think the current equivalent is a "blogroll."
God, I miss Web 1.0.
LOL, laters
Here's a screen shot of a website I never finished from 2003. Frontpage, tables, 3 gifs, ms paint graphics... this site had the works: https://imgur.com/Lulenom
When you have en article/text that require over 10 MB to load, I can't say I'm convinced of the benefit. The only reason I visited the site in the first place were to read the article (10-15 lines of text), and/or view some minor/related photos.
Guess that's why Atom/RSS is on the rice again I suppose. (DISCLAIMER: Just started using Newsboat[1] via the terminal, and I freaking love it :) )
Note! That is not to say that there isn't some formidable people doing astonishing works, and should be credited accordingly. The web sprawls of infinite possibles, and have something that caters to all.
1) You could write about whatever you were interested in.
2) You could share things you had found on the web with others.
These days, (1) has been superseded by YouTube and Facebook groups, and (2) has been superseded by Wikipedia/Google/YouTube.
Now the web is the place for yet another pizza delivery startup with a super slick frontend. Websites are made industrially mainly to sell. All the big platforms took over. There is no place anymore for small self-hosted websites (or at least those are extremely rare)
Call me cynical, which is probably true, but I remember the time when the web was the playground of the geeks. Now it feels like it became the playground of business majors.
Are you sure it's actually true that most of those sites are multi-billion dollar startups with super-slick frontends and that almost no one makes self-hosted sites anymore, or is it more likely that the web has gotten large enough that non-commercial, non SEO-driven sites are simply harder to notice?
The "big platforms" are still a rounding error in terms of the total content on the web.
The web isn't like old network television where there are a limited number of channels and limited number of slots for content. It hasn't moved from being the playground of geeks to business majors, but the playground of geeks to everyone, including, yes, the business majors.
Also I still use FTP (secure FTP of course), I use it for smaller projects on shared hosting and so on. It's completely fine.
In all seriousness though, people designing websites should be given the shittiest connections possible and old computers (between 5 and 10 years old). Maybe then we'll end up with websites that haven't got more JS than content, broken CSS and images that push the page download over several megabytes.
I seem to recall that every web site in existence in that time period was eternally "under construction".
Installing NoScript and blocking external CSS was the best decision I ever made. Now use <25% of the RAM and <10% of the CPU I used to for the same number of tabs (in Firefox) - with a better experience because the browser isn't constantly trying to die.
The UK Government site team is my go to for a good web design philosophy: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles (Hell, if they could run the actual Government like this we would be in a lot better shape!)
Shouldn't this literally be a single page, hand-built HTML file with inline CSS? Is this trying to be self-ironic or something?
Yes, I'm going to assume that is a parody. However, signs of FrontPage or Word as an editor would be cool.
EDIT: An article on brutalism and antidesign: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/brutalism-antidesign/
Web 1.0 was full of excess. We’re talking 3D rotating words on fire when bold would suffice. Lots of drapery, lots of window dressing.
A brutalist site would be more like the sites that have a structure, but the seams are not made seamless, and excesses are avoided... Like craigslist.
But we tend to make simple things very complex in order to make them perfect.
The complexity then becomes the problem.
And we are back where we started for another attempt at perfection.
The wheel goes round and round.
Making the perfect knife, or the perfect cup of tea, can be done by one person with just two or three tools. But you have to know how to get everything just right, and that requires a lot of knowledge and experience.
You can make a machine or abstractions to handle most of these things, but rather than reach perfection, they just reach a reliably satisfactory facsimile. We keep tinkering, like an amateur sculpter carving out a mountain, because we're still hoping for perfection.
Although i understand Voltaire was using an cracked version of HoTMetaL Pro to make his web pages, so the whole premise is a little questionable.
> Shouldn't this literally be a single page, hand-built HTML file with inline CSS? Is this trying to be self-ironic or something?
Yes?
I can't be certain but I think that was the point.
> It's complicated on porpuse btw, I wanted to do it in ReasonML and Graphql but didn't have time as this was done in an afternoon hackathon
And yeah probably the ironic thing. This sort of page should be simple, much as a wide portion of websites out there.
What’s the solution here?
I recently got to watch someone spend nearly a full week fiddling with building a React app for filling out a form for submitting a batch job on an intranet site. It's a lot of code, and it's non-trivial to understand how it works, what with all the async methods and clever state management and whatnot. It needs to be built, which is a thing, and building it requires having the right environment setup. (Its build speed reminds me of my C++ days, too.) I wouldn't be surprised if someone's already talking about incorporating Docker into its future.
At least to me, that's a rather arresting amount of time and money to see being sunk into a job that could have been accomplished with a simple HTML form on a static page.
We're just starting. IMO, if we started from a better language than JS, we would take stuff like data-binding in react for Granted, since it would be much easier to this stuff it in other languages.
The tools we use are insignificant, what's important is the result. If the result is a HTML file with inline CSS, who cares how it was created? You can use punchcards and a 20ton 'computer' for all I care.
I will tack on my own opinion that building sites that only function with javascript is a massive disservice to everyone. From disabled people with accessibility needs, to old hardware/software, and even to security/privacy conscious people the JS paradigm is a massive problem. The trend for "new shiny" has become ridiculous and I find most modern websites to be pretty but rather useless. I have to scroll forever past slices with massive images and marketing lingo just to find something that seems potentially helpful but just goes on to more marketing bullshit.
Want to get my buy-in for your tools? Stop making them a hard requirement and make sure you have a non-JS fallback that works.
1. click "Set up camp in www" 2. make an account 3. choose your camp name 3. add your html / images etc.
edit: visit https://hackernews.hypertext.town (by TeMPOraL)
I made this dumb thing! Yes, the fact that it's made with vue and stuff is on porpuse, I wanted to make it with reasonml but didn't have any time so ended up with vue.
The point is that we complicate so many shit today that is not needed
Have fun and I will add some marquee tags!
[1] ex. http://fastcashmoneyplus.biz
Regardless, this is art.
I view it more as a donation-based project than an investment, so if you feel like buying me a beer, you should buy some fastcash :)
I had nothing to put on it for a while, so I started just working on my own design skills replicating Google.com. It just a fun thing I do for absolutely no benefits to others. Great way of learning.
Anyway, I check my other projects analytics and it shows that a large number of user sign ups come from that random for fun project.
So yes, please keep building websites like these. Build your own terrible website and don't worry if they don't seem immediately useful.
There are many fun sites to discover using the tag system, which emulates web rings:
Eventually I will get midi music playing correctly with mouse-tails.
SFW
Website : http://salutcestcool.com/
Check out their Christmas Calendars (2010-2014) in the "Trucs" section. Funny stuff. There you can find "Facebook 2" http://www.salutcestcool.com/quatre/facebook2/ or "make a webpage in a few clicks" : http://www.salutcestcool.com/quatre/page/
Music : https://youtu.be/hBduDuYXJHI
and, in particular, to the post on the front page as of today, "9/11 and Vernacular Web" http://blog.geocities.institute/archives/5983, which catalogs Geocities pages updated on 9/11. Pretty haunting.
It was startling to see how many messages various people had written in the thick dust that covered everything. The most common message was one word: "Revenge!"
People recognize buttons, textboxes, tabs, etc and knows how to use them. There are certain expectations of where certain elements would be on a site and that allows us to navigate quicker.
There should also be people who are pushing the boundaries of what design can look like, but I don't think that necessarily needs to be a majority.
I've been brainstorming ways to overhaul my personal site for a while now, and this is definitely the way I'll be going. Personal web pages used to mean something.
As far as the “silly spamming of things between text” aspect goes—that’s still done as well, only now it’s done with emoji. (If http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/good-shit-sign-me-the-fuck-up isn’t an example of 1997-era melange-design aesthetics, I don’t know what is.)
Frontend complexity went through the roof in the last ten years and compared to desktop software (not geocities) our developer tools and end results are not that great (ymmv).
But that's just my personal opinion, after fifteen years of web development and growing up along the c64 - 286 - pentium road, debugging in Watcom and fooling around in Turbo Vision.
I've been doing full stack development for two decades essentially non-stop, and I detest the new era of front end. I'm learning Go instead of anything more to do with front end. I put a bunch of time into Vue and React; the effect it has had, is to push me to banish those from what I build and pursue increased simplicity instead: JS minimalism.
I'm rather in love with Go. It's simple, small, very easy to pick up, and extremely fast. It actually reduced complexity and made speed & power more accessible rather than less, the exact opposite of what's going on in front end (which is adding complexity and bloat). I blame it on the dramatic speed-up in JavaScript, the front end junk will keep expanding in bloat perpetually until it fills in the speed gains. It reminds me of the joke, about Andy Grove providing the increased transistor counts and Bill Gates figuring out new ways to waste them.
I'm not a purist by any means, but I do think we've come to rely far too heavily on frontend libraries... And not just a reliance, but an expectation of things like single-page applications. I'm sad when I see developers pulling 4-5MB of minified javascript on a page load for something that could have been accomplished in CSS or maybe a dozen lines of JS. :/
The only line of JS I use on my personal site is optional to trigger a page reload to display a submitted comment with the rest. The comment system itself requires no JS to use. It's just a particular string, '/@say/your comment here' appended to any URL on the site. A perl script tails the nginx log and generates/modifies the static html files.
I feel like most of this kind of design has gone away because the people that make websites make them for commerce now and that requires a lot of bullshit. Bullshit which they bring home if only because of inertia.
This is why it's not fun anymore. Seriously, go look at all that crap you have to learn AND understand AND debug, ETC...
The reason all this crap was "fun" before was because it was so damn easy. :(
Indeed.
http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html
to an entire business division for a while. Might have.
Today you can make any Mac's display turn upside down with a few clicks in System Preferences. Someone in my office may or may not make this happen on machines that haven't been properly logged out when someone goes on vacation.
(A quick Command-Option-8 is also good for some fun.)
You just missed out on $2.99
Does this work outside of the land of the 'free'?
[1]: http://digitalfolklore.org/
Outside of the silly nostalgia, I do appreciate the personal blog/websites that are very minimal in their theming, while still looking modern and clean.
The silly old geocities days were fun but, it's nice to have readable text too.
Just make the site and drop it into your ~/Hearth/ directory, it will be published automatically.
It's nostalgic and definitely different from what we are used to today, but I don't really miss animated gifs, dozens of font styles and colors smashed together into a html. For me a cherry on the top was changing status message when hovering a link from target url to some custom text.
I know this is just some little tongue in cheek joke, but I can't help but vehemently disagree with this.
Never did we only make websites just "because it was fun" any more or less than we do now.
The early internet was incredibly frivolous. Commercial activity was completely banned on ARPANET and NSFNET. SSL didn't come along until 1995. There was a brief but significant period before the first browser wars and the dot-com bubble, when lots of people were interested in this new internet thing but nobody knew what it was for.
I don't want to return to those days, but it's hard to overstate the extent to which the internet was just a toy for geeks.
"Commerical internet" existed 'back then' as well.
I wonder what social sciences have to say about this. About public opinion swinging from one extreme to the other, never seeming to be able to land on the sane middle.
Today's "usable" websites seem to consist mostly of gigantic irrelevant photos, huge expanses of whitespace, and navigation consisting of buggy JavaScript puzzles for the user to trick into showing correctly.
If anyone wants to play, I've made a town for us.
I didn't touch any web development in at least 10 years so it was a lot of fun. I hope even more interesting towns will appear!
The reason I say this is that we now have 'css grid'. This means that you do not need frameworks, little scripts on the page, and 'div/span' markup, you don't even need ids and classes. You can directly style 'aside', 'main', 'article', 'form', headings, p tags, 'details/summary', 'nav' and other tags to get the desired effect.
If you have a three column layout with the column left and column right as 'aside' then the CSS does not need classes to identify the column names, 'article + aside' will refer to the right column perfectly fine.
This will also work responsively so you can do everything these days with no paddings, margins, floats, line-heights or anything else that is a bit silly.
The resultant code when freed of all this debris that should never have been in HTML is a quarter of the size. I say code, but is it really code when you have button text inside a span inside a span inside a button inside a div inside a div with a label inside another div and yet another div just so it works as the'designer' intended?
For me CSS grid + semantic minimal 'div free' markup is getting back to the fun. No longer do web pages require a team of a designer (that knows no code) plus a front end developer ( that knows nothing about 'real code') plus a backend developer (that knows nothing about design) plus a team manager to book inane meetings and to do scrum rituals as if it mattered.
We can also get rid of lorem ipsum and go 'content driven design' (a phrase I had to invent just now as nobody has had a use case for such a phrase in decades).
Happy times in web design are back on. Even more interesting is that with the likes of Rachel Andrews we also have a lot of women getting into doing web design properly and showing how its done.
Isn't your site making the opposite point? That without all the "complicated shit that is not needed", websites would look as awful as they did in the 1990s. Any website-maker is of course free to make their site as "shit" as they want, but 99% of users are not going to visit it a 2nd time.
javascript:a=(b,c)=>{d=document.createElement(c);d.classList=b.classList,d.id=b.id,d.style=b.style,d.innerHTML=b.innerHTML,d.name=b.name,d.src=b.src,d.href=b.href,b.parentElement.insertBefore(d,b),b.remove()};document.querySelectorAll("span,%20p,%20a,%20code,%20li,%20h1,%20h2,%20h3,%20h4,%20h5,%20h6,%20h7,%20label,%20button").forEach(b=>a(b,"marquee"));[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/cursor
From memory, it’s just CSS. You have a ‘pointer: spaceship.ico’ probably on the body.
(Saying that nobody uses plain Javascript to build pages these days wouldn’t be as notable, and so not as funny. jQuery is just standing in for “plain Javascript” here, because it sort of was the only way to write plain Javascript that worked in all browsers, until browsers standardized on their JS APIs some eight years back.)
At work I use react and can't use jQuery anymore and I miss it man.
On the other hand, obscene overengineering is probably a good way to build a portfolio. Nobody will get hired for demonstrating that they can build an HTML form on a static page.
Leave it to an internet forum to get all gripey about something someone did for fun.
Theodor Adorno said about philosophy that, "Philosophy is the most serious of things but then again it is not that serious".
I'm pretty sure we can say the same thing about web development.
- Socrates
EDIT: Now I made this[1] to make it easier to publish these kinds of frivolous sites.
Use what you need.
I regret to report though, but something is broken - nothing above the SUPERHOT videos section is clickable :(.
Just fixed it, I had invisible div over whole page.
(For those who don't care about society in general, consider that this also means your users' batteries last shorter, making their days worse.)
Stupid Intel driver programmers, thanks for nothing, really. Still wondering if this came to life as an internal joke.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/500
Their error pages are still quite funny (and epic shit).
[1] http://stephdavidson.com/ [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/richard-turley-2011-4
I know of shift and command, emacs and vi don't require you hold down any key. What system uses ctrl+alt?
Also he put "HTML" on the list, you're saying that has outlived its usefulness?
I probably characterized the list wrong anyway, as you've pointed out, since HTML decidedly has not outlived its usefulness. Perhaps it's a list of web things prominently used 15 years ago.
I would normally use "technologies" here, but it seems we have a difference of definition.
About the html, I live in a bubble of react and vue and everything is templates and jsx that's why HTML is there
I love having an API into the jquery plugin and getting things done quickly and efficiently, and giving credit to the developer who kindly gave it away for free.
This is why jquery doesn't belong on a list with "blink" tag which everyone hates because it's a flawed tag that should be forgotten, much like over-use of animated gifs.
Anyway.. good luck breaking free of the bubble!