Websites got a lot less fun at some point too. A lot of the designs seem dated now, but I really miss the days when websites had brightly colored text over load backgrounds. Obviously modern sites are more usable, but I want <blink> tags back.
I suppose this is the natural progression as a given thing becomes more accessible, that the things themselves lose personality and flair because literally anybody can do it now. It reminds of cars, actually, how back in the early days every car was unique because when you bought a "car" what you received was a chassis, engine, wheels, etc. and then you'd take that to a coach builder who'd finish the job to your liking. Then as time went on, things got standardized (for cars, it was manufacturers and models, for websites, it's companies like Shopify, Wordpress, Joomla, etc. and then slowly everything gets paired down into what is generally agreed upon as the "correct" set of features, and they all just look a bit the same.
And then of course you occasionally have a teenager who fits a great stereo to a Mazda or something, but by and large, everything is pretty much standardized.
I know it's more efficient, but it's terribly boring.
I'd argue that fewer people can do it now (relative to the Internet population) than previously, because free webspace is dead, the desktop is dead (the laptop close behind it), ftp is dead, DMCA, GDPR, hackers are scary, HTML is much more complex (e.g. responsive design).
The web is a playing field for larger corporations now and most people and small entities have given up and just maintain a FB/IG presence.
New PC sales makes it look like access is dropping, but the reality is people simply use older Computers on average. A 10 year old desktop in 1998 is relatively ancient, but in 2018 it’s not that far behind the curve. On top of that tablets and smartphones often replace secondary computers. If you have a powerful gaming desktop and a tablet then a laptop is less useful.
Another big issue is that 'computer malls' are also still a thing. Think something like Fry's, but 6 stories tall and full of nothing but independent shops. These places drive two confounding issues. The first is that they build [lots] of computers a la carte. PC sales figures only come from major distributors like Dell, HP, etc. So even though there are millions of PCs sold at these malls, it'd count as 0 by most metrics. And another factor is that people tend to repair/refurbish/upgrade their computers rather than buy new ones. These malls again facilitate such things at very affordable prices.
I can count the number of tablets I've seen on one hand.
> It has something like 40% of web traffic now
I'm not sure what your metric is here so I've assumed volume.
40% of web traffic now is an order of magnitude more traffic than all web traffic a decade ago. I'm not sure how something which has an increased volume and still has 40% of the total pie can be 'dead'. I might buy 'dying' if it was accompanied with more data.
> ...despite those with desktop PCs being more likely professionals in the field...
I'm not sure what you are saying. It seems like you're saying outside of tech, businesses don't use desktops. That does not jibe with my experience. I have seen an increase in POS systems using tablets, but those are primarily replacing cash registers, bespoke POS systems, etc.
> ...so normal people simply don't really use a desktop/laptop anymore to browse the web.
With the exception of the people I know who own a laptop but not a television, it seems that all normal people do with their laptops is browse the web.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/13/17567760/pc-sales-growth-...
I actually travel on business with one a lot of the time but will probably replace it because no one really makes the hardware I want.
So what? A browser is all you need to make a website.
When people say the desktop/laptop is largely dead. That's what they mean. [ADDED: That, and that web access is increasingly through a phone.]
https://www.cnet.com/news/oracle-to-debut-500-network-comput...
I'd also rather have an iPhone helping me out in the workshop than a laptop or desktop, for a bunch of reasons. I can use it as a measuring device, a level, a note-taking/shopping-list machine (hands free, even!), a youtube how-to player, an instruction manual finder, and so on, and it fits in my pocket and reasonable amounts of sawdust and liquid won't hurt it. That's creation.
People spend most of their time on "real" computers consuming, too, by a huge margin. I still wouldn't say their (computers') primary focus is consumption. Anyway, the premise is kind of nonsense as consumption is a major part of many creative processes.
Making silly little programs in BASIC or Perl is a lot tougher on an iphone, and that's what sparked the interest for a lot of people (though maybe I'm wrong and it's getting easier?)
Nope, it's better than ever. You have non-profit providers like https://neocities.org/, regular shared hosting with free plans, and stuff like Github pages and Netlify for those with a bit more tech skills.
Way better than the times when you had Geocities and such injecting ads into your site.
> the desktop is dead (the laptop close behind it)
No need for those to build a website. Any cheap Android phone can do it.
> ftp is dead
Nope, the previously mentioned shared hosting providers still offer it.
> HTML is much more complex (e.g. responsive design)
Old-school HTML pretty much works the same, and is actually quite fine on both desktop and mobile screens.
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Frankly, I don't think the problem is that making your own site has gotten any harder, it's that there was no FB/IG back then. Had there been FB pages from the start of the web, you'd probably would have never seen so many custom sites in the first place.
I’m not sure about this. AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe all had vibrant online communities. However, what you could do was much more limited than the federated web, and they were silos.
Without the competition of “I’ll host my own server, and search engines will index it”, I wonder if FB and it’s predecessors would have been able to figure out what to build.
It was creatively speaking a very exciting space - there were almost no rules yet, and you could do whatever and people wouldn't be turned off because your site looked weird or unusable, because all sites looked weird and were equally unusable.
There are many upsides to the web we have today: accessibility, ease of use, ease of discovery, rich content, but that creative space has gone and something with that fresh creative scope combined with massive, new audience may not exist again in my lifetime (or even ever - the internet was the first time you could throw up a page and have people all over the World see it - a larger network of eyeballs can never exist).
Probably the only remnants of the old web are professors who publish academic websites and are based on content rather than design. I do remember when I was about to graduate there was talk of standardizing all the professor websites. I would agree all websites would need accessibility, mobility etc but like you I miss the old web where you could just explore.
Having said that, the new Captain Marvel website is awesome. I don't think the page counter is real though :( https://www.marvel.com/captainmarvel/
I'd take spinning flaming guitar gifs, gaudy tiled backgrounds, and <blink> over that crap any day.
http://runtimeterror.com/games/dino/
(and i think the main runtimeterror.com site has a bit of a late 90s/early 2000s style, but it is just that i prefer it that way)
The web platform evolved into a much more complex space. In the early days (late 90's) you could spend an hour in "HotDog Web Editor" and build a page that looked somewhat close to a mainstream website. Those days are long gone and most people now opt for platforms, templates and/or site builders, which make total business sense and are the right decision for most, but they lack the fun and excitement experienced by the early Internet "webmasters".
Now, everything is sterilized. Run through a million filters to be picture-perfect, work on everything beautifully, etc. This is great for the bulk of the web (businesses and web apps and what-not), but personal websites disappearing was a _huge_ blow to the personality of the internet. Heck, MySpace pages were a disaster, letting users run arbitrary HTML and CSS everywhere, and when Facebook came along everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief that _finally_ we'd be free of those horrendous MySpace pages.
Now, looking back, I miss the crap out of those pages. I also ditched social media entirely but I consider everything I just mentioned as playing a large role in that. No charm, no personality. Rigid. Walled gardens. It's like a microcosm of the state of technology in 2019.
And I mentioned personal sites disappearing, and I still stand by it - yes, of course there are blogs and what-not, but they're not the same. They're hosted, fast, efficient, and typically use approved themes. If you want to get down and dirty and actually make your own site, it'd be looked at as a gigantic waste of time. Technology has come too far for it to be practical to build a fancy site out of pure flat HTML files that looks like the worst 90s sites. Why do that, when you could just have an out-of-the-box Wordpress or Tumblr site?
Plus, no one would visit it anyway. If it's not spammed or marketing, no one's visiting anything these days. It's just too saturated.
The average internet user visits a tiny fraction of the number of websites they used to. Typically, aggregators. Reddit and Facebook and whatever. Worse yet, aggregators that pull in only things they agree with, shared by people they agree with. And that is their version of the internet, and not to mention, the world. No dissenting opinions, nothing original. It's depressing and I hate it.
I grew up learning to build websites from copying source code into Notepad and running it locally. It was a hot mess, but so much fun and super rewarding. The 90s web, even early 2000s until ~2006 or so (when I personally consider it went "too mainstream" to put on my hipster hat, and everyone was suddenly on it), I miss it all.
Sorry for the rant but this all hits close to home and, as a web developer who got started in the mid-90s, I'm subjected to the "modern web" for many hours a day, and I'd give anything to see it regress.
I still write my website by hand. I use a static site generator to do things like make a blog index and stuff, but I don't use any templates. Everything you see is designed by me.
TBH i never understood, even at the time, the point of writing static pages by hand (i remember even proud web buttons like "Made in Notepad" :-P) - the main explanation i was given was that the WYSIWYG editors created messy code, but to me that never sounded like a good reason since the entire purpose of such an editor is to not have to bother with the code.
I only started making sites by hand when i got into (classic) ASP (i made single pages before, but mostly for javascript demos or learning HTML and the like) and later PHP. Even then, the first time i used ASP was for a hobby site i worked on with some friends over the net about (point and click) adventure games where we'd put articles and such and the articles themselves were written in Frontpage Express for formatting and such (with the code just copy/pasted into a textarea i had in the "admin" section :-P).
I'm still using Seamonkey Composer and Frontpage Express (well, more the latter than the former since i'm not using Seamonkey much anymore whereas the latter is just a 1.5MB zip file i carry on my external hard disk that works out of the box anywhere) for very simple pages like [0], [1] and [2]. Although my "bigger" sites (that is, sites with more than a couple of pages and a need for a theme) are made using custom generators (usually in Free Pascal or Python).
And FWIW one of my favorite software that isn't developed anymore is Apple's iWeb - i haven't seen a tool as easy to use for making static sites as this one. Sadly Apple cares much less than Microsoft ever did about backwards compatibility and i'm certain my copy of iWeb will stop working soon (and there isn't any Wine equivalent to fall back on whereas in the unlikely even that old Windows programs stop working, i can still use them via Wine) so after Apple abandoned it, i stopped using it myself.
[0] http://runtimeterror.com/tech/jtf/
Blink is easily implemented in pure CSS these days if you still want it. You can even customize its behavior!