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  • Jun 8, 2026, 4:19 AM

    Raising the barrier to entry wasn't just down to, like, "Oh it's because phones" or "Fucking facebook and amazon," it was us. It was, like, "See this badge that leads to a code validation page, that means I actually know what I'm doing," it was shit like saying "Domain name" instead of "Web address" and when too many people knew what a domain name was we started saying "DNS Zone," it was telling people for fuck's sake don't go giving money to folk who still make websites using pirated copies of dreamweaver, give money to me instead because I know how to make a website the Incredibly Boring way.

    Our, Nerd Fucking Desire to be Special.

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Replies

  • Jun 8, 2026, 4:23 AM

    We made website-making harder, to show that we can do a thing that's very hard and that normal people can't do.

    Elitism. But, like, very very petty elitism.

    Making a website should be the easiest fucking thing in the world by now. There should be a program that you can use to spit out a website as easy as Word spits out words on paper, and we - us fucking foss nerds or whoever - should've made it.

    It probably would've made shit HTML code soup but so long as it worked, it wouldn't matter, nobody would care, just like nobody cared that Frontpage put out shit HTML code soup.

    Well, nobody cared except the likes of us, and look where that got us.

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 4:26 AM

    Is there a spec yet for including a HTML page inside another HTML page, without fucking around with javascript or php or server-side includes or whatever? A thing people wanted to do on their freeserve.co.uk subdomain in 1997? Just like, <include src="navigation.html">, or is that making things too easy?

    'cause fucking hell, we don't want things to be too easy, do we

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 4:30 AM

    This shouldn't have been a blog post, it should've been a podcast haha, it meanders and doesn't have a point and there's a lot of growling and yelling, good thing I don't have a microphone and also know that something like 99.9% of podcasts are one episode long and this would be my episode

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 4:36 AM

    Anyway I see the first post of this thread is continuing to blow up 'cause of folk who didn't know it'd go to horrible uncomfortable "We blew it all up" places, I'll see if everyone's mad at me in the morning

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 12:17 PM

    It's 2026 and you're doing a thread late at night in a flow state of heightened emotion, 100mph jabbing at the keyboard, a gibbering goblin bloodshot eyes in the cold monitor light, surf the wave and thrash the keyboard no think just post

    It's 2026 and you follow the crowd to see what all the fuss is about, haha looks like someone got themselves really wound up last night - oh shit it was me

    Don't gibbering manifesto before bed kids

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 4:53 AM

    @ifixcoinops I made it through all of that and never gave up.

    I started with HTML 3.0 in Notepad though, so I never used Dreamweaver or Frontpage, which had a side effect of making me like a cockroach they couldn't destroy.

    Also you should add in the horror of XHTML. Hoo boy. Now that was one meant to try to make everyone ragequit. I tried that one for a while and it made me see red... but I still persevered.

    Or the era where people said NO! NEVER USE PHP! CODE HTML IN PYTHON! for no reason.

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 5:05 AM

    @ifixcoinops I made a website in pure HTML without js or php or CSS, all tables, buttons, all that guff, decades ago, and hosted it on angelfire. Its still out there, I guess, but ads have eaten half of it and I can't access the back end and elete the site without signing up and paying money to angelfire which, lol no,.so there it stays.

    I'm still a little proud of it tho. I really miss when you could code a website from literally nothing and 20mb was more than enough for a site

    EDIT: my bad i might have used JS for the mouseover effect on the buttons (literally swapping one image for another and then back again when the mouse comes off it). Seriously it's been years since I even LOOKED at the page. I can't even remember the URL. last time I found it again I tried to log in to delete the whole thing, but NOPE.

    So yeah. one JS element I guess. for mouseover. welp.

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 10:49 AM

    @Nine @ifixcoinops to be fair 20mb is still more than enough for a site as long as you have no (large) media in it

    webp can crunch down images to mind boggling sizes much better than JPEG could, you can have a shared CSS file for the whole website, and you can fit quite a lot of HTML and text in that space

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 11:04 AM

    @Nine @ifixcoinops that's with basic size optimizations, I could do better but I didn't see a point in trying.

    And then there's some very specific pages where I have unreasonably huge images and perhaps I should have thumbnails for them because 8MB per image is kinda unreasonable.

    Basically I listened to the people screaming about how JavaScript is the root of all evil and have some very… creative CSS hacks for basic features (and ended up adding a sprinkle of JS anyway because turns out my CSS hacks fucked with accessibility in annoying ways. It's still technically usable without JS but with a few UX papercuts like the image viewer accidentally blocking you from downloading an image when it's zoomed in. And the tab-order being weird and nonsensical in some cases.). Which means adding thumbnails in a reasonable way would be pretty hard actually!

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 8:52 PM

    @lunareclipse

    The lawsuits are about patents Google does *not* own.

    It's not like copyright, where the thing belongs to whoever made it. Patents allow somebody you've never heard of to come out of the woodwork and claim ownership of your whole idea.

    @Nine @ifixcoinops

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  • patterpatterfloof@meow.social
    Jun 8, 2026, 11:13 AM

    @Nine @ifixcoinops the time when there was little enough in html it was expected that anyone could pick it up, combined with free space everywhere.

    Plus the ease & access of "view source". See something interesting on a website, you could figure out how to copy it (even if the fancy header was just a gif)

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 5:07 AM

    @ifixcoinops This. Made. My. Day. Thank you! I can see my entire career there. And the disgrunting. And the wish for things to be better *for the user* at least once.

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 5:14 AM

    @ifixcoinops It really is kinda sad that it’s so freaking hard to host your own website in a way that’s not dependent on some corporation.

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 5:38 AM

    @ifixcoinops
    Odd coincidence, read this after reading an article about Chris Stanford & Sylvia Spruck Wrigly.

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 5:49 AM

    @ifixcoinops Brilliant thread. Here's a bit of a take on those days from a screen reader user.
    Screen reader users like me absolutely couldn't stand flash websites. If it needed flash back in 1999 or so until something like half a decade later it wasn't accessible to us at all. It never was a joy to use but at least they eventually added things to make buttons and whatnot visible to screen readers.
    Screen readers have had options to ignore tables that were just for layout purposes for decades now.
    We were probably some of the people emailing you about the crap code, no doubt because the result wasn't accessible, although to be fair I don't think there was any WCAG guidelines in 1998. If there was I absolutely bet Frontpage Express didn't comply with them. At least there's guidelines now, which would make things so much better if folk actually went and followed them.
    I dabbled with Frontpage Express but I never published anything with it..

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 6:02 AM
    @ifixcoinops Your anger is righteous, but I do think a lot just comes down much more to "because capitalism". Megacorporations steering things for their own ends has made for infertile ground for better tools, for more accessible digital worlds. The geeks certainly haven't done as much as they could have to help others, but building user-friendly tools and platforms and standards is frustrating and even doomed in a world whose metasystems actively work against those, block them, hide them from view, make it seem like the only options are technofeudalism or technoabstinance . . .

    And one result of all this is it's easier to make a website simply than it ever has been, but harder to get there. Like, one *can* just make a webpage using literally whatever text editor one is most familiar with, and I don't just mean text editor in a computer nerd vernacular, I especially mean Document Editors, be it Word or LibreOffice or Google Docs, stuff people use every day and yeah it'll save to HTML in a form that is horrifying to look at under the hood but it'll work! We have, looking at it from a slant, exactly the tooling you say we've failed to make, easy for everyone even if messy as hell.

    But the problem is that there's an enormous gulf between Having A Web Page and Putting It On The Web.

    Nearly everyone these days has some tool they're reasonably comfortable with that, though they likely don't even realize it, could let them create a webpage. And in a functioning civilization, everyone would have an easily accessible space to put those messy, self-created pages. But people don't see that they have those tools because the territory between them and having something On The Web is a confusing chaos of gatekeepers and middlemen.

    To try and pull out of a Lapsed-Trotskyist tailspin and finish my annoyingly long reply with optimism and concrete advice: those of us with the combination of drive and opportunity to be able to navigate those layers of bullshit can serve as guides and greatly help others! I've shown people tools they've found to be great reliefs from the corporate shit they thought were their only options; I've explained in sane terms the arcana; I've quickly set things up for people so that they don't have to deal with the acidic atmospheres and trap-filled labyrinths. It's hard to solve systemic problems flowing from economic structures without reworking the foundations, but we *can* each (that is, those of us in a cohort of people of a sort to even know about something called The Fediverse) fairly easily carve out better parallel worlds for at least a few others as well.

    And hey, maybe from example, maybe from the release of pressure these saner and more humane practices of digital publishing and communication create merely by existing in a world of friction and profit-driven scams and pennypinching . . . perhaps transformation will snowball! Revolutions, literal or more figurative, do tend to happen when the tension ratchets up between what is seen to be possible and the misery of What Instead Is.
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  • Jun 8, 2026, 6:31 AM

    @ifixcoinops this thread is the first thing I read this morning, while having breakfast before starting my used-to-be-fun-but-now-I'm-not-sure-anymore coding job. Ooof.

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 6:46 AM

    @ifixcoinops sideway tangeant, (from someone who did start with writing tags in a texf editor and was listening to the rationale behind CSS):
    I am under the impression that static website generators that ingest Markdown and spit out stuff that you can upload on the hosting that came for free with the domain you registeted, did mostly got us "there".

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 1:39 PM

    @dryak Static site generators are still generally command line, which isn't remotely similar to a WYSIWYG program, imo. Much higher barrier to entry, even if you only use a standard template. And that's before you get to figuring out how to use git (for GitHub/GitLab pages) or Netlify.

    There is Publii, which I think is still around? GUI plus integration with free hosting. @ifixcoinops

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 7:54 PM

    @eladnarra @ifixcoinops hence the "mostly".

    Though:
    - they aren't CLI by necessity, it should be possible to wrap a nice GUI around (just like the countless existing GUI that wrap around cd burning and ripping tools, ffmpeg, etc.)
    - there *are* WISIWYG markdown editors
    - Git isn't required. Some registrars (e.g. Infomaniak) offer a tiny static website that you can SFTP into (with FileZilla) to deposit you static files.

    The building block are here.

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 8:01 AM

    @ifixcoinops And there is me, back in 2021, still maintaining the website of the eingetragener Verein made by the previous guy in „Microsoft FrontPage 5.0“ with frames. Converting every page I touch from ISO-8859 to UTF-8 and every page I want to modify more deeply from FrontPage HTML to manually written HTML…

    (I only stopped because my parents stopped being active in the Verein)

    You can still do it that way. Frames never stopped working.

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 10:06 AM

    @ifixcoinops Incredible thread, thank you so much, this was a terrific read.
    I feel a lot of myself in this, but as someone who never got into the code side of things, once CSS started to become popular, I checked out of making my dinky little crappy websites as it started to feel 'too hard' and I just wanted to go play video games against friends over the modem.

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 10:19 AM

    @ifixcoinops great thread Dan, I too, am full of regret for badge pride. I want to live in a retirement home full of Web 1.0 war stories

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 12:44 PM

    @ifixcoinops I'm in this thread and I don't like it. Made some websites with Netscape (already old at that time), but what a good concept to just ship the website-making-tool with the browser.

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 1:31 PM

    @ifixcoinops in the nursing home and they set us up with a keyboard and a text box in a page with a post button that does nothing but it keeps us poor dears happy with the reassuring routine

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 2:53 PM

    But all so relatable.

    I used to manage quite happily with Dreamweaver. Then, as you say, they gave up.

    I half-way figured out Coffeecup enough to make a very simple site again but can't seem to upload it to my domain properly and their instructions are vague to the point of faith.

    The struggle continues.

    Sigh. .

    @ifixcoinops

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 6:32 PM

    @hamishb @ifixcoinops I think the original version of my site from the late 90s still has <META generator="/usr/bin/vi"> in the source code.

    Time to resurrect it, and serve from a BSD machine under my desk again.

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  • Jun 8, 2026, 5:03 PM

    @ifixcoinops
    Your "gibbering manifesto" sounds a lot like my fond remembrances do. I hadn't thought about Frontpage in a *long* time, and while I'm not a fan, I agree that it was a gateway drug for a lot of people. Anyway, thanks for sharing.

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  • Alexpianoblack@mefi.social
    Jun 8, 2026, 7:50 PM

    @ifixcoinops I like your gibbering manifestos. Websites are way harder than they need to be.

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