This is great. As someone who's been on the web since the mid-90's and witnessed the whole thing unfold, this speaks to me on a really deep level. In fact, I was just having this conversation with...
This is great. As someone who's been on the web since the mid-90's and witnessed the whole thing unfold, this speaks to me on a really deep level. In fact, I was just having this conversation with someone last night, trying to explain how different the internet was before the dot-com boom, before blogs, before adverisers and the commercialization of data became a thing. How the internet used to be populated by people, not platforms. I'm definitely sending this to the guy I was talking to last night, because this does a way better job of explaining it than I did.
My favourite passage from this:
Movable Type didn’t just kill off blog customization.
It (and its competitors) actively killed other forms of web production.
Non-diarists — those folks with the old school librarian-style homepages — wanted those super-cool sidebar calendars just like the bloggers did. They were lured by the siren of easy use. So despite the fact that they weren’t writing daily diaries, they invested time and effort into migrating to this new platform.
They soon learned the chronostream was a decent servant, but a terrible master.
I strongly disagree with the author's premise. Blogs and chronology didn't break the web. On the contrary, it brought more people out of the woodwork and into the limelight. In the 80s, people...
I strongly disagree with the author's premise. Blogs and chronology didn't break the web. On the contrary, it brought more people out of the woodwork and into the limelight.
In the 80s, people already knew that computers were going to be everywhere. But they thought that that meant that everyone needed to learn to program. That's why almost all home computers came bundled with BASIC. By the 90s, GUIs had made computing easy and programming was no longer relevant. If you knew HTML in the mid-to-late 90s, you were a nerd. This was the era of desktop publishing, after all; needing to know code to write a document was not something the general population would see a need for.
Do you want to know why people never went back to traditional webpages? There's actually a number of very good reasons. First and foremost, manually linking every page was laborious. You could have written your own scripts to do this automatically, but we already established that most people wouldn't have the skills to do that. Beyond that, the web had become an extremely complicated place by the turn of the century. CSS and Javascript were already ubiquitous, and it seemed that everything was going to transition to XML. This was a bad time for web developers as a whole, since the predominant web browser had terrible compliance with contemporary web standards.
But even then, the author's description of the web ecology is not really accurate. Blogs were everywhere, true, but it's not like they were the only thing out there. Content Management Systems were everywhere, and many of them were designed to create regular, permanent documents as well as chronological news/blog style posts - Movable Type also offered this functionality. It's strange she focuses so much on that system because it was quickly overshadowed by a number of free, open source CMS software packages.
Even the characterization the author gives blogs is incorrect. Blogs that updated daily were rare. Heck, blogs that updated regularly weren't even in the majority. The thing that bothers me the most is that her critique of blogs is written as a blog post. Sure, it doesn't show a date on it, and she may be writing the pages manually, but the style of website she has is what we now consider to be a blog. It's full of content meant to make the author look good. The author is a marketer; she even has a blog post about how to write good content.
Here's the thing: the web is not broken. There are just trends you don't like. You can still find up-to-date pages on the niche content that you crave - you just have to look for it, the same as it's always been.
This is great. As someone who's been on the web since the mid-90's and witnessed the whole thing unfold, this speaks to me on a really deep level. In fact, I was just having this conversation with someone last night, trying to explain how different the internet was before the dot-com boom, before blogs, before adverisers and the commercialization of data became a thing. How the internet used to be populated by people, not platforms. I'm definitely sending this to the guy I was talking to last night, because this does a way better job of explaining it than I did.
My favourite passage from this:
This is such a core issue with many problems.
I strongly disagree with the author's premise. Blogs and chronology didn't break the web. On the contrary, it brought more people out of the woodwork and into the limelight.
In the 80s, people already knew that computers were going to be everywhere. But they thought that that meant that everyone needed to learn to program. That's why almost all home computers came bundled with BASIC. By the 90s, GUIs had made computing easy and programming was no longer relevant. If you knew HTML in the mid-to-late 90s, you were a nerd. This was the era of desktop publishing, after all; needing to know code to write a document was not something the general population would see a need for.
Do you want to know why people never went back to traditional webpages? There's actually a number of very good reasons. First and foremost, manually linking every page was laborious. You could have written your own scripts to do this automatically, but we already established that most people wouldn't have the skills to do that. Beyond that, the web had become an extremely complicated place by the turn of the century. CSS and Javascript were already ubiquitous, and it seemed that everything was going to transition to XML. This was a bad time for web developers as a whole, since the predominant web browser had terrible compliance with contemporary web standards.
But even then, the author's description of the web ecology is not really accurate. Blogs were everywhere, true, but it's not like they were the only thing out there. Content Management Systems were everywhere, and many of them were designed to create regular, permanent documents as well as chronological news/blog style posts - Movable Type also offered this functionality. It's strange she focuses so much on that system because it was quickly overshadowed by a number of free, open source CMS software packages.
Even the characterization the author gives blogs is incorrect. Blogs that updated daily were rare. Heck, blogs that updated regularly weren't even in the majority. The thing that bothers me the most is that her critique of blogs is written as a blog post. Sure, it doesn't show a date on it, and she may be writing the pages manually, but the style of website she has is what we now consider to be a blog. It's full of content meant to make the author look good. The author is a marketer; she even has a blog post about how to write good content.
Here's the thing: the web is not broken. There are just trends you don't like. You can still find up-to-date pages on the niche content that you crave - you just have to look for it, the same as it's always been.
Thank you for posting this! That was a wonderful article, I love looking back at the late 90s/early 2000s web, it really was a different time.