It's 1998, you make a website in the copy of frontpage express that came with your computer, it's just like Word and it's very easy, you figure out how to upload it to the couple megs of web space that your ISP gives you (the instructions are on their website), you visit your site in your browser and everything's fine and the site's readable and everything looks the way it should
🦝 "Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026" you think to yourself for some reason
The site works fine but sometimes you get email from guys - always guys - telling you that the code sucks because you used frontpage express
You don't bother replying because it doesn't matter, the site works fine, but this does discourage you somewhat, so you get a copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver on CD from a guy outside the computer market. His stall was a tarp on the ground.
A little while later you start getting different emails
You've been laying out your site in tables, is the thing, and there's this new thing now, cascading style sheets, and you can use those for laying out your site. Does Dreamweaver do those? I dunno. Does Frontpage? Oh almost definitely not
You learn about server-side includes, your server doesn't do that of course, your five megabytes of server space are free, they came with your free internet access. So you keep using frames, but it does bother you.
You join a web design newsgroup. You ask a question, how come my site does this weird thing in Netscape? The answer: "Probably because you coded it badly." You leave the web design newsgroup.
You're beginning to understand that there's a lot of money in this.
You do a few websites for friends, family, local businesses, you make a little bit of money.
You didn't need a degree, for this. You didn't need to pay to go on a course and get a bit of paper, there WERE no bits of paper then, you could learn it for free and the websites you built were proof that you could build a website.
That scared some folks?
Between all these things you learned Flash, which was a wonderful bit of software that let you make ANYTHING, and you also learned cascading style sheets, which, I cannot stress this enough, were complete fucking dogshit.
Like, it's good today, it's normal today, it's the standard way of doing things today - but back then, it sucked so hard that web designers with a decade of experience would crank out articles about trying to achieve "the Holy Grail of web design," which was three columns, a header, and a footer, with stuff in the middle bit and links in the left bit and maybe some other links in the right bit, that didn't fuck up in some hilarious or obscure way. Shit that was trivial and intuitive with tables, but absolutely fucking impossible with CSS.
It made everything harder, and it would be over a DECADE before anything got easier.
During this time, web editors like Frontpage and Dreamweaver just outright fucking gave up. You don't drag and drop anymore, you don't highlight text and ctrl-I for italics anymore, it's all code, except instead of <i> for italics it's <em> now.
What does <em> do? It adds emphasis. How does it add emphasis? By making the text italic. It's this way because you might not want your emphasized text to be italic, you might want it to have a drop shadow or be bright red or some shit like that, and the idea of divorcing the content from the presentation was kinda the Whole Deal of CSS, so that kiiiinda makes sense, in the way that a lot of early CSS kiiiiinda made sense
So there was this weird situation where the Open Standard, the libre open source shit, the anyone-can-make-it-in-notepad shit, was the realm of very boring websites, and the proprietary, locked-down, $600 to get started software was where art met anarchy. The proper fun, the proper expression of humanity and experimentation with interactive web content and making not just new stories but new ways to tell them, was happening in Flash, which was being bought out by giant evil megacorp inc.
The reason for this is two things, first Flash was WAY easier, and second my friend with a tarp full of CD-R's from earlier in the thread
Early smartphones were coming online around about then, and they weren't so hot with the whole flash thing. Like, it'd work, kinda, you'd miss out on all the cool rollover effects because you had to poke the screen with a little stick and it was just a resistive touchscreen, it didn't know you were hovering the stick over the screen.
For example, say you'd made a website for a local club of friendly motorcycle gentlemen whose navigation menu was a series of steel plates overlaid against the backdrop of a beating heart that was also a V8 engine. As you moved your mouse over the links, each link would rust over, the heart would rev up and get excited, and then when you actually clicked on a link, the whole thing would explode. On a smartphone, the engine heart wouldn't rev up, it'd just explode for seemingly no reason. But, y'know, it worked, we could make it work, and motorcycle gentlemen don't need no fucking professional white background with a pale blue header y'know
This needs to be a blog post, this really needs to be a blog post, I spaffed out the first post in the thread off the top of my head and then went and had dinner and fucked around a bit and then came back and carried on and didn't notice that the first post was blowing up
Anyway then the iphone came out and fucked everything up
See the iPhone was fucking shit compared to other smartphones at the time, like it was YEARS behind, but apple did that thing where, like, remember how they did it with MP3 players? Instead of saying stuff like "four gigs of space, six hour battery life" they said "A thousand songs in your pocket and you don't have to fuck around with CDs," while all the other MP3 player makers were fighting over people who already knew about MP3 players, apple targeted people who'd never used an MP3 player before, and that's what they did with their smartphone.
Anyway it didn't have a keyboard, it couldn't do flash, and you couldn't even copy and paste on the fucker but it sold like buggery because the adverts didn't say shit like "600mHz processor and 256 megs of RAM," they said "The internet in your pocket."
Now you can't make just one website anymore, you have to make two websites, and suddenly the point of all this CSS stuff becomes clear
So now you're making two websites, one for proper computers and one for shitty little three-inch screens.
This is the point where, let's be honest, most folk check the fuck out. Myspace is a thing now, livejournal is a thing now, if you <tr><td>'d your way into one website and it took you fucking ages you sure as fuck weren't gonna make two unless you understand that fancy new CSS shit.
I understood that fancy new CSS shit. But fucking hell, even at the time I knew, despite how AAALLLLL the websites about making websites had been banging on about CSS for ages, despite how all the bloggers were saying hey look this is definitely the way forward, I knew that knowing how to use CSS for layout put me in an EXTREME minority. The web wasn't for quiet uncles or excitable kids with a pirated copy of dreamweaver off the tarp outside the Manchester computer fair anymore, it was for fucking nerds with notepad++ who'd gotten interested in web standards. It was for people like me.
I'm not fond of people like me
@ifixcoinops I did a bit of early Web site design myself. I mostly did it all in my text editor (I think I was using UltraEdit32 back then? Maybe?) I knew up to HTML 4.01 back in the day. But when CSS stuff blew up and everyone made it clear that the Web was moving permanently to it, I quit right then and there and never made another thing.
(I have, of course, since forgotten basically everything.)
@ifixcoinops I'm fond of people like you (us?); I'm just not fond of the means of publishing stuff online being restricted to the likes of us rather than being available to everyone...
I had a similar rant a while back (and a bunch of people got angry with me for complaining about what HTML/CSS has become) but I wrote it into a blog post: https://www.snell-pym.org.uk/archives/2025/07/08/who-cares-about-user-interfaces/
@darckcrystale
I second that - yes, please write a blog post & get to the bit where the future doesn’t have to be the same as the past… 😀
The real problem with flash, for websites, is that it doesn't handle different resolutions very easily. Which wasn't an issue when everyone was on 800x600, but explains why it started dropping off when people expected their site to work on phones, tables and desktops of different aspect ratios.
That being said, I remember when people had entire businesses building drag and drop flash websites, before Wordpress took off.
@ifixcoinops Oh, making a video game fan page on Angelfire in fourth grade on the brand new candy shell imacs, then learning the html that went with them.
And slightly blatant overuse of blink tags (in my defense I was 9 and they seemed like the greatest thing ever along with marquee tags)
@ifixcoinops Most of that doesn't fit me, but the technical aspects 100% do. Frontpage to Dreamweaver.
What a Journey.
@ifixcoinops Okay, the thing that Gets My Goat about typing into a thingy with a Bold button is this. You've got a document. It's got a bit of bold text in it. You place the cursor next to the bold text. Will the next thing you type be bold, or not?
(The answer is always "whatever would be most obnoxious". I have no idea how they have such good predictive technology for the sole purpose of making things bold when they shouldn't be and not bold when they should.)
Sometimes this is a case of "is that space bold or not" (something I always want to have to wonder about), but sometimes it's literally whether placing the cursor on a formatting boundary puts it inside the formatting or not.
When you're writing markup, you're screwing around with markup, but at least you don't have to deal with any of That.
Missing "reveal codes" is probably why I prefer to write first drafts of documentation in Markdown before sacrificing it to Confluence.
@jrdepriest @whbboyd @ifixcoinops For small stuff I'm going the Markdown -> Pandoc -> [whatever] route. For anything complex and/or that I care about, it gets built in LaTeX because I have brain problems.
After 4 years here I still have no idea how our multiple Confluence sites are organized or how they are supposed to be used. LaTeX is the only way I can include subdocuments and instantly update hundreds of images without needing to point and click each one; these are critical for building the incredibly tedious and marginally useful software QA docs we need that demonstrate our engineering analysis codes aren't complete unjustifiable crap. Unlike Word which regularly eats its own tail then throws up all over the nice sofa.
LaTeX takes the place of WordPerfect allowing you to see what's going on in all its deranged glory, leaving you with the sanity of a senior librarian at Miskatonic University. But at least your documents don't have stray tentacles erupting from every crevice tearing at the bounds of space and time like Word.
Making websites was interesting in 1995, became a vicious fight with broke-ass Javascript in 1997, and was completely miserable by 1998 when every potatohead Stanford MBA wanted a dungeon full of wizards to turn Photoshop comps into fast-loading dynamic scalable applications yesterday so they could achieve humanity's dream of having toothpaste delivered overnight to your home. CSS was an undelivered promise that eventually turned into systemd for web chrome and nothing anywhere was fun anymore.
That's basically how web editors with preview panes work, except you're editing the codes.
I nerd-raged so hard at the deprecation of frames that I wrote several static site generators in XSLT.
In the early 2000s.
Long before Jekyll came along and the term “static site generator” had been coined to describe it.
I firmly believe that many companies have an explicit "Department of Software Annoyance."
i think tumblr's post editor is pretty good. the edge of a formatting style effectively acts like a character for the purpose of the arrow keys. so if the caret is inside the edge of the bold part, the bold part is highlighted and what you type will be bold, but if you press "right" once, the caret doesn't physically move but the bold part becomes unhighlighted and what you type will not be bold.
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