@Nezchan that person is wrong 😑

@pixouls

Well, yeah. To be fair, he's clearly not old enough to really remember stuff like Geocities and Angelfire, that mailing lists were everywhere and acting as semi real-time forums, or that Dreamweaver came out in 1997 and made website building much easier.

There were tonnes of regular, not-very-technical folks building webpages all over the place at the time. But it wasn't subject to the *marketing* that web2 brought to the party.

@Nezchan I'm not even old enough to really remember geocities and angelfire 🥵 but yeah, I make an actual effort to learn about the old internet.

You make a good point about the marketing!

@pixouls

Hell, I had a Geocities site that I hand-coded using basic HTML, and I am anything *but* a programmer. It wasn't all that hard, and you could just download the code from an existing page to figure out the basic structure.

It was no more difficult than editing Wikipedia, if all you wanted was something readable without a lot of bells and whistles.

@Nezchan @pixouls I even made it look good, for the time. Resurrected what I think was my second website design a few years later. I still kind of like it.

@jens @Nezchan I know we were talking about your personal website here, but interpeer sounds like an interesting project too!

@pixouls @Nezchan That's not the design I'm talking about; I actually want to have that redone. But thank you!

@Nezchan @pixouls HTML isn't hard, it's just super time consuming. For people who would rather write instead of design, it's a big mess.

@atomicpoet @pixouls

Sure, but it didn't take very long before there were WYSIWYG HTML editors that took care of a lot of that stuff.

@Nezchan @pixouls For writers, WYSIWYG isn't entirely a solution because highlighting and formatting text through a graphical interface also takes time. If you want to emphasize something, it takes away from your flow if you stop mid thought to italicize.

Then a bunch of geniuses realized that you can solve this formatting problem through markdown. Instead of doing <em>this</em>, you do *this*.

Later, someone realized you can build actual mark up (Gemtext) with stuff resembling markdown.

@Nezchan @pixouls i vaguely recall geocities might have even had a wysiwyg editor??? or are my memories of my high school daze finally starting to rot for good?

@Nezchan

But if you try to make do with just HTML and CSS when making a blog you won't get any interaction at all because the site is totally static and you can only change it yourself. So you could't have any comments, which some would consider essential for a blog to have. At least they used to, back in the day.

@pixouls

@hllizi @pixouls

Many of the earliest blogs (including one by my Roommate) were exactly that. They were "web logs", and comments didn't come along until much later. They're not an original part of the concept.

@Nezchan

but it seems that the ones allowing interaction were what really took off. Nothing against static content though, it may well be what one wants.

@pixouls

@hllizi @Nezchan @pixouls

Every item on that cart - as far as I'm aware - is a front-end technology. It makes no mention of the back-end tech.

@BigTheDave

Fair point, although you could use TS on the backend, too.

@Nezchan @pixouls

@pixouls @Nezchan when I was really young my dad showed me the internet and how to use it and such. It was the late 90’s, and one of the things he said to me was that I was going to see the major commercialization of the internet.

Always stuck with me.

@pixouls @Nezchan
Is it gauche to jump in here?

I started learning HTML in college with Geocities (before Yahoo bought the service) and I am VERY excited to learn that Webrings have made a comeback!

@loosecannon887 @pixouls

Nah, jumping into conversations is to be expected on Mastodon. Unless it's something really personal I guess.

But webrings are back? That's awesome. I had such fun with random rings back in the day.

@Nezchan @pixouls I have yet to find anything today that makes website building as easy and fun as Allaire Homesite (bought by Dreamweaver which was bought by Adobe) OR Anansi did back in 1997-9.
Anansi was a one-person project written in Turbo Pascal which I think was an old language then. The writer was Dutch, maybe Dutch-Surinamese, which would explain the name. It had project-wide search and replace, syntax highlighting and a built-in browser preview.

@Nezchan @pixouls The stuff I made with it was simple, but mostly because I wanted it to be.

The program's author had to bail on all his projects because of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, if I recall correctly. I hope he's all right.

@pixouls @Nezchan Very, very, very wrong. I was there. I can still remember the first time I saw CSS demoed. It was in a movie theater (some company, MS maybe, was doing some sort of promotional simulcast all over the country) and it blew my mind more than EEAAO did. I was staggered.

@Nezchan @pixouls sorry i can't hear this guy's take over my memories of

✨🔥hi and welcome to my page of doooooom🔥✨

::red text on animated starfield background::

::autoplay midi::

@carcinopithecus @pixouls

"How many levels of webring are you on my dude"

@Nezchan @pixouls Yeah its straight up not true. Back in the 90s there were flourishing small ISPs all over the place and making your own web site just involved dropping an html file in your home directory.

This is not a criticism of the comic or @pixouls who is lovely, the "Yes." just got me thinking of that meme :)

@atomicpoet @pixouls

I totally agree with you.

A friend and I are both running some small blogs, and his is entirely in HTML/CSS without a template system. He's excited for a lot of the same reasons seen in this thread. However, any time he wants to update his menus, header, footer, etc, he has to update a ton of files. It's very lightweight, but I'd rather take a lightweight framework with markdown/gemtext for my posts, that way I can keep the barrier to writing as low as possible.

@astro it is important! Always love more RSS.

@pixouls 2003 is optimistic here.

@reinderdijkhuis @pixouls > since 2003

until 2003

@pixouls @astralfrontier why do you think anything about a simple site would hurt SEO, which is pretty much based on structuring the page, fast load, and having relevant words in it?