Make Front End Shit Again (2018)

I think the point wasn't that jquery was old, but it was way too new for the rest of the page. Everything on it screams mid 90s, and then jquery which is a good 10 years later.

tdeck3• 5 years ago

Agreed, jQuery felt like an anachronism given the style of that web page. At most I'd expect a "remember DHTML?"

unnouinceput• 5 years ago

My eyes hurt. No thank you.

tonyedgecombe• 5 years ago

Wait until you see this:

https://www.lingscars.com/

hulitu4• 5 years ago

This is a bit heavy but it's creative. And the info is not hidden after dark patterns or hamburgers. One can see where the menu is and can easily navigate to rent a car.

pjerem• 5 years ago

Wow it’s truly amazing. I want to lease Ling a car but I don’t live in the UK.

I also love the content: fun but still really clear about everything you may need to know, with a lot of useful details just there.

Really cool.

ambericanonion• 5 years ago

This is one of my favorite sites from a design pov. Oddly enough i initially found it by searching for 'the worst sites on the internet'. In an earlier incarnation it also handled sales and had individual listings in the same style. Awesome stuff whoever you are.

boffinism2• 5 years ago

You can still make shit websites. Lots of people do. The problem is, they're more fun to make than to visit. So don't get huffy if potential visitors go to social media instead.

neya• 5 years ago

The problem is, they're more fun to make than to visit.

This is not true. https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

boffinism2• 5 years ago

I don't understand. That is not a shit website.

hulitu4• 5 years ago

This one lacks hyperlinks ( the h in http(s)).

tjpnz• 5 years ago

So don't get huffy if potential visitors go to social media instead.

Which is also shit, albeit more expensive shit. Facebook looks like a Fischer Price toy due for a recall.

DocTomoe2• 5 years ago

We prefer to call it "appropriate for the key demographic".

xcambar• 5 years ago

Like it or not, people had to be really creative to get things done the way they wanted.

Their creativity paved the way for new features, whether with HTML, CSS, JS, security, and whatnot.

sinab• 5 years ago

The GitHub repo made me lol: https://github.com/SaraVieira/make-frontend-shit-again

winrid• 5 years ago

Ha, did not expect Vue and actual individual components.

mjhagen2• 5 years ago

Yeah, this joke goes a bit deeper than its veneer let on.

amatecha6• 5 years ago

This is awesome hahaha

It's complicated on purpose btw, I wanted to do it in ReasonML and GraphQL but I didn't have time as this was done in an afternoon hackathon

skinkestek4• 5 years ago

I'm on mobile.

It loads quick.

I saw no ads.

It was reasonable straight to the point: no explanation about this being grandmothers pie recipe or anything to that effect.

(In fact, if you consider the point of the website to be funny it is actually straight to the point.)

If it is fast, doesn't track me and provides the answers I need I can put up with some animations.

I'd say what we have today is far more problematic than a few animations.

Also, most surviving websites from that era aren't that bad when it comes to animation: use marginalia to search for food recipes and see what I mean.

hulitu4• 5 years ago

Same experience here. It loads instantly when 99% of the sites need 30s to 1 min to load. It looks decent on mobile (not too big, not too small). Contrast is good, fonts are readable. This guy should give web design lessons.

King-Aaron• 5 years ago

This guy should give web design lessons

https://twitter.com/NikkitaFTW

I would assume it's 'this girl', but I do agree

brettermeier4• 5 years ago

It looks like poo on mobile, no offence, but you can't see the whole page and you can scroll to the right and stuff. It's just ugly.

onion2k• 5 years ago

I loaded it on mobile too..

- Horizontal scrolling because it isn't properly responsive.

- it doesn't reflow when the device orientation changes

- no sound (there's an audio control so I guess there's meant to be..)

- the audio control sits over the flags

- wildly different text sizes everywhere

- so much layout shift

- from an error loading the Korean version I think it's running on a platform that tracks what users do (serverside tracking is mostly fine in my opinion, and unavoidable really, but it's still tracking).

It's fun, and oddly similar to my first website actually, but I'll take the modern Web over this sort of nostalgia every time.

kamray233• 5 years ago

Sound autoplay doesn't really work anymore in modern browsers.

skinkestek4• 5 years ago

Upvote for serious criticism.

I still take this over:

- the noncompliant cookie warnings

- ... with >400 "partners" (yes, I have counted)

- works best in IE^HChrome

- 20 seconds loading

- written for Googlebot, instead of for a human like either the author or me. (Meaning it is bland, formula-driven.)

websites I often deal with as long as it provides the answers/entertainment I am looking for.

vosper• 5 years ago

it doesn't reflow when the device orientation changes

Does anyone design sites for landscape any more?

liftm• 5 years ago

- Horizontal scrolling because it isn't properly responsive.

It actually is properly responsive: it has horizontal scrolling on desktop too, and by just the exact amount, no matter what the window size is. (At least on FF.)

HelloNurse• 5 years ago

it doesn't reflow when the device orientation changes

When you lift a CRT and turn it sideways, it is usually done because it's placed incorrectly (no "reflow" wanted). It's also unusual to attempt to read a website on it at the same time you are risking injury.

styeco• 5 years ago

And it's all done in Nuxt.js/Vue

ahoka• 5 years ago

It's full of tracking though.

skinkestek4• 5 years ago

That is sad to hear even if it loads instantly.

Does it have 400 "partners" too?

divbzero3• 5 years ago

It’s actually built with Nuxt, a Vue framework [1]. I believe this style is called “faux retro”.

[1] https://github.com/SaraVieira/make-frontend-shit-again/

sapht• 5 years ago

The only thing worse about this than whichever 2020-era website was the "Right click is disabled!" as I tried to leave. (That made me chuckle). The other stuff is just nostalgia and not really related to the degradation of web UX. Irrelevant gifs and ugly colors are easier to ignore than 1000-page cookie dialogs.

brobinson• 5 years ago

For Firefox/Librewolf users, you can hold shift when you right click to bypass scripts that try to disable your ability to right click.

I laughed when that popped up for me. A very authentic experience.

seattle_spring2• 5 years ago

I feel like I had a literal flashback seeing the little Netscape gif at the bottom. Wow, what a trip.

VRay• 5 years ago

Obligatory link to a modern Geocities-esque collection of mini-sites, Neocities: https://marijn.uk/linkroll/

prox2• 5 years ago

Neocities FTW!

taubek• 5 years ago

Reminds of od days when GeoCities were around. Except there was no jQuery at that time :)

denago• 5 years ago

smile.rip

axegon_• 5 years ago

Drop the annoying music and it's perfect. Beats the "modern" gibberish which requires server grade hardware to be semi-useful(and that is coming from someone who's main computer hasw a dual-socket motherboard with two 14-core xeons filling those sockets).

Narann• 5 years ago

The music is actually straight to the point.

qbasic_forever3• 5 years ago

Every geocities site back in the day had a MIDI file autoplaying on view. This is exactly on point.

true_religion• 5 years ago

Someone once told me, “you will know what nostalgia truly is, when you see a younger generations nostalgia and think it’s still shit because you are too old for that to have been your childhood”.

The jQuery era is something I’d never want to go back to. Not because jQuery was bad, but because the basic DOM api was so poor, JavaScript was much more limited and incoherent, and webpages made anything outside of text input difficult (e.g. no voice, no gestures).

dehrmann• 5 years ago

I remember when web pages looked like that. I used the same animations and hosted on Geocities.

It's shit. I got a smirk out of seeing it again, but I just felt embarrassed for 1998 me.

amatecha6• 5 years ago

I remember when web pages looked like that... and it was AFTER I started making websites. I was scrolling through this page thinking "this stuff is too new, look at all these advanced features it's using". Flaming text? That's like 1999, practically cutting-edge! hahah :)

croon3• 5 years ago

In this case I could alter that to: "You will know what nostalgia truly is, when you see a younger generations representation of nostalgia and you can point out all the anachronisms in it."

Netscape 3 and websites that looked like that: 1996

Geocities: 1994-1999 (so far so good)

jQuery: 2006

Blink: 2013

amatecha6• 5 years ago

I think by Blink they meant <blink>

... wait... I hope!

seaish• 5 years ago

That steven universe gif: 2016

indrora• 5 years ago

Blink, the tag, dates back to the 1994 or so: http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag

That's what they're referring to in the page.

In 2006, I was reading [HTML, XHTML, and CSS Bible](https://www.amazon.com/HTML-XHTML-CSS-Bible-3rd/dp/076455739...), which was new-ish at the time and using Netscape as a daily browser, building sites using GeoCities. There were precursors to jQuery (cssQuery, for instance) that made it possible to do some things that Flash was too heavy for but you couldn't do in pure CSS.

And you bet your ass we were still building flashy, wild sorts of sites like that. Still do! Absolutely go check out stuff like Neocities.

KwanEsq• 5 years ago

Huh. When I read that I assumed Blink referred to the <blink> tag, but reading again you might actually be right that it means Google's browser engine. Truly anachronistic indeed.

chriswarbo2• 5 years ago

Sprinkling a little jQuery in a page to add interactive menus and AJAXify some form submissions was quite nice.

What I don't miss from the jQuery times is how painfully limited CSS was, e.g. to add rounded corners to an element (e.g. a button) required something like 11 nested elements (4 corners + 4 edges + 3 rows to contain them). The corners themselves needed image files: to support different background colours you could either use GIFs with transparent backgrounds, but they appeared "jagged" due to aliasing; you could use PNGs which support an whole alpha channel, but lose IE support; or you could create a bunch of different versions for each occasion.

I'm glad I do backend dev these days ;)

skilled• 5 years ago

An adjustable volume bar? That's the equivalent of using Vue.js back in the 90s.

Sorcery.

EDIT: Jokes on me. This site is built in Vue.

ryan-allen4• 5 years ago

That website was built on Vue? POSERS!

endgame• 5 years ago

Related: https://www.cameronsworld.net/

A great mural of old internet gifs, and autoplaying MIDI music.

Hamcha• 5 years ago

Some of my friends are finding a lot of neat websites under https://neocities.org, a Geocities-inspired service. They are all light and easy to parse, so I hope everyone there the best!

If you have a friend who'd like to mess around with that style but isn't tech-savvy enough, I've had my share of fun on https://mmm.page

JodieBenitez• 5 years ago

Loads of fun web here: https://theuselessweb.com

srcreigh• 5 years ago

The opt- in nostalgic music and the broken "____citis was d___" on mobile kills me.

exitb• 5 years ago

The website makes bold claim of being best viewed in Netscape 3. That does not seem to be the case though https://i.imgur.com/WKpmd28.png

mjhagen2• 5 years ago

I love this! Netscape 3 was a pretty tough browser to get stuff (especially JS) working in.

fabioborellini• 5 years ago

Imgur was again an example of shitty design. I could not use iPhone’s quick look to check the screen shot. I had to open the page only to consent to all cookie usage, and after giving consent the image opened in the Imgur app. Why would it ask for consent again and again, and why didn’t it open the app immediately?

parski• 5 years ago

The hero we need.

rbinv• 5 years ago

I can see the alert() debugging already.

brettermeier4• 5 years ago

The whole website is nothing but nostalgia bullsh*t :D

hdjjhhvvhga• 5 years ago

I don't believe it was done by a nostalgic person - rather someone who wasn't really there at the time and just wants to mock it. The things that were great then have nothing to do with the ones presented on that page.

JMS2021• 5 years ago

It's written with Vue js

hbbio• 5 years ago

Wow, that's the nostalgia at the bottom of your screenshot:

"27% of 3182K (at 1.5K/sec, 25:33 remaining)"

hulitu4• 5 years ago

For me it's not nostalgia, it's reality. I could not believe that in 2021 i will experience internet like in 1996 waiting for an image to load. But it seems that we are cursed.

Mikejames• 5 years ago

Sorry mate can i get light mode, it’s too dark for my eyes

bryanrasmussen• 5 years ago

Hey why is it that all these sites are always about how the old web was good and we should make things like the old web, but the only thing they ever make is stuff about how we should make things like the old web.

I mean I would expect them to after making the first site suggesting you do it like this, to make a number of sites showing the aesthetic put to other subjects of interest. Like, Carl's Icosahedron Spot on the WEB might be an example site but no.

It's almost like they don't have anything else to say but make it like it used to be.

accrual• 5 years ago

I browsed a bit and found this nice index on Neocities:

https://districts.neocities.org/

It's almost all content and little "make the web old", yet it still draws on the old and fun aspect of the early internet.

tdeck3• 5 years ago

What people miss isn't the thing, it's the feeling that the thing was novel, exciting, and good enough to be appreciated. People stayed up late creating these quirky little sites full of copy-pasted GIFs and cursor trails and felt proud of them. In retrospect it feels like a simpler and less self-conscious time. I'm not sure if it really was, though. For example, the "under construction" convention was basically a way to say "don't judge my website too harshly."

amatecha6• 5 years ago

So many people make websites that basically look like they are from the 90's (though without all the animated GIFs haha), and use basic features without any strictly-modern stuff. These are just a few off the top of my head:

https://cblgh.org/

https://technomancy.us/list

https://alexschroeder.ch/

http://100r.co/site/about_us.html

https://dataswamp.org/~solene/

https://rgz.ee/

https://www.bsdly.net/~peter/

https://codevoid.de/

https://www.undeadly.org

https://compudanzas.net/

http://altexxanet.org/

http://sdf.org/

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

taylorportman• 5 years ago

https://www.repairfaq.org/

I stumbled across this one recently, from their Please Read at Least Once:

"A word about the philosophy of this site: These pages are declared to be a fluff-free zone! There will be no unnecessary, superfluous, or useless graphics of any kind - including but not limited to: dancing, gyrating, or other animated icons, colored textured backgrounds that are impossible to read through, or forced downloading of bit intense pictures that may be of no interest to you. Nor, will I ever expect you to use a particular brand of Web browser to be able to effectively access these pages. There are and never will be any advertisements, cookies, or other impositions on your time and space. In the time that it may take wading through a single monstrosity of the professional Web page designers at other sites, you will be able to find out what you want to know, when you want to know it! What a concept. :-) (Note, however, that your browser needs to be configured properly to make sense of the many ASCII diagrams, schematics, and tables. See the document: Suggested Browser Settings for font and other related information.)"

Twisell• 5 years ago

You might notice that the author of the website orignaly included a link section to a crapload of inspirations. Unfortunately CORS policy will block this section on most up to date browsers.

Thanks to Firefox devtools and a bit of quik & dirty regexp here is this list ;)

http://thatsthefinger.com/ http://hooooooooo.com/ http://tinytuba.com/ http://cant-not-tweet-this.com/ http://www.staggeringbeauty.com/ http://eelslap.com/ http://corndog.io/ http://burymewithmymoney.com/ http://www.trypap.com/ http://www.fallingfalling.com/ http://www.republiquedesmangues.fr/ http://www.partridgegetslucky.com/ http://weirdorconfusing.com/ http://www.rrrgggbbb.com/ http://www.koalastothemax.com/ http://beesbeesbees.com/ http://cat-bounce.com/ http://r33b.net/ http://www.sanger.dk/ http://chrismckenzie.com/ http://www.everydayim.com/ http://endless.horse/ http://corndogoncorndog.com/ http://www.pointerpointer.com/ http://www.ismycomputeron.com/ http://ninjaflex.com/ http://metaphorsofinfinity.com/ http://imaninja.com/ http://ihasabucket.com/ http://iamawesome.com/ http://www.electricboogiewoogie.com/ http://unicodesnowmanforyou.com/ http://www.wutdafuk.com/ http://www.nullingthevoid.com/ http://zombo.com/ http://onemillionlols.com/ http://pixelsfighting.com/ http://www.ascii-middle-finger.com/ http://buzzybuzz.biz/ http://yeahlemons.com/ http://www.1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111... http://fastcashmoneyplus.biz/ http://space-turtles.rocks/ http://rtr.hackedbygod.net/ http://www.vape.horse/ http://rayps.com/ http://akrepnalan.com/ http://terrorpigeon.us/ http://paulvm.com/ http://pudim.com.br/ http://originalhampster.ytmnd.com/ http://tacospin.com http://www.internetfortheday.com/ http://www.akrepnalan.com/ http://finger-frenzy.now.sh/ http://www.oldversion.com/windows/netscape-3-04 http://www.cutercounter.com/ http://www.cutercounter.com/hit.php?id=10190&nd=6&style=10

chrismorgan• 5 years ago

There are a few things here with `width: 100vw`. This is annoying on platforms that don’t use overlay scrollbars because 100vw is wider than the page and so forces a horizontal scrollbar, and I don’t think it was done deliberately. All should be changed to `width: 100%`.

(The viewport units are fundamentally stupidly broken by design, including scrollbar areas, so that if your website has scrollbars they will give you a wrong answer, that the actual viewport width will be things like 17px less than 100vw. There used to be a convoluted way of unbreaking the units with the mild side-effect of forcing the presence of a scrollbar—it involved `overflow: scroll` on the body element, from memory—but Firefox was the only one that implemented it and after some years they collectively gave up and removed it from the spec. So now I say there are literally zero completely legitimate and reasonable uses of viewport units, though there are a few uses where the amount of error is tolerable, though still not a good idea.)

not-my-account• 5 years ago

photosofben.com

aamederen• 5 years ago

a shittier version is https://bitfission.com/

dpcan• 5 years ago

Still use JQuery all the time as a WP dev. And ftp too.

LazarWolf_• 5 years ago

Where’s the guestbook?

raverbashing• 5 years ago

No guestbook, but the number of signatures keeps going up somehow

Sporktacular• 5 years ago

Aw I memba.

Yeah, but it looked shit.

cblconfederate• 5 years ago

There s nothing "old" about jquery, quite the opposite. the github projects based on jquery actually work, while almost everything made for the "post jquery" world is abandoned, totally not working, or impossible to develop on.

divbzero3• 5 years ago

Oh shit, you disabled right click?

And a rather modern approach for doing it:

  <script>
  export default {
    mounted() {
      document.addEventListener("contextmenu", event => {
        event.preventDefault()
        alert("Right click is disabled!!!")
      })
    }
  }
  </script>

https://github.com/SaraVieira/make-frontend-shit-again/blob/...

Accacin2• 5 years ago

Maybe you know, but it might help someone else. Hold shift when right clicking and it works :D

divbzero3• 5 years ago

Interesting, I did not know about shift + right click. It appears to be a browser feature in Firefox to avoid abuse of the contextmenu event. The same trick did not work in Chrome or Safari.

qwerty456127• 5 years ago

We need to make dumb shit! Make useless stuff;

That's what we mostly are doing nowadays. Over 80% of the information on the web could be communicated much more efficiently without 80% of the "modern" bullshit.

pmontra• 5 years ago

It looks like shit but it loads faster than Medium and a lot of similar sites that stare at you with a blank page until JS finally shows the text/img content HTML was designed to display since the early 90s.

ryan-allen4• 5 years ago

Medium usually tries to make me sign in or sign up, which is even worse.

shrimpx• 5 years ago

This is useful to know (wrt it being written in Vue/Nuxt):

It's complicated on purpose btw, I wanted to do it in ReasonML and GraphQL but I didn't have time as this was done in an afternoon hackathon

makach• 5 years ago

I was a little sad that the inspirational websites portion was empty, other than that, good clean fun...I suppose?

qbasic_forever3• 5 years ago

If you need some inspiration: https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

novok• 5 years ago

People do, but your not a kid anymore and don't do it yourself and you don't browse such things anymore either. The tools are bit different this time, the pieces of art different too, but they are still being made. One example I like is CYOAs: https://www.reddit.com/r/makeyourchoice/ or twine games.

Roblox games and minecraft creations are another example.

darkwater• 5 years ago

Geocities-style pages never had that kind of super long and scrollable pages. iframes and menus on both top and left sides FTW.

frozenport• 5 years ago

jquery (2006ish) with the 90s web (blink tag) is historical anachronism.

emreb2• 5 years ago

It missing the rotation @ logo for email us.

emreb2• 5 years ago

Oh also I did not see a table with border=2

amatecha6• 5 years ago

In case anyone needs the best GIFs for their website, you can peruse GifCities! https://gifcities.org/

You know you need that Netscape spinning-cube GIF.

tonis2• 5 years ago

It's a shitty website, but still uses like 500mb of node_modules to build, that's not the way we should be going to.

brettermeier4• 5 years ago

So true. If you want to build an oldschool website do it the oldschool way! Otherwise it's kind of lame...

archi42• 5 years ago

Might be part of the joke ;)

lvs• 5 years ago

This appears to be very much on purpose.

spongeb00b• 5 years ago

It's like they got things reversed. What I miss about old web dev is the simplicity of the tooling: no complex build systems, "CI" was just uploading your changes via FTP (maybe using something like Dreamweaver's features for keeping track of which files you've edited), and basically zero server config.

What I love about the web now is the rich features of modern HTML, CSS, and JS. I no longer spend my days debugging weird browser quirks. What I hate most are the fragile build and server environments.

break_the_bank• 5 years ago

One of the funny things that pulls me to web3 is that their websites already kinda look like this and I don’t have to do a lot of design work. Plus most of those apps don’t support mobile so no app dev!

iou• 5 years ago

Love that scroll effect

dmitrygr• 5 years ago

OOOF... W3C HTML validation fails

https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fmakefrontends...

trevormcneal• 5 years ago

what this site got wrong is just "remember jquery ?", this was a modern thing back then and almost nobody used. Would make more sense "remember tables for everything ?"

mojuba• 5 years ago

Yep, and 1x1 gifs for sizing certain unsize-able elements.

I'm building a web site currently, after a looong break from web development. It's almost unbelievable how much cleaner HTML, DOM and JS have gotten. It's more of a pleasure (only relatively to the previous eras) building pages and you actually don't need frameworks.

Ueland• 5 years ago

Another classic site to show in this regard is this Norwegian online store.

https://arngren.net/

gfd• 5 years ago

It's been such a long time since I've seen a <marquee>

qbasic_forever3• 5 years ago

We need a simple modern serverless hit counter image like every site used to have back in the day. Maybe a S3 bucket that hosts the hit counter image and then a lambda cron job that wakes up every few hours to crawl the S3 bucket access logs, aggregate the hit count, and write out a new counter image to the bucket.

stillblue• 5 years ago

The nostalgia is so overwhelming I'm super sad now. Such good times!!!!

Dave3of5• 5 years ago

Blocked by my corporate firewall:

Elevated Exposure Sites that camouflage their true nature or identity, or that include elements suggesting latent malign intent.

rplnt• 5 years ago

I wish every site worked like this. Meanwhile I wait for my expensive company notebook to barely handle the 30+ MB of JavaScript Jira downloaded to render a text form which is also completely and utterly broken.

brainwipe• 5 years ago

It's missing links to other dumb shit so that I can surf but otherwise, it's on point.

dozzman• 5 years ago

yo its the UFO mouse that got me

ahmed_ds• 5 years ago

The good ol' days. When people had limited resources, infinite imagination and they made compromises in there design choices. Now we have infinite resources but we have design and standards and guidelines and boxes and structures and grids and SEO and accessibility....

I think if you are building things on the daily we have to go through a resource limitation sabbatical.

just-tom• 5 years ago

It's easy to make this kind of one pager, when you don't need to include complex user flows. No registration, no account, no search, no products, no modal, no navigation, not even a form. There's literally just text, images and one embedded HTML5 audio component. When you do, design tends to be attracted to the conventional side.

However, I do miss the concept of websites taking the lighter approach, not trying to imitate enterprise design by fully optimizing every part of the website, and just thinking what's fun.

napsterbr• 5 years ago

This just reminded me of the timeless, legendary https://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/

nathias• 5 years ago

this is much better than the standard: cookie accept menu,adds, playing video blasting full force, affiliate links with watered down content

keyle• 5 years ago

Remember jQuery, hahah

Is the author young or he mixed up his timeline?

DHTML4lyf

idkwhoiam• 5 years ago

Those W3C badges made my day

Lamad123• 5 years ago

http://www.savewalterwhite.com/

poletopole• 5 years ago

Mission accepted. I will be on that inspiration list. I never thought I would have to use my hamburger backpack again...

louissan• 5 years ago

awww come on where's the html4 DTD?

I also think the site is severely lacking in terms of light blue characters against a yellow background xD

also: table layout missing?

danschumann• 5 years ago

What drove us away from making fun shit? Was it our inferior need to make money? I used to think I was the greatest computer guy around until a guy in his dorm room, one year older than me, suddenly became a millionaire and then a billionaire. He made me feel so inferior, I lost the plot. It wasn't like being good at art as a kid, feeling valued, and then later on in life, realizing art isn't my thing, in a moment of disappointment, and then dismissing it as a career option. It was more like, seeing what he did, being greedy to want to copy it, and then seeking to be like a lesser version of zuckerberg, and to make an inferior facebook, while completely losing what I was doing in the first place, like the ultimate distraction.

ryan-allen4• 5 years ago

The front-end style depicted predated jQuery by a long shot!

tomcooks• 5 years ago

This faked nostalgia is becoming irritating.

Websites which were like that didn't last long, and mostly were hosted on free webservers.

If you want to get rid of nostalgia please spend 60 whole minutes making sense of HTML+PHP5.6+jQuery copy pasted code. And make it IE6 compatible. And use tables for layout. And don't use stackoverflow, caniuse, or an IDE. You'll soon understand how we reached the current state of things.

t. Boomer that spends 8+ hours straightening PHP5.6 sghettis for a living, who still swears by FTPZilla and jQuery scripts.

easrng3• 5 years ago

Vanilla JS is quite nice these days, the only advantages jQuery has now is the fact that it's somewhat less verbose for DOM things and has support for old browsers.

  // For example, instead of
  $("#somebutton").click(() => alert("Hello"))

  // You would  do
  document.querySelector("#somebutton").addEventListener("click", () => alert("Hello"));
  
  
  // Instead of
  $("#message").text("Important Message")

  // You would  do
  document.querySelector("#message").textContent = "Important Message";
  
  
  // Instead of
  $("#things .thing").css("color", "red")

  // You would  do
  for(let e of document.querySelectorAll("#things .thing")) e.style.color = "red";
  
  
  // Instead of
  await $.ajax("https://httpbin.org/get").then((_1, _2, {responseJSON}) => responseJSON)

  // You would  do
  await fetch("https://httpbin.org/get").then(e => e.json())

drodil• 5 years ago

And still you needed Vue.js to make this (shit)?

rvieira• 5 years ago

I'm all for it (well not making it "shit", but fun and personal).

My nostalgia filtered memories are that people spent more time creating stuff (however "shit" it was) than consuming. Your feed was a curated list of bookmarks (could be something else today, hello Fraidycat). People had infinitely more freedom (it's my corner with any type content/media), instead of mandated formats ({text, pic, link}, 140 chars max, etc).

Not saying this is the only way. I wish it could co-exist successfully with modern social media.

andersonmvd2• 5 years ago

I guess the point is to make you feel something different, to explore and try to figure the website out. I remember accessing the "hack websites" with black background and red texts in comic sans while thinking "is it a dangerous website?" haha. Today we mostly take some template because it's "cost-efficient" and end up all looking the same with flat design, call to actions everywhere "buy" "talk to sales" "schedule demo", chat on the right bottom corner and so on.

When I wrote my last website (https://kakugo.ch) I factored in how to balance in trying to making it interesting yet presentable for the everyday audience. I don't know if I achieved that but I tried. A few things one can notice there: two easter eggs, a text written from the heart and some peculiar images. If you also have any more ideas, let me know, thanks :)

Recently I've also stumbled upon three.js which is awesome to build sites like this https://bruno-simon.com/. 3D modeling for websites is pretty neat. As the owner of this website said "i like to build websites that look like videogames".

gandalfgreybeer• 5 years ago

I love the kakugo website’s aesthetic. It’s simple but it doesn’t come out flat.

withinrafael• 5 years ago

I highly recommend folks play Hypnospace Outlaw, an Internet and OS simulation game, complete with a page builder[1] to achieve a similar aesthetic. (It's hard to describe this game without giving it away so I won't try.)

I stand with gooper.

[1] https://www.hypnospace.net/create.html

andersonmvd2• 5 years ago

Old thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17060303

aasasd2• 5 years ago

One of my favorite sites in terms of aesthetics is http://linkdot.link. I don't know anything particularly about the content, and I do have trouble actually reading it, but boy does it feel good to have it enter my eyes.

Make Front End Shit Again (2018)

Related Stories