Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026

And there were a bunch of WYSIWYG editors in the mid-late 90s. It seems like everyone had one, including Netscape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer

I enjoyed this. But reading the claim that the iPhone was bad compared to other phones of the day makes me question it all. That's so incredibly backwards. It _was_ a much better internet in your pocket. If you couldn't see that, it says something about you, not phones.

What a brilliant piece of writing. I remember almost every single step—safe for actually getting angry emails. Maybe I ended up being the one writing them.

What a glorious time period.

Interestingly, it would’ve been impossible to share this writing with as many people as the author did by publishing it on mastodon and then it ended up on HN in 1998. The network effects are real.

Actually, do things ever get easier to tinker with as technology matures?

Is it easier to build or repair a radio now than it was when they were first sold? A computer? A car? A washing machine? A vacuum cleaner?

I read the beginning of the post and immediately tabbed back to start writing a rant about standing up a website being fine, but the real loss of web functionality was Flash, glad I kept reading. I'm quite good with CSS and doing tricks with SVGs, but constantly run into things I want to do in 2D web I find to be complex enough and time consuming enough I don't even bother, while I would have been able to do it in Flash as a 13 year old in a few minutes. The modern web is a prison built out of <div>s, the tricks you see for "amazing" websites with obnoxious scrolljacking/parallax don't hide it.

My experience was almost identical. Don’t forget all the time spent balancing image quality with load speed to get that perfect blend of shit quality and slow download.

> Making a website should be the easiest fucking thing in the world by now. There should be a program that you can use to spit out a website as easy as Word spits out words on paper

squarespace?

> and we - us fucking foss nerds or whoever - should've made it.

wordpress?

SSI is still the perfect balance of just enough power to do templating with .html fragments with a minimal attack surface and no maintainence from version churn. It's stable, it's tested, it's left alone. It's in most major webservers as a core module. It's as good now as it was in 1998.

Not seeing anything

Looks like its getting a ton of traffic

Spinner and load bar at the top

Completely ignoring accessibility

My actual thoughts were "Wow, doing front end is a shitty experience in 1998, I'll bet it'll be even shittier in 2026".

the prediction wasn't even wrong, it just split in two. deploying a static site in 2026 is genuinely easier than 1998. you drag a folder into netlify and you're done, no ISP instructions, no FTP client, no guy with a tarp. what exploded is everything before the deploy. and the funny thing is the actual complaint buried in this thread, "i don't want to paste my nav into every page and update it by hand," is the exact problem we've spent 25 years re-solving. frames, then SSI, then php includes, then templating engines, then the whole frontend framework industry. react is, underneath everything, a really elaborate way to not repeat your navbar.

Those angry emails from guys (it's always guys) felt so contrived and wedged in just to attack other guys. I reminded me of the tweet about how people online invent someone doing a hypothetical situation and then get mad at them