I miss the content of the old Internet, but I do not miss its tech.
Web design in general was garbage. Not just the good kind of garbage, with funky animations and weird colors, but horrible typography, unreadable fonts, zero accessibility, horizontal scrollbars everywhere, images used as text, misaligned tables, no math typesetting, no videos, and no interactive content without installing more garbage like Flash, ActiveX, or Java.
When writing server-side stuff, your options were basically Perl/CGI, and later PHP, both of which are insecure trash that makes today's JavaScript look sane by comparison.
The average modern blog is a masterpiece of readability, usability, and frontend/backend engineering, compared to almost anything seen on the web during its "golden age".
Perl's Taint mode made it more secure than most languages, including today's. Other languages later ran into the same security bugs that had been fixed in Perl a decade before.
I wouldn't go that far. Perl's got a very simplistic view of a tainted value with no context of usage. An untainted value will be fine for example for embedding in html, but not for SQL queries, paths, mongo queries, json strings, shell downs, etc. The protection/checks you get from it are really minimal in practice in comparison to Sonar and similar analysers.
The simplicity is what I liked about taint mode - it didn’t purport to make anything safe for any particular context, you had to do that yourself. It just tracked strings that came in from outside Perl to make sure they didn’t get sent outside Perl again without being run through a regex. My main critique is that you don’t always want to use a regex to check safety, sometimes you want to try properly parsing a value before handing it off to another system. So in various places I’d end up untainting with a dot star regex.
>The average modern blog is a masterpiece of readability, usability, and frontend/backend engineering, compared to almost anything seen on the web during its "golden age".
Eh, maybe. There's a lot more scrolling, sure. And whizzy CSS tricks to make things rotate and gradients and whatever. And you can download a coolio new font so the site looks like it was typed on a 1932 Royal typewriter with a crooked arm on the "G" key.
But then I go to something like the OpenBSD site, and I remember how much I liked the simplicity of Ye Olden Tymes.
Back in the bad old times, there was no problem getting something centered when using tables. CSS only got that working reliably 17 minutes ago. And while making your page look like a brochure with invisible GIFs and table layouts was kinda heavy, we've replaced it with 100MB of Javascript and an embedded WASM running Emacs.
If we had to run the modern Web on dial-up, we'd all be dead before Reddit loaded.
> There's a lot more scrolling, sure. And whizzy CSS tricks to make things rotate and gradients and whatever. And you can download a coolio new font so the site looks like it was typed on a 1932 Royal typewriter with a crooked arm on the "G" key.
What are you talking about? That description doesn't match 99% of blogs. In fact, rotating things and gradients were a staple of the old web, not the current one.
> Back in the bad old times, there was no problem getting something centered when using tables.
Cool. Except it only works on a standard sized desktop screen. And good luck using such a site if you are vision impaired and need assistive technologies. "Bad old times" indeed.
Web design in general was garbage. Not just the good kind of garbage, with funky animations and weird colors, but horrible typography, unreadable fonts, zero accessibility, horizontal scrollbars everywhere, images used as text, misaligned tables, no math typesetting, no videos, and no interactive content without installing more garbage like Flash, ActiveX, or Java.
When writing server-side stuff, your options were basically Perl/CGI, and later PHP, both of which are insecure trash that makes today's JavaScript look sane by comparison.
The average modern blog is a masterpiece of readability, usability, and frontend/backend engineering, compared to almost anything seen on the web during its "golden age".