The thing that’s usually on my mind when people are lamenting how the Web has evolved is that all the tools are still there to build websites however you want. So the lamentation is really, “other people are doing things in a way I don’t like and that upsets my experience.”
Which is this mix of… yeah I guess that’s true. I feel the same. But also, I have absolutely zero right to really externalize that grievance. People can do whatever they want for good or bad reasons, whether I’m equipped to understand those reasons or not.
But what we can do is be the change we want. Just make my own little oasis. Find other oases and hook ‘em all up.
Which then got me thinking about if there could be a special Web Classic experience we could voluntarily hook into. Maybe someone runs a search engine that only indexes crawled pages that have a X-Web-Classic header or whatever. If people actually want it enough to put the work in, can’t we make it? I guess corporations would come to capitalize on its success if it became successful. But I’d be willing to fight that battle if we got to that point (ie. curation or tech limitations or whatever…)
I’d love a browser that I switch into Web Classic Mode and it pretty much only reaches these resources. Example.com doesn’t implement an X-Web-Classic header response? Give me a 404. Does it try to load cross origin resources that aren’t X-Web-Classic? 404. Straight to 404.
I see there being two related but distinct issues:
- The desire for a simpler, quaint looking Web
- The desire for discoverability on the Web that isn't so driven by algorithms
I love what the Web once was, aesthetically speaking, but to me the real problem is that of discoverability.
There was a time where, if you built it, the audience would come. Today that is not so much the case, especially for written content which has become so heavily devalued. I would never write a blog today (especially one that is self-hosted) because I know I would spend most of my time begging for scraps. If you really want a large enough audience that your creative efforts are worthwhile, you have to churn out content. I don't want to churn anything out. One can churn out snippets, which is effectively what one does on sites like X, but then your writing has to either by pithy truisms or cringey drama. Besides, more and more people just want to consume content passively through audio and video. But then now I have to essentially put on a big production just to get my ideas out there, and for an audience that is probably less intellectually curious than those who would actually read an article.
The classic Web isn't coming back until something changes about the way people discover new things. The web is no longer a place where one goes to seek information; it's where information comes to you through word-of-mouth and so-called algorithms putting content in front of you.
Golden-era web was great. Now I'd just rather do my job, comment on HN, and go fishing. Actually trying to bring back the old web is like trying to bring back Jazz clubs hoping everyone will come to their senses and dance the Charleston again. No, it will always be a niche thing.
> All the tools are still there to build websites however you want.
No, they're not. The good tools all died off.
I wish there was still something good that just edited HTML and CSS locally and uploaded it. Mozilla Composer died long ago. Its spinoffs, Nvu, Kompozer, and Blue Griffon are all dead. You can still buy Dreamweaver, but Adobe wants $300 or so a year now, and they really want to sell you their whole "creative cloud". Brackets has been abandoned and converted to something called Phoenix, which now does more things less well.
I don't want a whole "content management system" that assembles pages on the fly from a database. Just a decent WYSIWYG editor that can also manage uploads. I don't want something controlled by the hosting service. I'm using a Dreamhost account for this site, and its main purpose is to host some API endpoints implemented in Go. The human-readable web part is just the documentation. There are many images, so I need more layout than Markdown supports. It's not a blog, so Wordpress is the wrong tool for the job.
You'd think there would be something good. As far as I can tell, no. Anybody know of anything?
> So the lamentation is really, “other people are doing things in a way I don’t like and that upsets my experience.”
Well put. Personally I have zero issues with SPAs and the amount of Javascript we are facing in the web industry right now. And if you try to build some kind of business that wants to present itself successfully to potential customers, on the web, there is no way to write a appealing website without Javascript.
Most target demographics at this point and in the future have grown up with beautiful websites and the internet being really interactive. I highly doubt they'd be interested in what you have to say if you wrote your page in a way the web was supposed to be used.
> But also, I have absolutely zero right to really externalize that grievance.
I’m not so certain. It’s like if one bought a nice house in the country, and enjoyed listening to classical music and going to sleep early, and then someone a quarter mile down the road built a concert stadium, and hosted heavy metal concerts every single night.
The mere existence of a heavy metal concert a quarter mile down the road interferes with listening to classical music and turning in early. Likewise, the mere existence of the ad-laden, Javascript-laden, MegaCorp™ Internet goes a long way to preventing one from experiencing the joy of ordinary life in the late 80s or early 90s when the Net was a haven for academics, technologists and hobbyists.
This is nostalgia for the world before a series of "Eternal September" events. In my opinion, it's essentially longing for an internet dominated by a different kind of user than today's majority and no amount of technical solutions will solve that.
To be fair, they could be entirely disjoint sets of people, but I’m surprised by the simultaneous 1) hate for JavaScript[0] and the “modern web” and 2) praise for all the Flash-based websites from the ‘90s–‘00s. To be fair, my first interactions with the web were largely after the “Flash for everything” era, so I might be out-of-the-loop: Did corporate Flash-based homepages get the same reaction then that SPAs do now?
[0] I do strongly dislike JavaScript myself, but specifically from the perspective of language design.
I don’t want to impose my preferences on other random people. I think sites loaded up with JavaScript are garbage and the people who make them are bad at their jobs, but whatever, that’s their business. I can hold negative opinions about things without suggesting we ban them.
But I do think it should be considered totally unacceptable for things like government services to be gatekept by JavaScript. Same for entities that receive lots of public funds, like universities.
While i am not aware of a browser that behaves like you described exactly, i vaguely recall that there is a browser plugin that is similar to what you described....but can't find it right now.
That being said, there is a search engine named Wiby [https://wiby.me] that focuses "...building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet.", so maybe that be nice to check out?
But what we can do is be the change we want. Just make my own little oasis. Find other oases and hook ‘em all up. Which then got me thinking about if there could be a special Web Classic experience we could voluntarily hook into.
I've noticed a bit of a divide in the small web, between those who:
A. Want to get back to the web's roots as a document network, keeping a clear structure and a focus on content,
B. Want to use the web's flexible presentation itself as a medium for expression through styling, interactive content and so on
The Gemini protocol is a good example of A taken to its extreme, while e.g. Neocities leans more toward the latter. The web is by its nature fractured - the independent web even moreso - but sometimes it seems the gap between the two philosophies is the biggest obstacle to more widespread adoption of small web practices, or at least more unified tools for discovery and networking.
It also seems like developers tend to favor type A, which has led to robust infrastructure and projects around it - like Gemini, or the site linked here. But I think a lot of people looking to make a break from big tech are doing so because of the limitations, and going from one set of awkward restrictions to another doesn't look like an upgrade.
Just my two cents. I'd be sad to miss out on the wacky creative sites people build, whether it's because they're stuck in big social media, or because they took the pledge from the linked page:
> make a simple, honest website with the proper use of HTML, the use of CSS only where essential, and the use of JavaScript only where it’s absolutely necessary.
The problem with traditional Websites is that search engines don't index them in a way that attracts visitors. I know this because my archaic, out-of-date, 34-year-old static-page Website https://arachnoid.com/ has no advertising or other features that might cause it to be given priority by a search engine.
My occasional use of JavaScript only supports technical animations, specialized calculators and real-time LaTeX rendering, not dynamic page generation or dark patterns.
From a modern perspective, my Website is actually a museum. The proof? While I once directed Website visitors to my YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@lutusp), I now find myself directing YouTube viewers to my Website.
I love this. My wife calls them “art projects”. It’s freeing.
Yes you build ideas and abandoned them. But so does an artist. Enjoy the creation even if it doesn’t turn into a business.
I, too, lament the fact that some dude laments about others. ;)
Technically, the dude is right, but stating the obvious doesn't help. Simply saying "Let's do something like 1996 while appreciating 2025, because!" would have caught my sympathy.
I like projects like these, but lose sympathy when these people trash others as phony; The "purity is the ultimate sophistication" is a dogma.
Roll everything back? "Hey, stop doing Java or Go, let's go X86 Assembly instead because in the end your code is only an abstraction and the magic happens in the compiler and linker, which produce a gargantuan bloat of X86 machine language instructions."
We could say the same about "pure HTML". Which standard? Why not text files?
PS: Has someone already written a browser for HTML in pure X86 yet? It is about time, I guess.
(I love Assembler, do quite some 6510 and 68000 assembler stuff. But it is hard. Brutally hard. I am glad we evolved from there.)
Part of me wants to build one of these "here is my infodumping about hobby X", but... I don't have any unique hobbies, nor any deep knowledge of any particular subject, but I think the main thing is competition.
Example. I bought and built a Gundam model the other day, cool stuff, could make a website for that... but there's already a wiki [0] that has a painstaking log of the franchise, everything ever published, etc. I have nothing to add to that, let alone do I have any right to build a website about it.
Of course, I shouldn't take it so seriously; it could be a simple blog post about "this is what I did this weekend, this is what I found, here's some pictures and some links". That'd have its own charm, I'm sure.
It's funny to talk about non-essential CSS and then to use a grey background.
I don't think any CSS should be essential, but I think tasteful changes to make your website look unique for those who have it enabled is totally appropriate.
In my experience the issue with these ideas is that they are so niche that it ends up being a network of unstable or odd people who I cannot at all relate to. Of course when there is a selection effect towards enthusiasts you end up losing a lot of, for lack of a better word, socially "normal" people. And then, yes, it does become harder to enjoy. I'm sure this will be cast as my problem but it's a very real effect. Of course there was also some selection effect at the beginning of the internet but the net was still a bit wider than it is today. I'm not really interested in the 1000th furry rust hacker
I've been looking for a community of exactly this! This website layout/feel scratches a really deep itch. Let's make a hand-crafted web of enthusiasts and bring back 1999 all by ourselves! :)
Oh wow, are in luck! These kinds of communities have been building up over the last few years (maybe decade or so?), and now they're quite prevalent. I was about to share a few links (like indieweb.org, fediring.net, etc.)...but, then remembered stumbling upon the following blogroll/link page that does a wonderful job of capturing some really good starting points: https://shellsharks.com/indieweb
I love this, and I wish more people would just fire up a text editor and write HTML like it's 1994.
If you do this, it's a good idea to learn about the handful of meta tags you'll need so your page doesn't look weird in search results or social media. But word to the wise, it's easy to go overboard with HTML "best practices."
Last week I wanted to quiz myself on German vocab words, and after searching in vain for a simple "flashcard" site without subscriptions or bullshit I ended up just making one myself. Very barebones, a single index.htm file with a little css and js in the header. Threw it on to a silly novelty domain I own ( ineptech.com/flash ) and bang, a useful (to me) webapp from zero to done in maybe two hours. And I'm a terrible programmer! It does feel sort of powerful in the way this site describes.
Still, I can't see buying a domain for it and putting it on this guy's webring, because while it's possible someone somewhere might find it useful, i don't think it's possible that person would be able to find it. They'd see the same 30 links to adware crap I saw and build their own like I did. In fact I'm probably the hundredth person to build this exact site for themselves. That part doesn't feel so powerful.
Not sure my site qualifies as hobbyist enough. It is the work of an enthusiast (me) but I used Bootstrap for styling and layout. I use some JavaScript. The site also starts with an animation I made using Tumult Hype. All this is probably too much for a true hobbyist site. Still, I regard my site as my hobby.
Steps 1 and 2 are flipped. You should make the website _before_ you put your credit card in
Always use relative links like `../css/default.css`. Never use absolute links like `example.com/css/default.css`, never use domain-relative links like `/css/default.css`. Those will break your site when it moves between domains, between directories, or between schemas.
If you use relative links judiciously, you can prototype your site under `file://` and it will Just Work when uploaded
I like this. I remember my first website. A collection of all the punk rock websites I could find. Then I started designing sites. That lead to a software career. But, even though I don’t do web sites anymore (way better qualified people for that), I have maintained a personal website for the last 20 years.
Right now it’s just a thing I did for fun. I’m always messing around with JavaScript. No frameworks, just fun.
I'm currently on hiatus from work and took it on myself to build some passion projects. It's been really fun to strictly build with HTML5, hand-jammed CSS and I've been learning HTMX for some dynamic content.
They are soooo simple, but still feel like web applications I've seen significant businesses built around. I hope to drive more projects this direction when I'm at work again.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|7 months ago|reply
Which is this mix of… yeah I guess that’s true. I feel the same. But also, I have absolutely zero right to really externalize that grievance. People can do whatever they want for good or bad reasons, whether I’m equipped to understand those reasons or not.
But what we can do is be the change we want. Just make my own little oasis. Find other oases and hook ‘em all up.
Which then got me thinking about if there could be a special Web Classic experience we could voluntarily hook into. Maybe someone runs a search engine that only indexes crawled pages that have a X-Web-Classic header or whatever. If people actually want it enough to put the work in, can’t we make it? I guess corporations would come to capitalize on its success if it became successful. But I’d be willing to fight that battle if we got to that point (ie. curation or tech limitations or whatever…)
I’d love a browser that I switch into Web Classic Mode and it pretty much only reaches these resources. Example.com doesn’t implement an X-Web-Classic header response? Give me a 404. Does it try to load cross origin resources that aren’t X-Web-Classic? 404. Straight to 404.
[+] [-] ravenstine|7 months ago|reply
- The desire for a simpler, quaint looking Web
- The desire for discoverability on the Web that isn't so driven by algorithms
I love what the Web once was, aesthetically speaking, but to me the real problem is that of discoverability.
There was a time where, if you built it, the audience would come. Today that is not so much the case, especially for written content which has become so heavily devalued. I would never write a blog today (especially one that is self-hosted) because I know I would spend most of my time begging for scraps. If you really want a large enough audience that your creative efforts are worthwhile, you have to churn out content. I don't want to churn anything out. One can churn out snippets, which is effectively what one does on sites like X, but then your writing has to either by pithy truisms or cringey drama. Besides, more and more people just want to consume content passively through audio and video. But then now I have to essentially put on a big production just to get my ideas out there, and for an audience that is probably less intellectually curious than those who would actually read an article.
The classic Web isn't coming back until something changes about the way people discover new things. The web is no longer a place where one goes to seek information; it's where information comes to you through word-of-mouth and so-called algorithms putting content in front of you.
Golden-era web was great. Now I'd just rather do my job, comment on HN, and go fishing. Actually trying to bring back the old web is like trying to bring back Jazz clubs hoping everyone will come to their senses and dance the Charleston again. No, it will always be a niche thing.
[+] [-] Animats|7 months ago|reply
No, they're not. The good tools all died off.
I wish there was still something good that just edited HTML and CSS locally and uploaded it. Mozilla Composer died long ago. Its spinoffs, Nvu, Kompozer, and Blue Griffon are all dead. You can still buy Dreamweaver, but Adobe wants $300 or so a year now, and they really want to sell you their whole "creative cloud". Brackets has been abandoned and converted to something called Phoenix, which now does more things less well.
I don't want a whole "content management system" that assembles pages on the fly from a database. Just a decent WYSIWYG editor that can also manage uploads. I don't want something controlled by the hosting service. I'm using a Dreamhost account for this site, and its main purpose is to host some API endpoints implemented in Go. The human-readable web part is just the documentation. There are many images, so I need more layout than Markdown supports. It's not a blog, so Wordpress is the wrong tool for the job.
You'd think there would be something good. As far as I can tell, no. Anybody know of anything?
[+] [-] zwnow|7 months ago|reply
Well put. Personally I have zero issues with SPAs and the amount of Javascript we are facing in the web industry right now. And if you try to build some kind of business that wants to present itself successfully to potential customers, on the web, there is no way to write a appealing website without Javascript.
Most target demographics at this point and in the future have grown up with beautiful websites and the internet being really interactive. I highly doubt they'd be interested in what you have to say if you wrote your page in a way the web was supposed to be used.
[+] [-] eadmund|7 months ago|reply
I’m not so certain. It’s like if one bought a nice house in the country, and enjoyed listening to classical music and going to sleep early, and then someone a quarter mile down the road built a concert stadium, and hosted heavy metal concerts every single night.
The mere existence of a heavy metal concert a quarter mile down the road interferes with listening to classical music and turning in early. Likewise, the mere existence of the ad-laden, Javascript-laden, MegaCorp™ Internet goes a long way to preventing one from experiencing the joy of ordinary life in the late 80s or early 90s when the Net was a haven for academics, technologists and hobbyists.
[+] [-] poszlem|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] BalinKing|7 months ago|reply
[0] I do strongly dislike JavaScript myself, but specifically from the perspective of language design.
[+] [-] bee_rider|7 months ago|reply
But I do think it should be considered totally unacceptable for things like government services to be gatekept by JavaScript. Same for entities that receive lots of public funds, like universities.
[+] [-] mxuribe|7 months ago|reply
That being said, there is a search engine named Wiby [https://wiby.me] that focuses "...building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet.", so maybe that be nice to check out?
[+] [-] neonnoodle|7 months ago|reply
This is kind of like what the Gemini protocol is trying to do.
[+] [-] ilamont|7 months ago|reply
Webrings!
See "We need to bring back webrings", https://arne.me/blog/we-need-to-bring-back-webrings and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38268706
[+] [-] Tade0|7 months ago|reply
Well, not exactly, but this is the next best thing:
https://www.marginalia.nu/
The author is a HN regular.
[+] [-] shayway|7 months ago|reply
A. Want to get back to the web's roots as a document network, keeping a clear structure and a focus on content,
B. Want to use the web's flexible presentation itself as a medium for expression through styling, interactive content and so on
The Gemini protocol is a good example of A taken to its extreme, while e.g. Neocities leans more toward the latter. The web is by its nature fractured - the independent web even moreso - but sometimes it seems the gap between the two philosophies is the biggest obstacle to more widespread adoption of small web practices, or at least more unified tools for discovery and networking.
It also seems like developers tend to favor type A, which has led to robust infrastructure and projects around it - like Gemini, or the site linked here. But I think a lot of people looking to make a break from big tech are doing so because of the limitations, and going from one set of awkward restrictions to another doesn't look like an upgrade.
Just my two cents. I'd be sad to miss out on the wacky creative sites people build, whether it's because they're stuck in big social media, or because they took the pledge from the linked page:
> make a simple, honest website with the proper use of HTML, the use of CSS only where essential, and the use of JavaScript only where it’s absolutely necessary.
[+] [-] lutusp|7 months ago|reply
My occasional use of JavaScript only supports technical animations, specialized calculators and real-time LaTeX rendering, not dynamic page generation or dark patterns.
From a modern perspective, my Website is actually a museum. The proof? While I once directed Website visitors to my YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@lutusp), I now find myself directing YouTube viewers to my Website.
Not our topic, but one reason is kids can't read: https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/american-childrens...
Apropos, here's one of my favorite jokes. I visit a bookstore. On the wall is a poster: "The tragedy of illiteracy -- now available as an audiobook."
[+] [-] graham1776|7 months ago|reply
And yes domain collecting is real.
[+] [-] _the_inflator|7 months ago|reply
Technically, the dude is right, but stating the obvious doesn't help. Simply saying "Let's do something like 1996 while appreciating 2025, because!" would have caught my sympathy.
I like projects like these, but lose sympathy when these people trash others as phony; The "purity is the ultimate sophistication" is a dogma.
Roll everything back? "Hey, stop doing Java or Go, let's go X86 Assembly instead because in the end your code is only an abstraction and the magic happens in the compiler and linker, which produce a gargantuan bloat of X86 machine language instructions."
We could say the same about "pure HTML". Which standard? Why not text files?
PS: Has someone already written a browser for HTML in pure X86 yet? It is about time, I guess.
(I love Assembler, do quite some 6510 and 68000 assembler stuff. But it is hard. Brutally hard. I am glad we evolved from there.)
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|7 months ago|reply
Example. I bought and built a Gundam model the other day, cool stuff, could make a website for that... but there's already a wiki [0] that has a painstaking log of the franchise, everything ever published, etc. I have nothing to add to that, let alone do I have any right to build a website about it.
Of course, I shouldn't take it so seriously; it could be a simple blog post about "this is what I did this weekend, this is what I found, here's some pictures and some links". That'd have its own charm, I'm sure.
[0] https://gundam.fandom.com/wiki/The_Gundam_Wiki
[+] [-] fauverism|7 months ago|reply
I feel good about the future when I see... https://os.ryo.lu/ https://neal.fun/
Somewhere on a zip are my IE 5.5 bookmarks. I'll stumble upon them again one day and remember how excited I was to surf the web on my 233mhz G3.
[+] [-] Arch-TK|7 months ago|reply
I don't think any CSS should be essential, but I think tasteful changes to make your website look unique for those who have it enabled is totally appropriate.
E.g. https://kramkow.ski/
[+] [-] adiabatty|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bowsamic|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rambambram|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] azdle|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] szszrk|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] foco_tubi|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] stronglikedan|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unavoidable|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mxuribe|7 months ago|reply
Enjoy! :-)
[+] [-] net01|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] raytopia|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nurettin|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] turnsout|7 months ago|reply
If you do this, it's a good idea to learn about the handful of meta tags you'll need so your page doesn't look weird in search results or social media. But word to the wise, it's easy to go overboard with HTML "best practices."
[+] [-] ineptech|7 months ago|reply
Still, I can't see buying a domain for it and putting it on this guy's webring, because while it's possible someone somewhere might find it useful, i don't think it's possible that person would be able to find it. They'd see the same 30 links to adware crap I saw and build their own like I did. In fact I'm probably the hundredth person to build this exact site for themselves. That part doesn't feel so powerful.
[+] [-] fud101|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] calvinmorrison|7 months ago|reply
https://utraque.org/
[+] [-] endemic|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] marinbala|7 months ago|reply
Not sure my site qualifies as hobbyist enough. It is the work of an enthusiast (me) but I used Bootstrap for styling and layout. I use some JavaScript. The site also starts with an animation I made using Tumult Hype. All this is probably too much for a true hobbyist site. Still, I regard my site as my hobby.
[+] [-] 01HNNWZ0MV43FF|7 months ago|reply
Always use relative links like `../css/default.css`. Never use absolute links like `example.com/css/default.css`, never use domain-relative links like `/css/default.css`. Those will break your site when it moves between domains, between directories, or between schemas.
If you use relative links judiciously, you can prototype your site under `file://` and it will Just Work when uploaded
[+] [-] reactordev|7 months ago|reply
Right now it’s just a thing I did for fun. I’m always messing around with JavaScript. No frameworks, just fun.
https://gabereiser.com
[+] [-] mattlutze|7 months ago|reply
They are soooo simple, but still feel like web applications I've seen significant businesses built around. I hope to drive more projects this direction when I'm at work again.