I enjoyed this. But reading the claim that the iPhone was bad compared to other phones of the day makes me question it all. That's so incredibly backwards. It _was_ a much better internet in your pocket. If you couldn't see that, it says something about you, not phones.
Very little of this rings true for me, but that part worst of all.
The mobile web pre-iPhone was terrible. Nobody used it, nobody wanted to use it, and nobody wanted to build it. At best there was a shitty cut back version on the `m` subdomain. WAP/WML were terrible and didn’t give you anything close to the real web, and XHTML Basic was still-born.
The iPhone came along with its “desktop class web browser” and it genuinely worked. Steve Jobs got on stage and told everybody if they wanted to build apps for the iPhone, they should be web apps. Then he told everybody Flash was terrible – which it was – and that we should all use open standards instead.
Practically overnight, everybody commissioning websites wanted them to be “iPhone-compatible”. They did not ask for mobile sites – they specifically asked for them to be iPhone-compatible.
And because WebKit was open-source (thanks to it being based upon KHTML), all the other phone vendors took the code and ran with it, including Android.
This is why I say there is no single organisation that has done more to push the mobile web forward than Apple. The difference in attitudes and capability towards the mobile web changed practically overnight, and it’s directly attributable to Apple’s intentional actions to develop and promote the mobile web.
The original iPhone was genuinely terrible. A 2006 Nokia could surf the web on the go and tell you where you are. The iPhone could do neither, since Apple did not include a 3G modem or GPS. It also did not have any apps, and one of the key features highlighted by Steve Jobs was voicemail. The 3G one year later was the first truly usable iPhone.
Fuck, you missed it being bad at being a phone. It launched on the network that had such bad coverage they needed Apple's hottest product ever to get people to switch. They had to put a cell repeater (or was it a miniature tower?) in the presentation center so the call would go smoothly, and still had to rig the cellular icon to always show full bars.
Judged purely as a "Let's give Ted a call"-phone, it was fucking bad compared to the competiton.
I seem to recall I had a windows phone at the time, with a full keyboard. I could use OS maps on the thing, and although it didn't have GPS, it could get my rough location by tower.
My mate had an iPhone, and it had an app where you could pretend to drink a pint of beer.
That might prove the novelty of the App Store back then. Also, let’s not forget that its’ screen was better than most other smartphones of its time. It was a rather limited phone, but not bad exactly.
What a brilliant piece of writing. I remember almost every single step—safe for actually getting angry emails. Maybe I ended up being the one writing them.
What a glorious time period.
Interestingly, it would’ve been impossible to share this writing with as many people as the author did by publishing it on mastodon and then it ended up on HN in 1998. The network effects are real.
I read the beginning of the post and immediately tabbed back to start writing a rant about standing up a website being fine, but the real loss of web functionality was Flash, glad I kept reading. I'm quite good with CSS and doing tricks with SVGs, but constantly run into things I want to do in 2D web I find to be complex enough and time consuming enough I don't even bother, while I would have been able to do it in Flash as a 13 year old in a few minutes. The modern web is a prison built out of <div>s, the tricks you see for "amazing" websites with obnoxious scrolljacking/parallax don't hide it.
My experience was almost identical. Don’t forget all the time spent balancing image quality with load speed to get that perfect blend of shit quality and slow download.
> Making a website should be the easiest fucking thing in the world by now. There should be a program that you can use to spit out a website as easy as Word spits out words on paper
squarespace?
> and we - us fucking foss nerds or whoever - should've made it.
SSI is still the perfect balance of just enough power to do templating with .html fragments with a minimal attack surface and no maintainence from version churn. It's stable, it's tested, it's left alone. It's in most major webservers as a core module. It's as good now as it was in 1998.
the prediction wasn't even wrong, it just split in two. deploying a static site in 2026 is genuinely easier than 1998. you drag a folder into netlify and you're done, no ISP instructions, no FTP client, no guy with a tarp. what exploded is everything before the deploy. and the funny thing is the actual complaint buried in this thread, "i don't want to paste my nav into every page and update it by hand," is the exact problem we've spent 25 years re-solving. frames, then SSI, then php includes, then templating engines, then the whole frontend framework industry. react is, underneath everything, a really elaborate way to not repeat your navbar.
Those angry emails from guys (it's always guys) felt so contrived and wedged in just to attack other guys. I reminded me of the tweet about how people online invent someone doing a hypothetical situation and then get mad at them
And there were a bunch of WYSIWYG editors in the mid-late 90s. It seems like everyone had one, including Netscape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer
The very first web browser that ever existed – WorldWideWeb – had a WYSIWYG editor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb
I enjoyed this. But reading the claim that the iPhone was bad compared to other phones of the day makes me question it all. That's so incredibly backwards. It _was_ a much better internet in your pocket. If you couldn't see that, it says something about you, not phones.
Very little of this rings true for me, but that part worst of all.
The mobile web pre-iPhone was terrible. Nobody used it, nobody wanted to use it, and nobody wanted to build it. At best there was a shitty cut back version on the `m` subdomain. WAP/WML were terrible and didn’t give you anything close to the real web, and XHTML Basic was still-born.
The iPhone came along with its “desktop class web browser” and it genuinely worked. Steve Jobs got on stage and told everybody if they wanted to build apps for the iPhone, they should be web apps. Then he told everybody Flash was terrible – which it was – and that we should all use open standards instead.
Practically overnight, everybody commissioning websites wanted them to be “iPhone-compatible”. They did not ask for mobile sites – they specifically asked for them to be iPhone-compatible.
And because WebKit was open-source (thanks to it being based upon KHTML), all the other phone vendors took the code and ran with it, including Android.
This is why I say there is no single organisation that has done more to push the mobile web forward than Apple. The difference in attitudes and capability towards the mobile web changed practically overnight, and it’s directly attributable to Apple’s intentional actions to develop and promote the mobile web.
> Very little of this rings true
How old are you? I'm betting mid-twenties.
It was bad if you had a Nokia smartphone, or a Blackberry. Lots of people felt they weren't ready to give up their keyboards.
It's hard to make objective judgment when you're in one tribe's trench.
The original iPhone was genuinely terrible. A 2006 Nokia could surf the web on the go and tell you where you are. The iPhone could do neither, since Apple did not include a 3G modem or GPS. It also did not have any apps, and one of the key features highlighted by Steve Jobs was voicemail. The 3G one year later was the first truly usable iPhone.
It was a bad phone, poor battery life, fragile, and relatively poor reception.
That was more than offset by the unmetered internet connection + decent browser, but that’s a feature not everything.
it's 3 products: a widescreen iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. Are you getting it?
Better internet may be, but that doesn't make an entire phone. There was the terrible battery life, limited multitasking, poor camera, etc.
Fuck, you missed it being bad at being a phone. It launched on the network that had such bad coverage they needed Apple's hottest product ever to get people to switch. They had to put a cell repeater (or was it a miniature tower?) in the presentation center so the call would go smoothly, and still had to rig the cellular icon to always show full bars.
Judged purely as a "Let's give Ted a call"-phone, it was fucking bad compared to the competiton.
I seem to recall I had a windows phone at the time, with a full keyboard. I could use OS maps on the thing, and although it didn't have GPS, it could get my rough location by tower.
My mate had an iPhone, and it had an app where you could pretend to drink a pint of beer.
That might prove the novelty of the App Store back then. Also, let’s not forget that its’ screen was better than most other smartphones of its time. It was a rather limited phone, but not bad exactly.
What a brilliant piece of writing. I remember almost every single step—safe for actually getting angry emails. Maybe I ended up being the one writing them.
What a glorious time period.
Interestingly, it would’ve been impossible to share this writing with as many people as the author did by publishing it on mastodon and then it ended up on HN in 1998. The network effects are real.
I read the beginning of the post and immediately tabbed back to start writing a rant about standing up a website being fine, but the real loss of web functionality was Flash, glad I kept reading. I'm quite good with CSS and doing tricks with SVGs, but constantly run into things I want to do in 2D web I find to be complex enough and time consuming enough I don't even bother, while I would have been able to do it in Flash as a 13 year old in a few minutes. The modern web is a prison built out of <div>s, the tricks you see for "amazing" websites with obnoxious scrolljacking/parallax don't hide it.
My experience was almost identical. Don’t forget all the time spent balancing image quality with load speed to get that perfect blend of shit quality and slow download.
> Making a website should be the easiest fucking thing in the world by now. There should be a program that you can use to spit out a website as easy as Word spits out words on paper
squarespace?
> and we - us fucking foss nerds or whoever - should've made it.
wordpress?
Not seeing anything
Looks like its getting a ton of traffic
Spinner and load bar at the top
Completely ignoring accessibility
SSI is still the perfect balance of just enough power to do templating with .html fragments with a minimal attack surface and no maintainence from version churn. It's stable, it's tested, it's left alone. It's in most major webservers as a core module. It's as good now as it was in 1998.
the prediction wasn't even wrong, it just split in two. deploying a static site in 2026 is genuinely easier than 1998. you drag a folder into netlify and you're done, no ISP instructions, no FTP client, no guy with a tarp. what exploded is everything before the deploy. and the funny thing is the actual complaint buried in this thread, "i don't want to paste my nav into every page and update it by hand," is the exact problem we've spent 25 years re-solving. frames, then SSI, then php includes, then templating engines, then the whole frontend framework industry. react is, underneath everything, a really elaborate way to not repeat your navbar.
> react is, underneath everything, a really elaborate way to not repeat your navbar.
That specific use-case is now replaced by having a single, small webcomponent for client-side includes.
Is a much better dev-XP than configuring the server, then tying your sources to that specific server.Those angry emails from guys (it's always guys) felt so contrived and wedged in just to attack other guys. I reminded me of the tweet about how people online invent someone doing a hypothetical situation and then get mad at them