Oct 21, 2026, 8:51 AMthe 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
@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.
@alefunguju
YES
@jk
@julienw @alefunguju @jk oh my God, that brings back memories. Like when my fellow high school site admins and I got tired of us overwriting each other's files to the point that we "invented" "version control" from first principles in PHP. The "version control" in question was a simple interface that lets admins lock files to mark that they are working on them and upload new versions without going through FTP, but still a bunch of teenagers discovered a problem and worked around it.
Probably helped by the fact that the professional internet spoke English, and we didn't, so "looking up how to do it properly" wasn't an option, leading to, in hindsight, kind of beautiful even if very much not production quality adhoc solutions.
@jk There was a PUT method in HTTP from the very beginning, such a shame that no web servers supported it.
Oct 21, 2026, 12:24 PMIt's definitely not ready for general use yet but that was my idea with http://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.
@jk bingo. much of modern web and social media is orthogonal when not totally antithetical to the orig WWW