[Go Make Things] The web of yesteryear

Tuesday, June 11, 2024

Yesterday, I wrote about the grain of the web.

Zach Leatherman kindly reminded me of this legendary article from Frank Chimero about that very topic. The article is nearly a decade old now, and feels as relevant as ever.

I have thoughts, and also wanted to take a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Let's dig in!

Not much has changed

Frank's article came out shortly after I started my web dev career.

His advocacy for the craft of web development was absolutely formative around how I build for the web, and influenced the trajectory of my entire career.

But it's also heartbreaking that after all that time, the problems with the web are if anything worse than when Frank wrote the article. Consider this section…

Most of the solidified techniques about our practice come from the natural ways of the web that have been there since the start. The answer is right there in front of us, in the website itself, and each step we take away from its intentions makes our creations weaker.

What does it look like when you work against the web's natural character? Well, it probably looks like this [photo of a circus bear riding a bicycle]:

A bear riding a bicycle. Yes, really.

I think you make what I call "bicycle bear websites." Why? Because my response to both is the same.

"Listen bub," I say, "it is very impressive that you can teach a bear to ride a bicycle, and it is fascinating and novel. But perhaps it's cruel? Because that's not what bears are supposed to do. And look, pal, that bear will never actually be good at riding a bicycle."

This is how I feel about so many of the fancy websites I see. "It is fascinating that you can do that, but it's really not what a website is supposed to do."

Now consider how we build for the web today.

Megabytes of JavaScript. Blank white pages that only render after that JavaScript loads (if at all). JavaScript routing (often poorly done). UI updates driven entirely by, yep, JavaScript again.

Tools like React and HTMX are clever as hell.

They're also… wrong. I can't think of a better word for it. They're just wrong.

The web of old

Right at the start of his article, Frank has an embedded MP3 of the dial-up modem connection noise.

It's deeply nostalgic for me. It's the sound I will forever associate with the internet.

I came online during a time when using the web meant tying up a phone line. We didn't have computers in our pockets. We didn't have JavaScript. We didn't even have CSS.

We had HTML, some inline properties, and servers.

There weren't any search engines. And then there were, but they weren't very good. You found sites by either typing a URL directly into the browser, or from it being linked to by another site.

I would often type random URLs in to see what I could find. It felt like exploring.

People built webrings: groups of sites often connected by a shared topic that would all link to each other for easier discovery. I found a lot of rad websites that way, too!

There was also live chat functionality as a web app back in the 90s on some websites. Before JavaScript.

How, you ask?

A form with a text input, and a server that stored the last few dozen messages and displayed them in the UI. Submitting a message would reload the page and update the UI with the latest messages. You could also manually reload the page.

Modern chat apps mostly do the same thing, except they apparently required megabytes of JavaScript to work.

What I miss. What I don't.

The modern web is amazing.

CSS Grid and Flexbox make building layouts so much easier! Hell, just CSS existing at all is a big win.

I appreciate how good cross-browser compatibility is. It doesn't always feel like it when Webkit decides to just "nope" things or Chrome runs off and does whatever the fuck it wants, but trust me, the "Browser War" years were much, much worse.

And despite search engines starting to circle the toilet thanks to "AI," I do still very much love that they exist. Finding information on the web used to be really hard.

But despite all of that, modern web development kind of sucks.

It doesn't have to. What we do today is a choice, and we as developers could decide to do things differently.

I miss how much we got done with so little back in the 90s. A miss a web that starts as mostly HTML, and layers in more when it can.

A miss a web that was less commercial. I miss that sense of exploration and whimsy.

I don't think the "Web Industry" is going to go away, but I do think we can carve out our weird little spaces again.

And I also think that for the clients we serve and the companies we work at, we can build sites in ways that are simpler, faster, more resilient, and easier to maintain.

Cheers,
Chris

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