>The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.
How different it is today...
What went wrong?
How did the web turn from universal access to information to selective access to entertainment?
Other urls found in this thread:
textfiles.com
youtube.com
motherfuckingwebsite.com
en.wikipedia.org
twitter.com
>Who killed the World Wide Web?
Web 2.0
Yeah, but that by itself shouldn't consume the entire web to such an extent.
Surely personal resistance should have played some part, in that people used to make their own sites all by themselves using just HTML. So why would they over complicate it so much for themselves?
>How did the web turn from universal access to information to selective access to entertainment?
did it though? it may be true for the few hundred popular websites people visit regularly, but does it also apply to the millions of other websites that exist out there?
Netscape (and by extension firefox) did ruin the modern web.
Also mosaic is a meme, nobody was using that shit.
Read history of violawww - it had client side scripting, ajax, css in fucking 1993. It failed because the author wasn't interested in doing a windows port.
Later netscape made a really poor clone of it with which were pretty much stuck to this day.
>he says as he posts on Sup Forums using Google's captcha
Isn't that an argument in favor of OP though?
>Who killed the World Wide Web?
Advertisers and Adobe.
I got you, nigga.
Bout to drop some of dat knowledge on you, OP. This be what you lookin for dawg. High grade info.
(((they)))
Presentation related:
youtube.com
You're being sarcastic, but you could spend the day on that site and learn some really interesting aspects of computer history. Tom Jennings' contribution is very good. And what's better is you can easily browse and view that site on any web browser, on any quality of connection, on any OS. Someone could really read all about Atari STs on the web, with an Atari ST connected to the web.
>Someone could really read all about Atari STs on the web, with an Atari ST connected to the web.
This is something I really think the web has lost.
>How did the web turn from universal access to information to selective access to entertainment?
Normies.
>What went wrong?
Aside from normies?
HTML was always shit. CSS is cool in practice, but its fundamental flaw is that it's trying to fix shit. JavaScript is shit. And HTTP is kinda shit.
What does a bowl of shit attract? Indians. And what do Indians do? They write bloated, inefficient code that's shit.
Remember this when you try to download a web page with 15MB of frameworks, ads, ad trackers, and convoluted HTML, generated by a slow-as-fuck server side program, and your smartphone is burning your hand while you wait for all this shit to load.
We have reached levels of shit that should not even be possible.
>You're being sarcastic
Sarcastic, nigga?! Really?! You gotta problem with my vernacular, bitch?
I think dat site be dope as hell! Shiet, why you gotta be so judgmental doe.
This is a mix of problems with the web stack and with web developers writing bloated nonsense.
There is no reason why a 68040 or 486 based machine or higher should be unable to render attractive web pages, minus high resolution movies of course. But the web stack is crap and was an inefficient design from day one, and we have crap modern coders who amplify everything that's wrong with the web stack for ads and giggles.
HTML was never really meant to be "good". It was just a way of getting formatted text across as a file that's as small as possible.
And I think it's the most important thing that it has lost. I am fully in favour of Facebook and NetFlix apps as a technology (though the conservationist in me has a problem with Big Web stuff, but that's not for this thread). At the end of the day those apps are just the modern incarnation of a client. No one ever expected a web browser to also have an IRC chatroom -- you used a client for that.
But people really don't have as much of a philosophical imperative to adhere to the actual creed of the web.
Netscape really fucked things up. Thanks to extensions made by Netscape to existing standard, website creators got much more control over exactly how information looked when the original goal was to let browser decide how to best display information that websites provided. Fast forward to now and it's all about how things look and not about the underlying information being conveyed.
>And I think it's the most important thing that it has lost.
I agree.
The web should be accessible to not only us, but some poor kid in a 3rd world country with his Pentium II machine.
>be me
>be Tim Berners Lee
>chilling at home
>working on the next big thing
>phone rings
>"world wide web is kill"
>no
jQuery
JavaScript can be useful when used in very limited amounts for AJAX functionality, but modern web devs write everything in JS and use 10 different frameworks and external scrips which grinds even a high-end computer to a halt
((( news organizations ))) ((( content creators ))) ((( prosumers )))
isn't it obvious?
>Someone could really read all about Atari STs on the web, with an Atari ST connected to the web.
> some poor kid in a 3rd world country with his Pentium II machine
Every web dev should have this hung on their wall.
Would it be too whimsical of me to say that the web (as it was intended to be) is the most important creation humanity has ever come up with?
Wow, we have this thread SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much, we should just have a separate board for it.
1. Just because you showed up first, doesn't mean you're the "shepherd" of the internet. Nobody gives a fuck what you think.
2. It has a lot of entertainment because people like to be entertained.
3. It still has more "universal access" back from your shitty pic than it does now.
4. You grew up and are just thinking it changed. Nostalgia is cancer because it makes you only retroactively remove the bad part. Fuck off.
5. If there was a button to hit to make the web exactly like it was the way you think you want it to, you'd flip shit within 2 hours. You don't remember how shitty search engines were and link hunting and thousands of dead shitty websites owned by individuals who hadn't been updated in a decade. not to mention shitty internet infrastructure and no wifi or 3g.
6. Jerking off about it and crying real loud and remaking this thread every 8 hours doesn't change any of the above. Or you can fuck off and go join some BBS/IRC circlejerk full of "ye olde fags" where you just pretend to not be losers or something.
smart phones.
up until smart phones became popular you had to be at least remotely tech savvy to get online as it required a computer, and even those that weren't very tech savvy largely stuck to a handful of websites.
now, cellphones and tablets are pretty much toys for adults that even retards can use to get onto virtually any website. notice how when smart phone traffic exploded it's also when tumblrinas started flooding everywhere. before, they were simply too stupid to use a computer and didn't access the internet due to that.
the incentive and ability to use the internet to make money (or at least take it over with copyright law) is a far more powerful force than the desire to universalize knowledge.
not to mention, normalfags just plain enjoy being part of the consumerist and social media system more than the aforementioned system.
Butthurt web dev spotted.
Did it ever occur to you that young people could also hold these views for philosophical, moral, or environmental, reasons?
Besides, you're confused several aspects of the web there in your desperation to sound smarter and better than real developers like this video.
>1.
I first got online in 2004. This web I'm advocating for was already on its deathbed by this time. And its only gotten worse.
>2.
The issue is not the entertainment, it's that the structure and presentation changed to better suit the entertainment. A news site has as much javascript and overhead as youtube, when that should never be the case. Even youtube shouldn't have as much as it does. It's a video host. Despite what it wants you to think.
>3.
No idea what this means.
>4.
It has demonstrably changed. If it hadn't there'd be no issue. And again it's not nostalgia. There has been many different arguments and points put forward totally separate from nostalgia.
>5.
No one in this thread has advocated putting the clock back. And why are sites "owned by individuals" a bad thing? This is a good thing, and something that should be encouraged.
>6.
Again, missing the point entirely.
i would say that myspace and facebook were the real beginning of the end. facebook's existence drew nearly every single normalfag to the web on a regular basis by 2006. twitter, tumblr, instagram made it worse, and smartphones allow them on more frequently.
All of these people complaining probably didn't even disable javascript for Sup Forums, or have 4chanx installed.
Way to completely miss the point
>tfw you can't use Sup Forums using a text-based browser anymore
Why don't you explain it to me then?
>disable javascript
>can't post
No shit we haven't disabled it for Sup Forums.
I'm sorry I don't have time to do a detailed post but basically it's about graceful degradation. There's nothing wrong with javascript. The problem is those websites that use many megabytes of useless cruft and those that just display a blank screen when the user's browser can't run js. The video in is a good summary.
When could you?
Before captcha was required every time you post
Too many Web standards that were designed to allow senseless bloat, like JS and Flash. Both could be used minimally, but Web developers don't give a shit. They assume everyone and their brother is running the latest Intel i5 machine with 16 GB RAM, so why bother with any optimization?
Disabling JS and Flash will make a huge difference, but then you'll have restricted access to major Web sites like Sup Forums. I think moot or Hiro eventually did away with the non-JS CAPTCHAs altogether.
Sup Forums X at least does non-JS captchas (it will even copy and paste and post automatically when you fill out the non Js, but then again, you need a browser that will do Sup Forums X
>Sup Forums X at least does non-JS captchas
What's the point then? Sup Forums X is a script in itself, and possibly more bloated than the Sup Forums scripts it seeks to replace.
With Sup Forums X, you can browse Sup Forums without any nonfree JS. But that's not the point of this thread I guess.
>HTML
>that's as small as possible.
No. HTML was never about efficiency.
Maybe not, but I'm struggling to think of a formatted document that's smaller and easier to render than HTML.
HTML is a bitch to render. Parsing HTML into a DOM and applying CSS is a very CPU intensive process in modern browser engines. Fucking PostScript doesn't require as much horsepower yet is far superior as an imaging model.
And having verbose opening/closing tags for every little fucking thing is NOT small and efficient. It's crap.
I hated HTML in the late 90's. Things have only gotten worse.
LOL I was born in 1998 faggot why are you still on Sup Forums lmao
>Parsing HTML into a DOM and applying CSS is a very CPU intensive process in modern browser engines.
That sounds more like a problem with the browser.
Trying to emulate desktop apps in a stateless environment ruined everything. The web was for serving up static documents. Fuck off with your SPA's.
I hated Angular till I tried it. Just saying.
netscape invented javascript and mozilla is continuing making it even worse
I have tried it, along with Knockout, React and Vue. I actually liked Angular 1.x, but I have no interest in keeping up with JavaScript churn anymore (an entirely separate issue with modern web dev).
HTML's advantage was that it is super easy for people to make pages with. It's not the best, but it "just works," or works enough that it wasn't worth getting upset about.
But bare in mind that the tags weren't as prevalent on all pages as they are now. I still remember the shift from a "menu page" to a "content page" as you navigated a site.
Mozilla is actually on the forefront of developing WebAssembly, which eventually might save us from the nightmare that is JS.
>implying
Wasn't JS meant to save us from shit like ActiveX and suchlike?
Looking at what devs are like it will only make things worse.
With WebAssembly you'd be able to write Java, C, C#, or a bunch of other languages and it compiles down to JS, instead of trying to 'fix' JS or supplement it with a million and one different modules just to get the same functionality of inherently better languages.
Eternal September.
Also pretty much everyone in this thread is part of the problem.
The real problem is that rules weren't enforced from the start. The degradation would never have happened if people didn't stand for the shit as it was being done.
so now it all exacerbates continuously and people like think this is the way it should be.
PostScript would be a worthy alternative if we were all using Gopher.
It went wrong when gopher wasn't made open source. Gopher but with proper input forms could have been fantastic.
This is what the web could have looked like: gopher://gopherpedia.com
I'm still trying to work out what the back-end of Gopher looks like.
Like, in HTML you have tags and shit, but Gopher is just plaintext. What format does a link take with that?
>What went wrong?
The NSF AUP went away.
THE NSFNET BACKBONE SERVICES
Acceptable Use Policy
GENERAL PRINCIPLE:
(1) NSFNET Backbone services are provided to support open research and education in and among US research and instructional institutions, plus research arms of for-profit firms when engaged in open scholarly communication and research. Use for other purposes is not acceptable.
......................... (deletia).....................
UNACCEPTABLE USES:
(10) Use for for-profit activities unless covered by the General Principle or as a specifically acceptable use.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
(11) Extensive use for private or personal business. This statement applies to use of the NSFNET Backbone only. NSF expects that connecting networks will formulate their own use policies. The NSF Division of Networking and Communications Research and Infrastructure will resolve any questions about this Policy or its interpretation. [NSF IG App A]
>Also mosaic is a meme, nobody was using that shit.
Mosaic became IE. It all went downhill when Microsoft "bought" a license for Spyglass Mosaic (told them they'd get a share of the profits from sales - Microsoft never sold IE for money. Therefore, Spyglass got fucked in the typical Microsoft fashion.
I wonder (((who))) lobbied hardest to get this removed
Italians?
All the Italians I know are cheap-ass motherfuckers that want to squeeze a penny until it bleeds.
>http
Daayum nigga what you finna tryna pull here? Nigga know we ain't down with HTTP over here. Some wack ass cracka could hack my battlestation if I clicked on that shit, fool.
Then why is it in text instead of an optimized serialized format :|
dillo doesn't seem resource intensive, i think it is browser dependent for that sort of thing, or lynx for that matter.
HTML is better than plain text because of hyperlinks.
It was ruined by including server side CSS and JS. CSS and JS should strictly be client side tools for formatting/scripting
Shit ain't be eight bit clean.
Now get off my lawn.
>That sounds more like a problem with the browser.
No. It's a problem of having to read/parse a verbose data stream and stuff every little piece into a DOM model in memory.
A fair point. A 486 could handle a simple page with few tags. But as the web scaled up....
>tfw you will never browse a web built off Gopher delivering glorious PostScript pages
Italians have worse working conditions than they did 50 years ago. I wouldn't be surprised.
>How did the web turn from universal access to information to selective access to entertainment?
Capitalism. Give corporations an avenue for profit and they will exploit it in every way possible.
It's only CPU intensive if you're trying to make HTML+CSS Turing complete.
This is not (very) CPU intensive:
Page
Hello world
body { width: 500px; }
NetSurf looks a little better and uses only about 10MB more RAM, as well as having better interactivity and standard shortcuts.
Issue with NetSurf is that you can't save images. And neither of them can post on Sup Forums.
A link is just a line from the text file that's formatted in a particular way. If a line isn't formatted as required it's just ignored. This only applies for menus of course.
The wikipedia article makes links look way uglier than they need too, but it's a good place to start for understanding how gopher works. en.wikipedia.org
HTML is just plaintext.
This. I never like getting governments involved in things, but the web really should have been treated more like a national digital library and forum (in the classic sense) than just a wild west computer playground.
>Capitalism
No.
Yes.
>"I was here first so that means I'm entitled to decide how the internet runs forever"
100 posts later and you still haven't fixed anything, you also couldn't fix it with 1,000 whiny posts. these threads are just whining, like they have been since 1993, 2003, 2013, and will be in 2013. "Oh but now this particular group ruined everything because it's all slightly different and I can't change so I'll just say it all went to shit".
1980s
"muh usenet. How do we fix the internet? I was here first"
1990s
"Muh eternal september. How do we fix the internet? I was here first"
2000s
"muh normies. How do we fix the internet? I was here first"
2007
"Muh mobile users. How do we fix the internet? I was here first"
2010
"muh social media. How do we fix the internet? I was here first"
each 5 year period is chock full of stupid shits who all think they were here first, as if that gets them "points" or something, and each shit-group has a different gay opinion about "what killed the internet".
go fuck off to your bbs or irc circlejerk. Alternatively, go to google and use their year system to only find content from your particular gay area and actually re-remember it, but you won't because you know it was always shit.
>Also mosaic is a meme, nobody was using that shit.
Our university was using Mosaic.
This.
Fuck "universal access." That was never the point of the web.
I wasn't here first. I wasn't even here tenth.
Your the one who has yet to actually put forward a defence of their position the way that people in this thread have.
maximum autism
>go fuck off to your bbs
If a popular english one still existed I would.
You know what? Go and kill yourself. This isn't trendy Sup Forums talk, I legitimately want you to end your time on earth.
You're the cancer that killed the entire technological industry. Actual advancement has never mattered to you, or the ones you defend for some insane reason, it's always been about getting cash (why this matters to you though, I have no idea. Unless you're a shareholder for some corporation that sells equipment).
Many times in this thread it has been pointed out why the current web is significantly worse than its intended incarnation. It is meant to provide "univeral access" to "documents."
What you are defending is limiting the access to only people who are worthy at this moment in time. You don't care about people in developing countries with poor equipment and infrastructure. You don't care about the poor in developed countries. You don't care about quality.
This is immoral of you. And the world needs less of people like you.
"muh social media. How do we fix the internet? I was here first"
The dialup BBS scene was social media. Usenet was social media. IRC in 1990 was social media.
It's /all/ social media.
My brother and I ran a BBS out of our bedroom in 1986. *tips fedora*
I'd say the large difference (and I think it's an important one) is that BBS and IRC are personal projects. There were corporate BBSs, but most people used personal ones. Even FidoNet was just ordinary guys doing it as a project that got way out of hand.
Plus those three technologies allow the creed of the web ("universal access") to a fantastic degree. We've got close to 40 years of hardware than can interact with them.
I agree with you. People complain about new users and normies but don't bother creating their own god damn website and staying there. Instead it's just inane shitposts complaining about normies.
Things don't become popular by themselves.
Be the change you want to be.
Chuckled quietly.
I think it went wrong when they decided to not give developers the tools to do layout properly in case they didn't do it right. Developers wanted to control the layout and used whatever dirty hacks would let them do that(tables, empty gifs, etc) and conversely everybody did it badly because there was no way to do it right. Now there is this prevalent attitude held by webdevs where everything can be, should be a hack, that there aren't "best practices".
That and that browsers will render whatever they can instead of forcing properly written webpages.
People in these threads always say that the internet is bad today, but why?
Which sites do you wish to use, but can't because you have to download a 20kb Jquery file?
I can't think of anything but youtube.
In the past it was actually worse because you needed shitty plugins to do anything at all that isn't plain reading.
If you want to learn and inform yourself, most of the sites are pretty fucking plain.
And today there is more information then ever on the internet!
People just upload their fucking books, so others can enhance and correct them (Real World Haskell),
and you fucking complain?
It's no wonder that some web3.0 snapshit requires javascript, but why do you care?
It's just some dirt. It's a waste of time.
Look at just about any newspaper website. Many of those don't even display content without javascript.
>sum total of world's knowledge available at your fingertips, 24/7
>can find and purchase nearly anything without having to send mail-order forms and dig through obscure catalogs
>long-distance communication is easier than ever
What the fuck are you autists bitching about? That the internet is no longer a safe space for the socially retarded?
Why should I look at them? Most of them are a waste of time and energy.
Anyway, foreign affairs (one that isn't complete bullshit) is actually pretty much working without JS.
It's ugly as shit, but works.
>That the internet is no longer a safe space for the socially retarded?
No, you illiterate fucking moron. Literally the opposite. It's borderline inaccessible to anyone who isn't using recent hardware when that doesn't have to be the case.
they have evolved to be http versions of them now, called "forums", but you will claim they aren't the same because they aren't shitty and have more than 10 users
It's meant to provide ""universal access" to "documents"" ? Says who, says you, you are still on the same "I was here first so I decide what the internet is about" shit. Same as any other BBS and usenet, eternal september spouting fuck. In 1995 you couldn't pay $5 a month for unlimited hosting. So right now is the best time to provide what you want.
one of my favorite things about bbs nostalgia or this meme idea that sites run by individuals are superior is how you conveniently forget how fantastically they fell victim to ban circlejerking. For example, if this were a BBS run by anyone else in this thread, I'd probably be banned immediately after 2-3 reply turns because I post things you don't like and the ban button is easier than replying, and you'd justify this by saying I was a normie, trolling, or shitposting, or whatever else you wanted to make up. If you actually were part of BBS or IRC you'd remember that ban happy losers always make it to be admin and then your site and IRC explodes into a thousand copies of the same thing and then a week later the same thing happens for all the child sites and irc channels and the entire thing eventually censors itself and nobody posts anything. BBS and IRC are literally two decades of fucking butt diddling.
open up the blender
put in one part scared of change, inherited straight from their grandmas who fought PCs in the 70s, 80s, and 90s before retiring
put in one part hipster
put in one part special snowflake
put in one part "better than u"
put in one part not using your computer skills to make any money because you're a loser
mix it all together what do you get
a bunch of fucking luddites jerking off thinking that they're running the internet by making the same thread every two days.
Yeah, god forbid web developers exploit the capabilities of the majority of hardware in use today. Sorry Pornhub doesn't load on your Pentium beigebox from 1997.
ok bye nigga
>spam
>freemiums
>botnets
>youtube comments
>reddit
Frankly, I miss the socially retarded pre-aol internet.
BBS and IRC are literally two decades of fucking butt diddling.
facts itt
>ban circlejerking.
Incoming lines were precious bbs resource. Can't waste it on retards. It also culled the userbase.
It was only as circlejerky as sysop allowed it to be. But all good BBSes ran on merit (except the ones with paid subscription).
imageboards is entirely different beast, it's the web answer to fido/usenet.
The internet should have remained the province of professsionals and whatever hanger-on enthusiasts with ability. It's a basic necessity now with how interconnected the world is so you can't live a normal life without it anymore.