The web is fucked and there’s nothing we can do about it. Kev Quirk looks back fondly at Web 1.0.
Pseudo romanticizing of the old web. Yeah, I don’t like that we’re heading into a corporate super controlled web but as of now, that still vastly better than it used to be before search engines were a thing. I also only look back with a nostalgic eye at the time of gaming magazines because it was fun, but it’s so much better to be able to Google stuff now. I don’t miss dealing with web design out of order, wild west style.
Old website navigation was often bad and ugly. Everyone had a forum but you never found what you were looking for. And web design unavoidably had to change to allow better mobile access. You could no longer load in font size 6 blue on top of blue as that would (correctly so) annoy people and make them stop visiting your page, when ther was a better site available.
Now social media isn’t necessarily bad, we’re on one after all, but there are definitely harmful social media who are just made for ragebait, like Twitter and Facebook.
It’s a fact though that you need more googlefu now, to find what you’re looking for.
When you see an article dismiss problems with “but that was all part of the fun”, you know that usability isn’t high on the author’s agenda.
Special shout-out has to go to my local newspaper websites The Derby Telegraph and Nottingham Post .
They are a virtually unreadable mess, due to the layers of advertising and other JavaScript interruption.
It was kind of inevitable that it would go this way. The business model that people expect the Internet to work in is directly at odds with how people want to use the Internet. Tech companies have been enjoying a 20 year long honeymoon period where they have effectively infinite money and no regard for sustainable profit.
The article acknowledges this in the conclusion (emphasis mine):
I’m done. There you have it. That’s my opinion about how ____ed the web is. Look, we will never get the web of old back. Let’s be honest, it wasn’t perfect either. The web of today is more accessible, more dynamic and pretty much a cornerstone of our society.
Accessibility wasn’t the main topic discussed in the article. It was mostly pointing out that the current web is too centralised.
Accessibility wasn’t the main topic discussed in the article
That’s part of the problem. All these rants about the glory of Web 1.0 are ignoring the fact that Web 1.0 wasn’t usable for anybody with accessibility issues and the modern web is better for them. A tiny acknowledgement at the bottom of their rant shows how they value accessibility lower than all of their other concerns.
I don’t think accessibility is meant in term of disabled people.
I understood it as accessible in terms of technical knowledge. Anyone can whip out their phone and access the internet… or at least use an app which needs internet.
Eternal September is another term for it.
The article wasn’t really about Web 1.0 as much as it was about the time that Web 1.0 was around. The author could remove “Web 1.0” and replace it with “late 1990s to early 2000s Internet”.
That’s part of the problem.
No, thats just the angle that the article wanted to take. Just because it ignores an aspect of something doesn’t mean that its position is moot.
Are you asking for every article ever to have a section discussing accessibility? I’d rather we let the author speak their mind, and focus on what they want to say.
Out of curiosity, I have always thought text only web pages would have been way more accessible at the time were RSS was still a thing, then the blinking ad ridden pages you get nowadays.
You tell me that wasn’t a thing?
Living somewhere now where many of the local websites are terribly dated and while the initial nostalgia factor was nice the lack of functionality/accessibility is seriously a problem. Not to say you can’t make a functional/accesible site with old web standards, but some things changed for a reason.
“Fuck you for wanting a sterile web where everything is boring”
…said no one ever.
I disagree with his definition of web3. Some devs are working on decentralizing the web, that’s the real web3. IPFS is blockchain-less. My new peer-to-peer search engine is blockchain-less. Yes, blockchain people are trying to put blockchains everywhere, but we musn’t let them build their vision web3. And that means, you need to help the blockchain-less vision, you need to find projects to contribute to. Let’s make the web uncensorable and anonymous together
