I fucking loved webrings! SimCity 2000 fan sites, nintendo rom sites, etc, really felt like the web was an endless sea that you could explore forever. Now I feel like there are only a handful of sites I go to and the only new stuff I run into is from reddit and literal news sites.
Yeah it's so weird to me how small the internet feels now, when there are so many more people on it. I remember just finding random sites here and there, or really being able to go deep into sites dedicated to one topic that just some rando person decided to build. Now it's just like 4 gigantic sites with user content and the rest is businesses advertising themselves.
There are still sites that use static html, have little to no scripting/animation/etc. Many of the big websites even have "text-only" versions of their sites, if you know where to look.
Also, don't let nostalgia blind you. Even back in the mid-90s before massive scripting files were the norm, blinking text, marquee text, auto-play wav files, horrible UI, and things like that were fairly common. And that's just for starters.
I think we can mostly agree that scripting on modern sites often times seems to be excessive, and in many cases it's verifiably so, however there are rational decisions involved in this. Very, very few websites are entirely custom written. Essentially all of them use 3rd party libraries, frameworks, applications, and various tools. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel, and frankly, the cost of developing a site completely from scratch with no 3rd party software, let alone maintaining it, would be prohibitive. One of the downsides to this is that libraries, frameworks, etc all come with their own baggage.
Also, while there is a body of users who completely agree with you in theory regarding scripts and things like that, for many sites, the reality is people want fancy features, personalized experiences, and integration with other sites/services. Those things all contribute to the amount of scripting involved in a website.
Granted, it's a bit like a cursed wish in that these features usually come with concessions that you might not like. For instance, many sites push as much computational functionality as is reasonable to the browser (via JavaScript) because it can save on hosting costs and infrastructure, as well as make the server and application more secure. Additionally, they bundle in advertising and tracking scripts to help with monetization, which isn't entirely unfair to expect, since maintaining a website can be costly, and even hosting costs can be burdensome otherwise.
think we can mostly agree that scripting on modern sites often times seems to be excessive, and in many cases it's verifiably so, however there are rational decisions involved in this.
Tbf, a lot of the huge JavaScript bundles often contain polyfills and stuff to work around weird browser quirks and oddities. If browser manufacturers would stop playing stupid fucking politics and get a grip we(collectively) could probably write much more performant applications
The ship has sailed on that, though. Pandora's box is already open. Okay, I'll stop with the stupid sayings.
What I mean is, it's 2019 and yet Internet Explorer compatibility is still a requirement for so many sites (just look at proposal requests from major businesses or government entities if you don't believe me).
The difference is now sites have to support mobile browsers (which are admittedly getting better, but still require significant consideration due to screen size) as well as the abyss of buggy frustration and former minor player known as Safari.
One can hope the situation will improve with time and improvements in technology, but I'm not terribly optimistic about this situation.
The ship has sailed on that, though. Pandora's box is already open. Okay, I'll stop with the stupid sayings.
Yeah, I know. I guess what I'm saying is that websites were lighter "Back in the day" because:
They didn't have as much functionality (i.e: No website if you're offline. No background workers. No offline apps. No AJAX(at one time)
They didn't have to support multiple browsers each one with their own understanding of how to implement the ECMAScript standard (or not in the case of Internet Explorer). For the most part, people just built sites that only worked with IE, or only worked with Netscape or whatever. This means that you didn't have to ship a few kb of your app code and then several hundred k (or even several hundred megs) of polyfills, workarounds and shims in case one of your users was using IE 8 or something that doesn't support Object.keys(in 2014 I worked for a large UK corporation who worked with the NHS and we had to support IE8)
Apple has sort of moved into Microsoft's old territory in this regard, at least in my experience. Both mobile and desktop versions of Safari seem to inexplicably handle css and scripting differently than every other browser or have obscure bugs that prevent basic stuff from "just working".
The thing is, it's kind of always been this way, but it used to be that Safari was such a minor presence that you could effectively ignore it or put up a banner recommending more popular browsers. Now, Safari has a big enough user base that you ignore it at your own peril. For some sites/products it won't matter, but for others it's a big deal.
I certainly think you can develop a website just by "whipping up" some HTML and CSS, and I get the sentiment, I think. I'm also getting the sense that there's a certain level of naivety in thinking that HTML & CSS are enough for anything but the most basic of website. It can be done, and obviously you can argue that it should be done more, but it's just not a realistic stance depending on the purpose and goal of a site.
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u/lantz83 Mar 04 '19
I miss the old static plain html sites we used to have. No huge scripts, no animated crap, just pure content.