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  • Oct 21, 2026, 8:46 AM

    i really like PHP. in my experience, its full of insane issues and functions called "doThingSecurely_final_FINAL". but it's a tool, like excel or hypercard, that lets a normal person make Web without years becoming a Web Developer. you could just throw it onto a server and make a view counter or whatever. just mash it in there in the HTML for some basic dynamic feature on an otherwise-static page. wow! then 'Developers' ruined it, like with javascript, by trying to use it to make actual software

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  • Oct 21, 2026, 8:51 AM

    the main thing that's good about the web as a medium, imo, is that you can just chuck something into a directory and then it will appear in web browsers around the world. you can edit the file and hit save and refresh. the magic that you feel is the core of the entire thing. and as far as i've seen, Web Development, as a discipline, has focused for the last few decades on systematically destroying that magic

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  • Oct 21, 2026, 9:08 AM

    @jk Oh wow, now this brought back memories of a 13-ish yo me just editing PHP files in an FTP-enabled text editor. No version control, no build process, just raw editing files on a remote server of some local freehosting service.

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  • Oct 21, 2026, 9:14 AM

    @jk There was a PUT method in HTTP from the very beginning, such a shame that no web servers supported it.

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  • Oct 21, 2026, 12:24 PM

    @jk

    It's definitely not ready for general use yet but that was my idea with codeberg.org/5BFP/hotch

    The public facing website is made up of static HTML files in a directory and all the complex server logic is for making sure only people who are allowed to make those files and eventually for serving them on platforms like this one.

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  • Oct 21, 2026, 12:35 PM

    @jk bingo. much of modern web and social media is orthogonal when not totally antithetical to the orig WWW

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  • Oct 21, 2026, 6:25 PM

    @jk I wish PHP had never tried to be Java but instead committed to making the "chuck a file on the server" approach as good as possible

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