Just applied this to the work app. Gonna have to seriously resist pushing this live on April 1st for a bit. (Our users hate change sadly, as per usual.)
Could you maybe just add a button to turn it on or something? Like Twitter’s night mode switch except instead of turning everything dark it turns everything back to the 1990s.
Also if you were really feeling this prank you could monkey-patch XmlHttpRequest so that it played a dialup tone and called setTimeout() before sending a request. You know, for that 90s* internet speed feel. (Now that I actually write this comment I think I’m legitimately going to add this as a mode to the bottom-right corner of my website.)
[*]: I was not alive during 80% of the 90s but I’m told everything was very very slow.
When did we lose our way? When everything became about making money. I always describe my developer burnout to folks, and I always tell them “I got into it because it was fun, and a creative outlet.” Maybe I just need to start making geocities sites.
Though, I don’t think we need to bring back jquery.
The issue is saturation. If you want to have fun then develop for a less popular platform. There’s a ton of good, fun platforms to develop for with solid commuities surrounding them. You just have to find them.
The new weird will probably look similar to the old weird (minus specific format-related glitches) though.
Like, the new weird will probably use color and animation for expression, offend the sensibilities of people who expect the web to be ‘readable’ (i.e., for artistic statements to obey the same laws of propriety as marketing and documentation), contain surrealistic and scatological humor, and occasionally be intentionally annoying or hostile. These are all things the early web has in common with dada, outsider art, lettrism, oulipo, faxlore, etc. In other words, it’s part of the general tradition of democratized creative work, and one of those things that gets axed as soon as the work is coopted by the Spectacle.
The new weird will break in different ways. We won’t use gifs because it uses less bandwidth to store actual videos these days, so we won’t have artifacts from 8 bit color or from transparency being inconsistent in a single frame or from the size changing for one frame (unless we go out of our way to reproduce those things). Hosting is cheaper per byte, so we won’t have failures related to files being deleted because we went over our megabyte of storage. We’ll have new and exciting failures.
I use jQuery every day at work. It’s pretty funny considering the code base is only 3 years old or thereabouts. The stack is definitely considered “old” by some. I try to make the best of it. Sometimes I’ll just write plain JS and it feels oddly satisfying.
Frontend has never been “fun” imo. It’s just excruciating. Like i’m currently on a vue project, or rather a legacy project (3 years?) that has fresh lava layer [1] of vue. I do frontend and backend and I work way way harder at the frontend than I do on the (statically type) backend. The frontend is a mesh mash of dead code; dead js, dead css, dead classes in the html. And this is typical from my experience in my experience.
I don’t think OP means fun to work with necessarily. I think they mean fun as in goofy and weird. Websites are polished and uniform today, whereas before they were amateurish and unique.
Websites are polished an uniform today for the most part because they are being made by professional organizations (including but not limited to profit-seeking firms), with professional aims. The sorts of quirky, unprofessional and fun websites of the past were made by individuals or small groups who were having fun posting their own content online, and didn’t have another way to do it other than making a webpage. Nowadays, people still make quirky and unprofessional content, but they generally do it on social media - that is, on top of professionally-designed web infrastructure operated by some other organization. If you want to make the frontend shit again, look to shitposting.
I enjoy front end development. I’ve been doing it since 97 (not exclusively) and it’s way more fun now than it was before.
People who are longing for goofy geocities pages are lying to themselves. Those geocities pages turned into wacky myspace pages that were impossible to read because of all of the nonsense. Those unreadable myspace pages turned into facebook profiles that are all standard and sterile.
There was nothing fun about handwriting all of your HTML and doing table layouts. It was excruciating and took forever. Also, jQuery was not a thing at peak geocities, and most of your javascript was limited to changing the status bar on link hover or adding a cursor following animation. Later on, people started using JS to animate button hovers and things like that.
I get that this is probably just some sort of joke post, but people who weren’t really doing dev at the time only know it as a quirky, terrible design aesthetic and not the complete shit show it was to create and maintain those types of pages. There are tons of fun and goofy sites out there, they just don’t look like that anymore.
Text requires unobtrusive design to be read easily. That’s why most good blogs these days are simple and privilege the text above all else. But in other parts of your personal website, you can just have fun. Imagine having a choose-your-own-adventure game or a list of cool colors you like or your favorite memes on your website. But the second you put your name on your website, you have to be careful about future employers, etc. Psedonymous web playgrounds made just for the sake of it are the retro-future.
Omfg the W3C validation badges at the bottom really hit me. I remember being so obsessed to make sure everything passed on my personal website, despite that 99% of the rest of the internet just worked fine without validation. Those were the days…
In a similar vein, here is a bootstrap theme based on geocities: http://code.divshot.com/geo-bootstrap/
I use it all the time for CTFs.
Was Bootstrap one of the reasons the web became boring? The first framework where every site looked the same?
I don’t know if it was the first per se but it in my mind, it had the most impact in setting us on the current path.
Just applied this to the work app. Gonna have to seriously resist pushing this live on April 1st for a bit. (Our users hate change sadly, as per usual.)
Could you maybe just add a button to turn it on or something? Like Twitter’s night mode switch except instead of turning everything dark it turns everything back to the 1990s.
Also if you were really feeling this prank you could monkey-patch XmlHttpRequest so that it played a dialup tone and called
setTimeout()before sending a request. You know, for that 90s* internet speed feel. (Now that I actually write this comment I think I’m legitimately going to add this as a mode to the bottom-right corner of my website.)[*]: I was not alive during 80% of the 90s but I’m told everything was very very slow.
Sadly for a very old version of bootstrap. Any newer versions for v3 or v4?
When did we lose our way? When everything became about making money. I always describe my developer burnout to folks, and I always tell them “I got into it because it was fun, and a creative outlet.” Maybe I just need to start making geocities sites.
Though, I don’t think we need to bring back jquery.
The issue is saturation. If you want to have fun then develop for a less popular platform. There’s a ton of good, fun platforms to develop for with solid commuities surrounding them. You just have to find them.
Agreed. Maybe discovery isn’t as easy but even on the current platform there are fun and interesting sites.
I also like to wax nostalgia on the internet of old but I do not want to bring it back. Find the new weird, don’t try and recreate the old weird
That’s a good point. Find the new weird. The internet is too young for us to go back to old weird already
The new weird will probably look similar to the old weird (minus specific format-related glitches) though.
Like, the new weird will probably use color and animation for expression, offend the sensibilities of people who expect the web to be ‘readable’ (i.e., for artistic statements to obey the same laws of propriety as marketing and documentation), contain surrealistic and scatological humor, and occasionally be intentionally annoying or hostile. These are all things the early web has in common with dada, outsider art, lettrism, oulipo, faxlore, etc. In other words, it’s part of the general tradition of democratized creative work, and one of those things that gets axed as soon as the work is coopted by the Spectacle.
The new weird will break in different ways. We won’t use gifs because it uses less bandwidth to store actual videos these days, so we won’t have artifacts from 8 bit color or from transparency being inconsistent in a single frame or from the size changing for one frame (unless we go out of our way to reproduce those things). Hosting is cheaper per byte, so we won’t have failures related to files being deleted because we went over our megabyte of storage. We’ll have new and exciting failures.
I’m building a greenfield web application with Haskell, Elm, Nix, Event-Sourcing, aaaaaaaand… jQuery!
Nothing wrong with it :)
I’m using intercooler for most stuff that I can these days, and it sits on top of jQuery (or zepto). So it’s definitely not going away for me yet.
Ohh nothing wrong with jQuery ;) I guess I felt real good coding in javascript without having to include it!
I use jQuery every day at work. It’s pretty funny considering the code base is only 3 years old or thereabouts. The stack is definitely considered “old” by some. I try to make the best of it. Sometimes I’ll just write plain JS and it feels oddly satisfying.
“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.” - Moliere.
‘bring back’? It was never gone…
yeah that’s true. one of my clients uses it in their front end stack. though whenever I work in a more modern codebase we end up not bringing it in.
Frontend has never been “fun” imo. It’s just excruciating. Like i’m currently on a vue project, or rather a legacy project (3 years?) that has fresh lava layer [1] of vue. I do frontend and backend and I work way way harder at the frontend than I do on the (statically type) backend. The frontend is a mesh mash of dead code; dead js, dead css, dead classes in the html. And this is typical from my experience in my experience.
[1] http://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-lava-layer-anti-pattern.html
I don’t think OP means fun to work with necessarily. I think they mean fun as in goofy and weird. Websites are polished and uniform today, whereas before they were amateurish and unique.
Websites are polished an uniform today for the most part because they are being made by professional organizations (including but not limited to profit-seeking firms), with professional aims. The sorts of quirky, unprofessional and fun websites of the past were made by individuals or small groups who were having fun posting their own content online, and didn’t have another way to do it other than making a webpage. Nowadays, people still make quirky and unprofessional content, but they generally do it on social media - that is, on top of professionally-designed web infrastructure operated by some other organization. If you want to make the frontend shit again, look to shitposting.
Yeah, I think OP is basically shitposting.
Unfortunately no… :[
I enjoy front end development. I’ve been doing it since 97 (not exclusively) and it’s way more fun now than it was before.
People who are longing for goofy geocities pages are lying to themselves. Those geocities pages turned into wacky myspace pages that were impossible to read because of all of the nonsense. Those unreadable myspace pages turned into facebook profiles that are all standard and sterile.
There was nothing fun about handwriting all of your HTML and doing table layouts. It was excruciating and took forever. Also, jQuery was not a thing at peak geocities, and most of your javascript was limited to changing the status bar on link hover or adding a cursor following animation. Later on, people started using JS to animate button hovers and things like that.
I get that this is probably just some sort of joke post, but people who weren’t really doing dev at the time only know it as a quirky, terrible design aesthetic and not the complete shit show it was to create and maintain those types of pages. There are tons of fun and goofy sites out there, they just don’t look like that anymore.
Yeah, we should go back to tormenting stick figures (NSFW) and interesting UI’s in Macromedia Flash. No, I got the name right. ;)
My contribution for a friend’s birthday a few years ago:
http://intimidation.solutions
Text requires unobtrusive design to be read easily. That’s why most good blogs these days are simple and privilege the text above all else. But in other parts of your personal website, you can just have fun. Imagine having a choose-your-own-adventure game or a list of cool colors you like or your favorite memes on your website. But the second you put your name on your website, you have to be careful about future employers, etc. Psedonymous web playgrounds made just for the sake of it are the retro-future.
it’s Friday everyday where vaporwave is concerned
This is my friend’s take:
http://rainbowdivider.com
http://rickbranson.com/ is my personal favorite, courtesy of this quote from Mozilla’s IRC servers. In my Firefox Nightly, sound autoplay is blocked… but for the full experience you really should turn it on IMO
Omfg the W3C validation badges at the bottom really hit me. I remember being so obsessed to make sure everything passed on my personal website, despite that 99% of the rest of the internet just worked fine without validation. Those were the days…
I lost it when I ran into the “Right click is disabled!!!” pop-up. That’s some authentic nostalgia.