The mobile web pre-iPhone was terrible. Nobody used it, nobody wanted to use it, and nobody wanted to build it. At best there was a shitty cut back version on the `m` subdomain. WAP/WML were terrible and didn’t give you anything close to the real web, and XHTML Basic was still-born.
The iPhone came along with its “desktop class web browser” and it genuinely worked. Steve Jobs got on stage and told everybody if they wanted to build apps for the iPhone, they should be web apps. Then he told everybody Flash was terrible – which it was – and that we should all use open standards instead.
Practically overnight, everybody commissioning websites wanted them to be “iPhone-compatible”. They did not ask for mobile sites – they specifically asked for them to be iPhone-compatible.
And because WebKit was open-source (thanks to it being based upon KHTML), all the other phone vendors took the code and ran with it, including Android.
This is why I say there is no single organisation that has done more to push the mobile web forward than Apple. The difference in attitudes and capability towards the mobile web changed practically overnight, and it’s directly attributable to Apple’s intentional actions to develop and promote the mobile web.
How old are you? I'm betting mid-twenties.
What real web are you going to get when there's no 3g, much less a reliable signal on a lot of places.
Wap worked well for actually relaying information.
The mobile-web world before the iPhone was one where mobile devices were second class citizens; desktop "real" websites first, and scaled down versions of those sites second (for mobile devices). The information itself was readily available to both, even if the presentation was lacking on the latter.
Jobs knew the only way to win was to not play the same game, because the open web is an even playing field. If you control a new platform on the other hand, you can't lose. So here we are, with locked down, dumbed down toys determining the standard.
That was more than offset by the unmetered internet connection + decent browser, but that’s a feature not everything.
My mate had an iPhone, and it had an app where you could pretend to drink a pint of beer.
It's hard to make objective judgment when you're in one tribe's trench.
Judged purely as a "Let's give Ted a call"-phone, it was fucking bad compared to the competiton. They killed it in other areas, don't get me wrong, but not at being a phone.
What a glorious time period.
Interestingly, it would’ve been impossible to share this writing with as many people as the author did by publishing it on mastodon and then it ended up on HN in 1998. The network effects are real.
Is it easier to build or repair a radio now than it was when they were first sold? A computer? A car? A washing machine? A vacuum cleaner?
3D printers are mostly still repairable and far more reliable and usable than a few years ago when the majority of the hobby wasn’t making stuff, it was tuning the printer to work reliably. Bambu and California may be signalling that the enshittification inflection point is near.
Not quite the same level, but home/hobby electronics with tiny microcontrollers is more accessible than ever before thanks to the availability of cheap ESP8266/32 clones.
And there are some obvious individual counter-examples - Framework computers, or repairable blenders[0]… but you’ve got to pay a premium for the privilege.
But broadly you’re totally right - in the modern world, by the time something becomes a mainstream product aimed at general consumers, there’s a profit to be made and it’s likely on a downwards path.
squarespace?
> and we - us fucking foss nerds or whoever - should've made it.
wordpress?
Looks like its getting a ton of traffic
Spinner and load bar at the top
That specific use-case is now replaced by having a single, small webcomponent for client-side includes.
<cs-include remote-src="..."></cs-include>
WAP might’ve been able to convey information, but so could Lynx in an 80×24 terminal – people want more than that. WAP sites were never popular (aside from some Japanese platform, IIRC) and I don’t think the average web developer had even heard of WAP or WML at the height of their popularity.
2.5g/GPRS was usable enough at the time.
WAP was more 1999, a lot happened between that and the iPhone.
Clients were lining up en masse for iPhone-compatible websites, but none of them ever cared about S60 compatibility.