I love the feeling that Louie Mantia so concisely captured in his post The Web Is So Cool. I’ve had a lot of similar feelings since rebooting my blog about a year and half ago.
Making a website or even a single web page - it’s just so damn easy these days.
Jump In The Time Machine
Publishing websites is especially easy compared to how hard it was back in the day. Well, not hard exactly, because it was also fun and exciting to participate in any capacity with this exploding new medium. So let’s say it was challenging in a rewarding way. We wouldn’t have put up with the hurdles otherwise.
And there were plenty of tiny little hurdles to make even the smallest change to a website. Enough that it all sounds like madness when I try to picture a typical day in the life back then.
Come, sit around the fire with me as I host yet another episode of Old Man Telling Tales of the Web We Lost.
Hosting
Get domain names, DNS servers, and hosting server were all separate. Hosting server sounds fancy - it’s basically renting a computer that you have remote access to, but without a typical UI that we were all used to. It was the command line, which was a mysterious throwback to an era of computing with inscrutable spells you had to memorize and cast in a certain order. It was maddening to throw away all the computer literacy I’d developed my whole life just to do this occasional secret handshake to make sure you could join and stay in this special global club of nerds.
Software
Then there was installing software on it. I never liked it or got the hang of it, just dipped my toes into it once in a while to try out blogging engines or build along with a Rails tutorial.
Reminisce about FTP. You could use your own computer and treat the server like just another folder to save your work to. Dreamweaver even showed you which files were out of date and needed syncing, which was an early introduction to version control. Especially when I started using it for real work at my first job out of college and DW had rudimentary multi-author support by locking files. No futurisitic merges or rebasing here, instead it was a nice hard line of ownership. Just seeing that someone else was working on a file you wanted to update made you get up, walk over to see if they were done with it, and if they had, get a quick rundown of what they’d changed, sort of like an oral version of a commit message. It’s the kind of publishing that was literally social and just as prehistoric as the scenes in old movies about journalists in a cubicle farm yelling at each other to be heard over the sound of typewriters.
HTML actually used to be hard
It’s pretty easy now. To the point that the role of dedicated html specialist doesn’t exist anymore, since it’s become a common literacy for devs and designers, something so basic that many devs still treat it as just plain output for their “real” work of creating the application logic.
That used to annoy me but they might be finally right now that we’re in the era of AI-enhanced IDE’s, automated code review tools and most importantly, years and years of stable browser implementation.
But today’s peace is because of yesterday’s wars. You wouldn’t believe the battles fought by standards advocates to shame and tame the browser makers into cooperative behavior.
And the advocates were basically everybody - you couldn’t help but become a foot solider in the larger movement because the very act of trying to put something online radicalized even the most pragmatic into loudly complaining in any forum they could.
There were no fallback workarounds like there are today, like the way Slack uses Electron to crosscompile their app to multiple OSes with suboptimal but working versions.
Nope, you had to hack through it. Read through the W3C specs to figure out how things were supposed to work, which was hard enough on it’s own since specs are written in this pseudo-legalese that was so inscrutable that it gave me PTSD flashbacks of my undergrad semesters in constitutional law. Breathe and remember that they weren’t really made for the developers, it was for the browser makers themselves and they didn’t stick to it anyway, so move on to testing across browsers to find out how things actually worked.
And then the kicker - do it all over again, for every single thing that you’ve already published because there was absolutely no guarantee of backwards compatability.
What worked today didn’t always work tomorrow.
Fun.
Social Headaches
Lack of social media and getting fireballed, i.e. community and distribution.
Reading Experience
Reading online sucked so bad that I used to print out articles.
Competing Platforms
No, not desktop software. Ha ha, remember those things!
I mean “Rich Media Applications”. Which is a euphamism for… you guessed it, Flash.
And also Director. CDROMS WERE THE FUTURE. To the point that I was “late” to my first web gig in 1999 because I’d written it off after my first taste of it as an undergrad a few years earlier.
Flash was the iOS and Android of it’s day. In fact my first job in SF was as a Flash developer at a game studio. I left to go to my first startup and my colleagues moved on too, some to buzzy dot com era huge game studios like NeoPets, but as the Flash scene eventually died out and it became clear that mobile gaming was a freight train that would finally kill it, most of them moved on to iOS.