Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
You know what I miss? When information was condensed instead of spread out to insert more ads. When software willingly gave you all the options you could ever need instead of removing most of them because "people might get confused". When website took up the entire screen instead of a mobile wide strip in the middle because "it can be scary for people".
Fuck everyone who keeps lowering the bar of tech literacy just to appeal to the general public.
Click next after each paragraph of the story so I can load more ads! And by paragraph, I mean one tag per sentence.
Not that unpopular an opinion I bet.
Google thinks otherwise :(
I saw a web page from 1999 today and as a full stack dev I immediately clicked away bc obvi NSFW
BUT then I had the urge to go back to this simple ass web "site" and just admire it for a second like "wow, someone probably spent weeks on this 2 day design".
Tbh afterwards I was kind of in awe that every option was available on each page with no sidebars or extra clicks. Not slick but quick tho!
Ignoring the security implications.
There are literally none with basic html.
It's when you started adding shit like Shockwave, javascript and the like, all massive security holes, things got dicey.
Plain old HTML, none what so ever.
My friend, enjoy.
I mean, there are basically no security implications for plain html.
Oh, I just thought older websites were less secure. But I guess now that I think about it, you only got viruses if you clicked on the sketchy links yourself.
Most of the issue with loading times are the billion ads and trackers. There are sites I visit that load instantly with Adblock on but extremely slow without it.
Find the right webring, and you’d hit a treasure trove of content. Dig a little deeper and find something even more interesting. The pre-corporate takeover internet.
We talk about enshittification ruining everything, but Facebook and Web 2.0 started ripping out the heart of the internet. Everyone went along with it, and corporate claws sunk in. The fun internet got pushed aside for the ad-friendly internet.
Speaking as a web developer - sorry.
No need. As someone who understands web development enough to know I know nothing about web development, it makes sense to me why the internet is what it is today. It's all about establishing a brand and identity now so doing extra things can make you stand out.
While YouTube has gotten more sluggish over the years, I do think some recent changes like ambient mode have been pretty cool. I also support reasonable hardware requirements because things get obsolete over time.
I guess I just miss the simplicity of early internet browsing more compared to all the bloat that exists today.
There isn't a day I don't think about how annoying the modern web is. Fancy crap, GDPR, a trillion frameworks weighing 1mb+ each, a ton of useless extra info for SEO and whatnot. All to see the pure information I initially seeked saying "yes". Which could've been a 1kb site.
The GDPR is not annoying. The fact that it is necessary is annoying.
Truetrue. Yet it still doesn't serve much of a protection service. What should we care a about a tracking-cookie when most sites use multiple tracking-scripts anyway? Or force you to either accept or pay. Or simply deny entry at all.
I just need another plugin to block another thing...
Right there with you buddy.
Craigslist and McMaster are so efficient..
I miss kb large old raw html websites that loaded instantly on DSL internet
Instantly? We had very different DSL connections 😳
What would stop an individual or company nowadays to build a pure html website? Isn't this what a "static site" is?
Isn't this what HUGO and Jekyll produce, only a little bit prettier?
Nothing. Warren Buffetts company Berkshire Hathaway has the most simple business's site of all time.
https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/
The fault is a combination of execs wanting a slick site, marketing wanting a highly SEO scoring page, and Devs wanting to play with web frameworks.
Hey, they even have an old-school tracker-free static advertisement image on that page. Now that's a classic.
I’d love to know how much they paid for it. Even part of the “message from warren” page too. Must have been a pretty penny. I bet a lot of pages would love to do static links in exchange for upfront fees similar to it.
The need to have a "responsive" layout and webdesigners. At work i see this happeneing a lot. Someone has a quick loading basic website, but it's old and it's sometimes complicated to use on phones. They hire a webdesigner to modernize it, to make the UI rearrange when you tilt your phone sideways and have a big menu on big desktop screens and a folded hamburger menu on small phone screens. They need touch support and want less reloads. Every requirement adds code and libraries. The result really has better usability and neat spinners instead of complete page reloads, but it initially loads a bit slower and has bigger components.
I dont think that usability or acessibility gets so much in the way. It's more about thinking webpages as applications instead of documents. Plain html is easier for screenreaders and larger fonts. You can also get responsive with very little css.
Simplicity is just not the goal anymore.
I instantly hit the Firefox Reader Mode button or turn on Brave's accessibility reader. They cut all the crap out of most websites. Bonus is they often remove paywalls.
Neocities!
You can still use old Gmail. I do. It's fast. It has no ads. It's amazing.
I got some bad news for you: https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/25/google-is-killing-gmails-basic-html-view-in-2024/
I like using email client software instead. It just uses Gmail as a backend and the inbox looks however I want it to look.
Plus, it works while offline on the train or with Amtrak's shitty WiFi
Everything is a transpiled Rract SPA loaded with trackers ..want to read your neighbors blog? Suck these hundreds trackers ...
I remember building the first web site for our company many, many years ago. It was Friday afternoon, approaching 16:00, and I was eying my jacket hanging next to the office door, when the owner and CEO came in and told me that he had come to the conclusion that we need a web site.
When I left the office at about 22:00, we had one. The CEO and I had sat down together while I set up an apache on a linux box on the desk across from me, and he actually learned a bit of HTML while following me "designing" a web page with a text editor and painting tool. It had everything we needed back then.
Even today, I have the habit of cleaning up HTML perpetrated by horrible tools, most often Word or Calibre.
wiby.me/surprise/
I set this as my home on chrome
It should load some older websites at random each time it's opened