You know what I miss? When information was condensed instead of spread out to insert more ads. When software willingly gave you all the options you could ever need instead of removing most of them because "people might get confused". When website took up the entire screen instead of a mobile wide strip in the middle because "it can be scary for people".

Fuck everyone who keeps lowering the bar of tech literacy just to appeal to the general public.

Not that unpopular an opinion I bet.

Ignoring the security implications.

There are literally none with basic html.

It's when you started adding shit like Shockwave, javascript and the like, all massive security holes, things got dicey.

Plain old HTML, none what so ever.

My friend, enjoy.

I mean, there are basically no security implications for plain html.

Most of the issue with loading times are the billion ads and trackers. There are sites I visit that load instantly with Adblock on but extremely slow without it.

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

And the drivatives: http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://bestmotherfucking.website/ https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/

Find the right webring, and you’d hit a treasure trove of content. Dig a little deeper and find something even more interesting. The pre-corporate takeover internet.

We talk about enshittification ruining everything, but Facebook and Web 2.0 started ripping out the heart of the internet. Everyone went along with it, and corporate claws sunk in. The fun internet got pushed aside for the ad-friendly internet.

Speaking as a web developer - sorry.

There isn't a day I don't think about how annoying the modern web is. Fancy crap, GDPR, a trillion frameworks weighing 1mb+ each, a ton of useless extra info for SEO and whatnot. All to see the pure information I initially seeked saying "yes". Which could've been a 1kb site.

Right there with you buddy.

Craigslist and McMaster are so efficient..

I miss kb large old raw html websites that loaded instantly on DSL internet

Instantly? We had very different DSL connections 😳

What would stop an individual or company nowadays to build a pure html website? Isn't this what a "static site" is?

Isn't this what HUGO and Jekyll produce, only a little bit prettier?

I just learned about https://neocities.org/, seems up your alley

Try this: https://makefrontendshitagain.party/

I instantly hit the Firefox Reader Mode button or turn on Brave's accessibility reader. They cut all the crap out of most websites. Bonus is they often remove paywalls.

Neocities!

This web thing is okay, but it will never replace Gopher.

Maybe you'll appreciate https://spacehey.com/

Everything is a transpiled Rract SPA loaded with trackers ..want to read your neighbors blog? Suck these hundreds trackers ...

You can still use old Gmail. I do. It's fast. It has no ads. It's amazing.

I remember building the first web site for our company many, many years ago. It was Friday afternoon, approaching 16:00, and I was eying my jacket hanging next to the office door, when the owner and CEO came in and told me that he had come to the conclusion that we need a web site.

When I left the office at about 22:00, we had one. The CEO and I had sat down together while I set up an apache on a linux box on the desk across from me, and he actually learned a bit of HTML while following me "designing" a web page with a text editor and painting tool. It had everything we needed back then.

Even today, I have the habit of cleaning up HTML perpetrated by horrible tools, most often Word or Calibre.

wiby.me/surprise/

I set this as my home on chrome

It should load some older websites at random each time it's opened

I'm still the old school developer that refuses to build JavaScript only sites. I build sites html first, and add some JS here and there to add some bling. But I never make it a requirement