Post #3318027
2026-06-08 04:36 UTC
Replies (18)
-
@ifixcoinops@retro.social 2026-06-08 12:05
oh god it's morning I got a toot hangover and too many replies to read
-
@Lyskar@plush.city 2026-06-08 04:53
@ifixcoinops@retro.social 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.
-
@Nine@chitter.xyz 2026-06-08 05:05
@ifixcoinops@retro.social 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.
-
@drahardja@sfba.social 2026-06-08 05:14
@ifixcoinops@retro.social 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.
-
@guardeddon@mas.to 2026-06-08 05:38
@ifixcoinops@retro.social Odd coincidence, read this after reading an article about Chris Stanford & Sylvia Spruck Wrigly.
-
@KaraLG84@dragonscave.space 2026-06-08 05:49
@ifixcoinops@retro.social 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..
-
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca 2026-06-08 06:02
@ifixcoinops@retro.social 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.
-
@parapiglia@sociale.network 2026-06-08 06:15
@ifixcoinops@retro.social Hi, I’d love for you to continue the story by explaining what the future holds for web designers and websites.
-
@aliceinwaterdeep@sunny.garden 2026-06-08 06:31
@ifixcoinops@retro.social 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.
-
@dryak@mstdn.science 2026-06-08 06:46
@ifixcoinops@retro.social 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".
-
@Pionir@masto.bike 2026-06-08 07:38
@ifixcoinops@retro.social I gave up making websites when it became clear Frontpage was insufficient
-
@ranlvor@queerchen.de 2026-06-08 08:01
@ifixcoinops@retro.social 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.
-
@laetsgo@mastodon.xyz 2026-06-08 09:10
@ifixcoinops@retro.social left it after dreamweaver But i totally recognize what you’re saying Do a blog post please 🙏🏻 (You made my day)
-
@andyeff@hachyderm.io 2026-06-08 10:06
@ifixcoinops@retro.social 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.
-
@tal@mastodon.social 2026-06-08 10:19
@ifixcoinops@retro.social 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
-
@xot@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-06-08 10:24
@ifixcoinops@retro.social I've been at this game for 28 years, and reliving the horrors in prose aged me another 28 years. 💀
-
@lnr@sunny.garden 2026-06-08 11:21
@ifixcoinops@retro.social <3
-
@bbelton@pkm.social 2026-06-08 12:02
@ifixcoinops@retro.social It’s comforting to know that there’s so many old people on mastodon with similar experiences. I successfully petitioned to teach my tech writing class at GaTech using their sparkly new Sun lab in 93 and given the results of that I sometimes wish I could go back in time and give myself a good talking to.