Retrophilia

I first got online in 1999. One of the first things I did was to create my first website (on Geocities), painstakingly updated from Internet cafes. When I retired it in 2006 or 2007, the whole thing still fit on two floppy disks. All 20-odd pages, plus some of my early 3D art. Nowadays, that's smaller than the average web page. And it all still works perfectly in a modern browser.

The old art of handcrafted HTML and CSS isn't dead yet. Young people rediscover it all the time. We just don't seem to be so good at finding and promoting those websites that work to keep the old flame alive. Neocities tried to make it a thing again, but they remained an obscure niche for some reason. That's too bad.

Now I find myself on Dreamwidth, along with many new arrivals, and lo! Here, the spirit of the old web never died off. Might have something to do with how the interface invites us to poke at it, change everything and express ourselves. Is it too technical? Maybe. But as I wrote elsewhere, how are newbies going to learn if you don't give them a chance to discover what's possible? So what if that means breaking stuff now and then.

People say it looks ancient. I say it looks clean. People say it lacks features. I say it loads quickly. How much do you need, really? Besides, I thought minimalism was all the rage this side of 2010?

Oh wait, that's just Apple fans. And only when it comes to appearances.

More recently, someone on Mastodon suggested going back to the roots. Defining a subset of HTML that doesn't need a modern, bloated browser engine to render, but something much simpler. To bring back genuine competition.

Something... like what text-based browsers can display?

Let's celebrate those websites that work well in Dillo. They don't even have to give up much. Mine for instance all have Open Graph support. And mobile support. The latter doesn't bother anyone. On the contrary. It makes a website work better for everyone.

Just make sure people can actually read the text, and disable animated GIFs if they need to. Otherwise, the web needs little of what's been piled up on top of its essence for the past decade.