Does Anyone Remember Websites?

It was common to make tables and use them to assemble a bitmap, where each cell had zero border/margin/padding and an exact size, and contained a "slice" of the image. Web authoring tools (and Photoshop) even had explicit support for generating this sort of thing, as I recall. This was I guess simpler to automate than defining clickable regions of a single image, and it allowed for the individual pieces of the image to be requested in parallel on slow connections (adding another dimension of progressive loading).

Looking at the code, it has definitely been modified from the original... there is now CSS as well as a google ad tracker... but visually it's probably almost exactly the same.

Table-oriented layouts was a thing back then too.

What’s the argument that it can be worse for the author’s privacy?

In general, I think we should encrypt everything. The more encrypted stuff floating around, the less it stands out, and the better for everybody’s privacy. Of course, nowadays encrypted content is quite common. But it didn’t become that way without effort!

I disagree. The primary threat model for unencrypted http connections is a MITM attack. A middle box (a proxy or router) modifies the response payload to inject malicious content or modify the content. For an ordinary blog or personal website an attacker can gain compute, violate privacy, acquire a (minor) DDOS source, on the blogs users by injecting a script.

Another type of attack would modify the content of the site to suit the attackers purpose - either to hurt the author and/or their message. Consider the damage an attacker can do if they injected CSAM onto a person's blog. The victim's life would be ruined long before the wheels of justice turned (if they turn at all). The one mitigating factor is that you'd need to have reliable control over a relatively stable middle-box to execute this attack, but that's quite feasible. Last but not least don't underestimate the way software grows. Sooner or later someone is going to implement HTTP basic authentication over plain HTTP and, needless to say, that's a bad idea.

Look, I don't like it either. I remember when you could telnet into a server and interact with it. That was good for pedagogy and building a mental model of the protocol. But we have to deal with how things are, not how we want them to be.

If you don‘t encrypt everything a malicious actor like some ISPs can inject nasty things like pervasive tracking or zero day exploits.

Unfortunately this isn't 1999, and bad actors are everywhere. Even ISPs themselves (cough Comcast) have been injecting unsolicited new code into people's webpages for many years now.

It helps against this kind of stuff (2015) https://blog.fox-it.com/2015/04/20/deep-dive-into-quantum-in...

Our solution was technical, the problem was political. It should have been solved using criminal penalties for the criminals who did this.

Also the shacks weren’t really particularly shabby or anything, they were just more like well-enough-constructed single family homes.

Old websites before scripting became popular were pretty much solid in that boring-tech way. Hardware and networks were not as reliable, but the sites themselves could be fine via simplicity.

Modern overdesigned sites are sort of like modern apartment buildings: shitty build quality under fake plastic marble and wood.

If you've visited old mining operations / shacks that's pretty common! There are always some weird choices and cool things to see

Keep in mind the early websites were mostly built by an enthusiast minority, technical or not but willing to learn HTML and Netscape Composer. You can't expect the whole humanity to be as enthusiastic. The skyscraper era, no matter how much we all hate it, makes the web more democratic: it gives everyone some standardized space (Facebook, Youtube, etc) with algorithmized discovery which is parking and elevators if you want to continue the analogy.

> But, eventually, something had to reign in all that and the FCC along with international laws and standards came up to calm all that down.

No, it actually stayed pretty lively until the 90s, when the government decided that there could be huge monopolies in media, all the stations were bought up by like 6 guys, and were automated to play Disney music 24 hours a day.

Not such a neat story, right?

The FCC licenses radio broadcasters because the spectrum is finite. Which finite aspects of the internet do you see driving such eventual practice?

The rationale behind the FCC is that it's regulating a limited resource (spectrum space.) The web is not a limited resource (although bandwidth is, but that's a different debate.) The web is also international, and we're already seeing conflicts where one country tries to force their regulations onto another. That metaphor just doesn't work where the web is concerned.

I agree that the web in the US, and specifically large social media platforms, will probably be regulated because that seems to be one of the few things both parties agree on for their own reasons. But more so because the government wants to control information and surveil citizens. I think the balkanization of the web as a whole into smaller, closed networks is probably inevitable.

But what's most depressing of all is how many people in tech and on HN would be thrilled if one needed a license to publish on the internet just because that would implicitly push most people off of the web and leave it for a privileged elite.

As bad as social media can be (and I think its harm is often oversold for political ends) having a space where anyone can publish and communicate and create freely, where different platforms can exist and cater to different needs, where media isn't entirely controlled and gatekept by corporations, is critically important. More important than any other communications paradigm before it, including the printing press.

It's really going to be sad when we burn it all down, because it seems unlikely anyone is going to make something as free and open as the web ever again.

Because you were 25 years younger. When you are, say, 20 years old, people >= 20 years old are likely to be interesting, which was pretty much everyone with a web page. When you are 45 years old, writings from 20 year olds are much less interesting, on average.

I've created a few sites and never explicitly told search engines about them, and they got picked up just fine surprisingly quickly.

Yes they will?

I run/host a bunch of personal websites for friends.

I do nothing special to get them indexed and they are all on search engines.