Nice article about webrings, which I had forgotten about.
Thank you. One quibble: “Websites were difficult to build” — I have to disagree. Websites were far far easier to build then.
You only needed to learn some HTML. There was no CSS, no JS, server-side rendering was non-existent or limited to some very specific features provided by your host (visitor counters were popular, maybe even a guestbook where visitors could leave a message if you wanted to get fancy!).
> You only needed to learn some HTML. There was no CSS, no JS…
The page linked in response is mostly CSS, and (I just went to a laptops to check) the first few lines are javascript google tags.
I think the original point was supposed to be that websites used to be just content wrapped in some simple HTML, which was easy to learn. But now the level of complexity is higher and so is the barrier to entry. I agree with this point.
So when someone replied saying “what’s stopping you from [building simple HTML sites] in 2022, thats what I did”, I was confused to see a site that included JS and was mostly CSS. Because it was seemingly trying to contradict a point about no CSS and JS. Honestly it feels like spam.
Its tangental, but I agree the source seems hand written and seems to have a well done minimalist approach, which is respectable. I regret the negative tone to my original response.
Yeah, I remember ~2000 or so it seemed like a lot of non-techie people were creating their own personal site on Geocities/Angelfire/etc. In high schools lots of teenagers (again, including non-techie folk) had their own web pages.
What was nice is that more thought went into it, since it was basically a blank canvas. There also was a focus on quality over quantity - your website was something you continually grew and improved. Modern content is something you churn out and forget about immediately after.
But as easier options became available, those sites disappeared. First blogs came along, which were more structured. And modern social media is even more structured as well. We went from a single blank canvas you could spend hours tinkering with to a coloring book page you're given for sixty seconds before it gets thrown away and you're given the next one.
Eh, i guess if you had a basic level of ability and knowledge of not just HTML, but also the ability to upload files over FTP, register a domain, set up the DNS records to point your domain to your host.
but most of the people building wix or squarespace (or whatever all the youtuber and podcasters are promoting this week), they don't have that knowledge and don't necessarily want to learn it. easier for you doesn't mean easier for everybody.
Geocities and the like had ways to put up a website without much expertise by the late 1990s.
Many ISPs included personal web hosting with their internet access service at the time as well, which usually did require a slightly higher level of knowledge, but not that high. Netscape had a point and click page editor by 1997.
In some ways they're even easier to build than they were back then if you use the right tools. Some static website generators these days are ridiculously simple to get started with and can get you rolling pretty darn fast with a quite professional looking and easy to self-host web site (or VPS host, or other site hosting method). The hard part of it all is writing content folks will want to read. Best if folks do what they did back then and write content about things you're passionate about. If it excites you to write about it, that excitement will often be "contagious" to others of similar mindset and interests.
If anything, the tools that were built to deal with problems extant at the time only allowed the building of more complicated websites - or, all too often, not more complicated websites but built in more complicated ways.
The heap of spaghetti these apps would pump out to create a webpage is similar to the endless layers of divs I see when I look at React generated source. Plus ça change.
