No, it was bought by MRG after AOL fought its users and won, so they all left for Skype.

EDIT: Or maybe first by Rambler and then by MRG. Rambler was the Russian search engine I used in 2005, btw. Was an email provider too. I had an email account or two there, don’t even remember which. Also narod dot ru (free web hosting, similar to geocities) hasn’t yet been bought by Yandex then, and there were ucoz dot ru sites, and borda dot ru free web forums (something like phpbb). ICQ (and later Skype) would be used for real-time conversations in all of these communities. EDIT2: … which you’d make forums for.

OK, makes me feel nausea. Even better.

But why? What’s bad about this?

What I said, literally.

But the web can support many more advanced use-cases than that.

Which can be done with something embeddable, and not by breaking a hypertext system.

So you can see that other people have different needs to yours, but you think those shouldn’t be considered? We’re arguing about the internet. It’s a pretty diverse space.

If those people don’t consider mine, then I don’t consider theirs. If I must consider theirs, they must consider mine.

Look, I’m not saying that the web is the most coherent platform to develop for or use, but it’s just where we’re at after decades of evolving needs needing to be met.

That says nothing. It’s a market\evolution argument. Something changes tomorrow and that will be the result of evolution. Somebody uses a different system and that’s it for them.

That said, embedded interactive content is absolutely not better than what we have now. For one, both Flash and Java Applets were mostly proprietary technologies, placing far too much trust in the corpos developing them.

And today’s web browsers are as open as Microsoft’s OOXML. De facto proprietary.

There were massive cross-platform compatibility problems,

For Flash? Are you sure? I don’t remember such.

and neither were in any way designed for or even ready for a responsive web that displays well on different screen sizes.

Nothing was. Doesn’t tell us anything.

Accessibility was a big problem as well, given an entirely different accessibility paradigm was necessary within vs. the HTML+CSS shell around the embedded content.

Yes, but applet’s problems in that wouldn’t spread to the HTML page embedding it. Unlike now.

Today, the web can do everything Flash + Java Applets could do and more, except in a way that’s not proprietary but based on shared standards, one that’s backwards-compatible, builds on top of foundational technologies like HTML rather than around, and can actually keep up with the plethora of different client devices we have today.

I’ve already said how it’s similar to OOXML. Only MS documented their proprietary at the moment standard of their proprietary program and made it open, while Chromium is itself open, but somehow that doesn’t make things better.

And speaking of security — sure, maybe web browsers were pretty insecure back then generally, but I don’t see how you can argue that a system requiring third-party browser plug-ins that have to be updated separately from the browser can ever be a better basis for security than just relying entirely on the (open-source!) JS engine of the browser for all interactivity.

That’s similar to the Apple walled garden arguments. It’s valuable in areas other than security because of separating power between some browser developer and some plugin’s developer. And fighting monoculture is also good for security.

Also people still use plugins, still separately updated, which still get compromised.

Also plugins can be properly sandboxed.

The idea that any old website builder back in the day was more “ergonomic” while even approaching the result quality and capabilities of any no-code homepage builder solution you can use today is just laughable. Sorry, but I don’t really feel the burden of proof here. And I’m not even a fan of site builders, I would almost prefer building my own site, but I recognize that they’re the only (viable) solution for the majority of people just looking for a casual website.

Sorry, I still do feel that burden of proof. Because for a static site like in 2002 I’d just export a page from OpenOffice and edit some links, and then upload it.

Ironically, proper SSR that has the server render the page as pure HTML & CSS is becoming more and more popular lately thanks to full-stack meta frameworks that make it super easy.

I know. Just the “full-stack meta frameworks” part alone makes any ADHD person feel nausea.

Of course, wanting to go back to having no JS is crazy — websites would lose almost all ability to make pages interactive, and that would be a huge step backwards, no matter how much nostalgia you feel for a time before widespread JS.

I disagree. Geminispace is very usable without scripts.

That’s right, they do and they are.

Well, then it appears they don’t care for what I need, so I don’t care for what they need. If only one paradigm must remain, then naturally I pick mine. If not, then there’s no problem and I still shouldn’t care.

And those industry rules I was answering about are about making a thing work for both, even if being less functional.

Flash and Java Applets were a disaster and a horrible attempt at interactivity, and everything we have today is miles ahead of them. I don’t even want to get into making arguments as to why because it’s so widely documented.

Sorry, but either you still make an argument or this isn’t worth much.

For me it’s obvious that embeddable cross-platform applications as content inside hypertext are much better than turning a hypertext system into some overengineered crappy mess of a cross-platform application system.

The security issues with Flash and Java applets weren’t much different from those in the other parts of a web browser back then.

There are vastly more usable and simple tools for making your own personal websites today!

I ask you for links and how many clicks and fucks it would take to make one with these, as opposed to back then. These are measurable, scientific things. Ergonomics is not a religion.

393027090 .

People will ALWAYS fuck up. The world we craft for ourselves must take the “human factor” into account, otherwise we amplify the consequences of what are predictable outcomes.

So what does it say about us diverting from purely server-side scripted message boards with pure HTML and tables, and not a line of JS? Yes, let’s get back there please. And no phone numbers.

The majority of industries that actually have immediate and potentially fatal consequences do exactly this, and have been for more than a generation now.

Boeing - we know where you’re goeing.

Damn near everything you interact with on a regular basis has been designed at some point in time with human psychology in mind. Built on the shoulders of decades of research and study results, that have matured to the point of becoming “standard practices”.

There’s one industry which kinda started like this, with proper HIG and standard key combinations and proven usability with screenreaders or by people with color blindness, autism, ADHD, whatever.

Then came in people talking with the tone similar to, sorry, yours in the “People will ALWAYS fuck up” part came saying that people want nice, dynamic, usable websites with lots of cool new features, people are social, they want girls with real photos, names and phone numbers on their forums which BTW should be called social nets.

By the way, we already had that with Flash and Java applets, some things of what I remember were still cooler than modern websites of the “web application” paradigm are now. And we had personal webpages with real names and contacts and photos. And there were tools allowing to make them easily.

These people just hated the existing culture with its individualism and depth, the web applications should be able to own you and not be just another kind of embedded content, the personal webpages should be all the same, and of course normies wouldn’t want to come as guests into the nerdspace - no, they had those new social nets as their space, looking down on those nerds and freaks of my kind.

Now - well, try using today’s web as a person impaired in any way.

And those normies can’t really use it too, and too feel impaired, they just won’t admit it.

OK. Well, not sure anyone really uses that.

R2D2

I think prince Xizor had a fuckable bodyguard droid in the EU. But in general employing living beings was cheaper.

Just like russias mirror of wikipedia which is heavily edited to discredit the west.

How come I live in Russia and have never seen such?

I know only of quite a few troll\counterculture projects, some, like Lurkmore, are already, well, dead, some, like Traditsiya, are not.

That, of course, if you don’t mean that Russian Wikipedia in itself has problems. Which would be true.

That is a good thought.

If a program has to keep in RAM all the things you are not currently, like right now, displaying or editing, then its author shouldn’t be in the profession. That also applies to the portions of a huge text file or a huge image you are not touching right now.

EDIT: Thankfully people writing video players usually understand this.

Wow. Have you ever considered how people were working with files bigger than total RAM they had in the normal days of computing?

So in your opinion if you have 2GB+ of a log file, editing it you should have 2GB RAM occupied?

I just have no words, the ignorance.

It’s not a cold boot and it’s not empty.

I know. BTW, if something is done in an order of magnitude less efficient way than it could and it did, one might consider it a result of intentional policy aimed at neutering development. Just not clear whose. There are fewer corporations affecting this than big governments, and those are capable of reaching consensus from time to time. So not a conspiracy theory.

Idiocracy was a prophetic movie, with everything working, eh, like this and planes falling.

Yes, you wouldn’t have 4K in 2002.

4GB today is nothing.

My normal usage would be kinda strained with it, but possible.

$ free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            17Gi       3,1Gi        11Gi       322Mi       3,0Gi        14Gi
Swap:          2,0Gi          0B       2,0Gi
$ 

256MB or 512MB was fine for high-quality content in 2002, what was that then.

Suppose the amount of pixels and everything quadrupled - OK, then 2GB it is.

But 4GB being not enough? Do you realize what 4GB is?

Those who have Apple shares worth more?.. But they’d be clueless to expect people to move to MacOS en masse if Windows gets unusable.

I still can’t fully accept that 1GB is not normal, 2GB is not very good, and 4GB is not all you ever gonna need.

If only it got bloated for some good reasons.

How do you do “mechanical failure” with hercons? I’m all attention. They may not be as pleasant to use, but beat touchscreens still.