The HTML Hobbyist (2022)
136 comments
·July 30, 2025Waterluvian
ravenstine
I see there being two related but distinct issues:
- The desire for a simpler, quaint looking Web
- The desire for discoverability on the Web that isn't so driven by algorithms
I love what the Web once was, aesthetically speaking, but to me the real problem is that of discoverability.
There was a time where, if you built it, the audience would come. Today that is not so much the case, especially for written content which has become so heavily devalued. I would never write a blog today (especially one that is self-hosted) because I know I would spend most of my time begging for scraps. If you really want a large enough audience that your creative efforts are worthwhile, you have to churn out content. I don't want to churn anything out. One can churn out snippets, which is effectively what one does on sites like X, but then your writing has to either by pithy truisms or cringey drama. Besides, more and more people just want to consume content passively through audio and video. But then now I have to essentially put on a big production just to get my ideas out there, and for an audience that is probably less intellectually curious than those who would actually read an article.
The classic Web isn't coming back until something changes about the way people discover new things. The web is no longer a place where one goes to seek information; it's where information comes to you through word-of-mouth and so-called algorithms putting content in front of you.
Golden-era web was great. Now I'd just rather do my job, comment on HN, and go fishing. Actually trying to bring back the old web is like trying to bring back Jazz clubs hoping everyone will come to their senses and dance the Charleston again. No, it will always be a niche thing.
floren
> I would never write a blog today (especially one that is self-hosted) because I know I would spend most of my time begging for scraps. If you really want a large enough audience that your creative efforts are worthwhile, you have to churn out content.
Why assume you need to seek an audience at all? I have been periodically writing blog posts for about 15 years about whatever I feel like. I may only post a few times a year. I don't have comments turned on. I still enjoy going back periodically to see what I was up to in 2015, and occasionally I get a really nice email from someone who stumbled on a post they found worthwhile.
ravenstine
To each their own. At that point, I'd rather just write to myself without publishing so that I can be 110% candid, which I already do by journaling.
krapp
I don't think that discovery without algorithms is possible, because the Web is essentially unstructured. Any means of discovery needs a way to organize all of that information, and then present it in a relevant way. People forget that Google was actually good at this.
The problem isn't algorithms per se, but how those algorithms are implemented. Unfortunately, people coming up with alternatives tend to lean too far in the other direction - we have alternative search engines designed to exclude all sites using Javascript, for instance, which cater to people who don't want to interact with any part of the modern web, but we don't have an alternative that does what Google used to do before search became big business and simply attempt to catalog the entire web (including the parts that HN hates) and display relevant results to the end user.
carlosjobim
How about hyperlinks?
eadmund
> But also, I have absolutely zero right to really externalize that grievance.
I’m not so certain. It’s like if one bought a nice house in the country, and enjoyed listening to classical music and going to sleep early, and then someone a quarter mile down the road built a concert stadium, and hosted heavy metal concerts every single night.
The mere existence of a heavy metal concert a quarter mile down the road interferes with listening to classical music and turning in early. Likewise, the mere existence of the ad-laden, Javascript-laden, MegaCorp™ Internet goes a long way to preventing one from experiencing the joy of ordinary life in the late 80s or early 90s when the Net was a haven for academics, technologists and hobbyists.
carlosjobim
If i listen to my favorite classical music radio channel, it doesn't matter what is on the other channels.
zwnow
> So the lamentation is really, “other people are doing things in a way I don’t like and that upsets my experience.”
Well put. Personally I have zero issues with SPAs and the amount of Javascript we are facing in the web industry right now. And if you try to build some kind of business that wants to present itself successfully to potential customers, on the web, there is no way to write a appealing website without Javascript.
Most target demographics at this point and in the future have grown up with beautiful websites and the internet being really interactive. I highly doubt they'd be interested in what you have to say if you wrote your page in a way the web was supposed to be used.
jillesvangurp
Agreed. There are a lot of people complaining about how things used to be better. But not a lot of them succeeding in building better stuff that others actually want to use out of the handful that actually lift a finger to do anything at all (most don't). And in the end that's the only thing that makes a difference.
There is no "way the web was supposed to be used". It was all just improvised and messy and open ended. Just some browser developers going "Sure, let's add a blink tag. Why the fuck not. Enjoy!". The only intention for that was to make stuff blink obnoxiously. Javascript was just a thing that they bolted on around the same time.
The default state of the web in the nineties was unstyled, fugly, and obnoxious. Just as it is today. You give people any kind of tools and they'll abuse them. Nothing has actually changed that much. The web people pine for, never really existed. It's just their lost youth that they are pining for.
Waterluvian
I think it could even be perceived in simpler terms: All website authors have a goal. They can choose whatever approach they want in trying to achieve that goal.
Inside that idea are all the nuances of what's your goal? Who is your audience? What do they care about? What do they want? What do they tolerate? Etc. If you achieve your goal and reach your audience, but a different audience hates that you're using JavaScript or React or whatever, do you really care?
recursive
The whole idea of target demographics seems kind of antithetical to the premise here.
Here's some information. Take it or leave it.
zwnow
This approach doesn't work nowadays. We have 3 apps for everything. If your app sucks people will go to one of the other 2.
8n4vidtmkvmk
I don't think I buy that. It's hard to build a nice web app without JS, but an informational website doesn't need JS to be beautiful.
motorest
> I don't think I buy that. It's hard to build a nice web app without JS, but an informational website doesn't need JS to be beautiful.
It's not that I disagree with the premise, but you should understand that the "informational website" scenario tends to apply only to a subset of a website's requirements. As soon as you stumble upon any need that goes beyond what static HTML can provide, you are faced with the decision to either create tech sprawl and a patchwork of ad-hoc solutions, or you just bite the bullet and onboard a framework that handles all your needs.
zwnow
That's why I wrote business. Wikipedia works for ages now.
at-fates-hands
>> there is no way to write a appealing website without Javascript.
This has always made me wonder if anybody really builds anything from scratch any more. With so many frameworks, even for basic static sites, I wonder who's out there writing HTML, CSS and JS from scratch.
Or is something that has been regulated to the dustbin of history?
lelanthran
> With so many frameworks, even for basic static sites, I wonder who's out there writing HTML, CSS and JS from scratch.
I do it, for my blog at least.
However, I use a proprietary framework of my own for commercial software development with the only f/end dependency being materialcss (although, I won't be using that soon, either). Backend dependency is PostgreSQL.
Waterluvian
I'm sure some do.
I've seen someone build furniture from literal trees and wooden tools. I guess they didn't smelt their own metal, but they're not using power tools. Is that a viable business? probably for a very small bespoke traditional furniture audience. Most furniture these days is built using layers upon layers of technology. (and just like with the Web, people, including myself, have strong opinions on furniture quality and source)
rikroots
All of my canvas library's demo pages are hand-coded HTML, CSS and JS. Including the site navigation. Is it worth the effort? Probably not; I just do it this way because I'm too lazy to pull together a sensible tool chain.
MrGilbert
Shameless plug: My own website[1] is mostly handwritten, although I use PicoCSS as a CSS framework.
[1]: https://g5t.de
recursive
I would if I was building something for my own purposes. And I wouldn't claim it to be the most efficient or beautiful. But if I did it for my own purposes, I wouldn't need to justify it. I just like the process.
jv22222
I’m building a Google docs style platform from scratch. No js html css libs of any kind. (But also, not canvas, it does use contenteditable)
bee_rider
Scripting heavy sites do provide a good signal; you can be sure the people behind them are prone to bad designs and aesthetics over functionality. It is disheartening to see how popular that stuff is, but at least it draws attention to itself.
zwnow
Customers won't care about all that. You may be right from a engineering view but thats not where the money is.
Animats
> All the tools are still there to build websites however you want.
No, they're not. The good tools all died off.
I wish there was still something good that just edited HTML and CSS locally and uploaded it. Mozilla Composer died long ago. Its spinoffs, Nvu, Kompozer, and Blue Griffon are all dead. You can still buy Dreamweaver, but Adobe wants $300 or so a year now, and they really want to sell you their whole "creative cloud". Brackets has been abandoned and converted to something called Phoenix, which now does more things less well.
I don't want a whole "content management system" that assembles pages on the fly from a database. Just a decent WYSIWYG editor that can also manage uploads. I don't want something controlled by the hosting service. I'm using a Dreamhost account for this site, and its main purpose is to host some API endpoints implemented in Go. The human-readable web part is just the documentation. There are many images, so I need more layout than Markdown supports. It's not a blog, so Wordpress is the wrong tool for the job.
You'd think there would be something good. As far as I can tell, no. Anybody know of anything?
motorest
> I wish there was still something good that just edited HTML and CSS locally and uploaded it.
What's wrong with launching a file watcher, opening the page in a browser, and editing away with any IDE of your choice?
carlosjobim
Sure, if only people who are programmers should have the right to express themselves online. The old school internet was completely destroyed when all wysiwyg tools where killed for no reason about 15 years ago. And now the same hackers who killed it and banished all normal people to social media are wondering "where did my good old internet go?".
How much good music would we have if you were forced to build a guitar in order to play it?
azemetre
Not everyone makes websites by hand. I know people that strictly use WYSIWYG editors to make static content. My friend uses this very archaic looking program to make his static content. They all look like design straight taken from geocities but it's what they use. I doubt they're a small co-hort.
They're probably larger in number than devs.
Animats
That's writing HTML and CSS by hand, which is a pain.
al_borland
It looks like RapidWeaver still exists, though last I used it, it wasn’t a typical WYSIWYG editor like classic Dreamweaver. I found it has a higher learning curve than I’d like.
https://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/
Most WYSIWYG editors have become text editors. Panic’s Coda has become Nova (a text editor). Even what I last saw of Dreamweaver, it was very code-forward.
I think the less technical users just use platforms. More technical users have historically turned up their noses as WYSIWYG editors, so it left a gap in the market.
Looking at AlternativeTo, there are some options out there.
https://alternativeto.net/software/adobe-dreamweaver/?featur...
Animats
- Rapidweaver. Nice, but MacOS only. Seems to be on the way out, too. It's called "Classic" now, and they want users to migrate to "Elements", which comes with "cloud storage".
- Silex. "It is designed for no-code developers with basic HTML/CSS knowledge". That's an oxymoron. Silex looks interesting, but the documentation is confusing. It used to be a desktop application.[1] That was discontinued in 2022. Now it seems to be more closely tied to Gitlab. Worth a look.
There are some commercial products, but most are cloud-dependent.
wolpoli
WordPress isn't just for blogs and I think it might fit your use case for documenting a set of API endpoint. There is likely a free swagger plugin in WordPress that would help you, although I hadn't really looked.
Other than that, you could look at using a static site generator like MkDocs or Docusaurus. It'll generate a site of HTML pages, and you could either manually upload them to your host, or you could set up an automation that updates your host when you merge changes into git.
I think my response illustrates another problem with modern tools compared to the 90s - there isn't any single tool that edits HTML/CSS and upload them. You now have to glue together several tools.
electroly
Use SeaMonkey Composer. It's still alive and I use it.
Gormo
SeaMonkey is still actively maintained, and still has Composer.
rekabis
> Just a decent WYSIWYG editor that can also manage uploads.
There is your problem.
Any such editor will invariably be heavily limited to what its developers envisioned the user’s use cases as being, and therefore WYSIWYG software is fiendishly complex as a result for even simple layouts and designs (as opposed to straight code editors).
Plus, web frameworks (HTML, CSS, JS, etc.) are still evolving on a yearly basis, requiring constant updates to any WYSIWYG that demand either a paid product or something that rides on the well-funded coattails of another service or product.
If you want a piece of software that lasts, learn how to code directly. If you can picture a soccer ball in your mind, you can (mostly) reliably envision what code will appear like on the screen before you even test it. It takes practice and experience, but building the WYSIWYG aspect into your own mind is eminently doable unless you have aphantasia.
And honestly, that’s how I view WYSIWYG editors: as accessibility tools for people whose legitimate disability is aphantasia.
For everyone else, WYSIWYG tools are a skills-nerfing crutch, as it isolates the user’s use of code from its direct consequences. By working directly with code, you are forced to envision the output of each element and its relationship to everything else on the page.
And honestly, the only major exception I can come up with is desktop publishing, where the underlying “code” is typically restricted to that master file on the designer’s computer, and has no effect beyond it… once the file is printed out (and the content leaves the designer’s control) everything is cemented ‘in stone’ and the underlying “code” no longer has any impact. Because the system is radically more constrained, with markup standards that are limited to the software and not world+dog, a WYSIWYG program makes sense. And yet… most are still paid products.
carlosjobim
I assume you know how to drill out a cylinder then if you drive a car? Because people who don't know how to reassemble their engine shouldn't be allowed on the roads.
Animats
> WYSIWYG tools are a skills-nerfing crutch
Everyone should be writing their documents in LaTeX, not using Microsoft Office or Google Docs as a crutch to understanding formatting.
BrenBarn
> But also, I have absolutely zero right to really externalize that grievance. People can do whatever they want for good or bad reasons, whether I’m equipped to understand those reasons or not.
Hard disagree there. I mean, suspect even you wouldn't agree with that second sentence on its own, outside the context of building webpage. (Like, what if "whatever they want" is releasing a cloud of poison gas into the neighborhood?)
But there's another dimension to it too, which is that in many cases my belief is not just "other people are doing something I don't want", it's "other people are doing something they don't actually want, they just don't realize it". The classic example is drugs. If someone spends their whole life drugged out of their mind, even if they have the money to do so, I think many onlookers would think, "You know, if a magic wand were waved and that person could somehow look at their life from the outside, from the perspective of a person who wasn't already locked into that druggie life, they themselves would not want to re-enter that life."
It's just the tyranny of small decisions. We as humans are prone to painting ourselves into corners that we think we chose to be in, although if several choice-points before we had known where we would wind up, we likely would not have chosen to be there. This is doubly difficult to resolve because a sunk-cost fallacy often leads us to avoid admitting to ourselves that we actually made a mistake. And it's triply difficult because it often requires extra work to climb out of the hole we've gotten into.
But it's still good to do this sometimes. It's possible for individuals to make mistakes, and for societies to make mistakes, and for both individuals and societies to make mistakes that they either don't notice or don't fully acknowledge. And it's good for individuals and societies to take stock of where they are and genuinely consider whether it's where they want to be. And it's even good for people to nudge, encourage, or exhort other individuals or society to do that kind of sanity check.
To do otherwise is to accept the strange, fatalistic viewpoint that whatever did happen is what should have happened.
BalinKing
To be fair, they could be entirely disjoint sets of people, but I’m surprised by the simultaneous 1) hate for JavaScript[0] and the “modern web” and 2) praise for all the Flash-based websites from the ‘90s–‘00s. To be fair, my first interactions with the web were largely after the “Flash for everything” era, so I might be out-of-the-loop: Did corporate Flash-based homepages get the same reaction then that SPAs do now?
[0] I do strongly dislike JavaScript myself, but specifically from the perspective of language design.
CM30
Oh, I remember a lot of developers hated Flash back in the olden days, especially those that focused their efforts on usability or who wanted to advance web standards. Case in point:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flash-99-percent-bad/
Heck, I'm sure at least some people celebrated when Adobe pulled support for Flash, just like some people probably would now if the likes of React went away forever.
reactordev
Flex was amazing. It was flash based app builder for enterprises with a robust ecosystem of “components”. It was the React of Flash.
githubholobeat
An alternative exists to Flex. It is called Apache Royale [https://royale.apache.org/]. Here is a components showcase [https://royale.apache.org/tourdejewel/]
bee_rider
I don’t want to impose my preferences on other random people. I think sites loaded up with JavaScript are garbage and the people who make them are bad at their jobs, but whatever, that’s their business. I can hold negative opinions about things without suggesting we ban them.
But I do think it should be considered totally unacceptable for things like government services to be gatekept by JavaScript. Same for entities that receive lots of public funds, like universities.
ilamont
But what we can do is be the change we want. Just make my own little oasis. Find other oases and hook ‘em all up. Which then got me thinking about if there could be a special Web Classic experience we could voluntarily hook into.
Webrings!
See "We need to bring back webrings", https://arne.me/blog/we-need-to-bring-back-webrings and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38268706
shayway
I've noticed a bit of a divide in the small web, between those who:
A. Want to get back to the web's roots as a document network, keeping a clear structure and a focus on content,
B. Want to use the web's flexible presentation itself as a medium for expression through styling, interactive content and so on
The Gemini protocol is a good example of A taken to its extreme, while e.g. Neocities leans more toward the latter. The web is by its nature fractured - the independent web even moreso - but sometimes it seems the gap between the two philosophies is the biggest obstacle to more widespread adoption of small web practices, or at least more unified tools for discovery and networking.
It also seems like developers tend to favor type A, which has led to robust infrastructure and projects around it - like Gemini, or the site linked here. But I think a lot of people looking to make a break from big tech are doing so because of the limitations, and going from one set of awkward restrictions to another doesn't look like an upgrade.
Just my two cents. I'd be sad to miss out on the wacky creative sites people build, whether it's because they're stuck in big social media, or because they took the pledge from the linked page:
> make a simple, honest website with the proper use of HTML, the use of CSS only where essential, and the use of JavaScript only where it’s absolutely necessary.
potato-peeler
It’s funny people are lamenting in the comments that it’s a choice to experience the ultra bloat that has permeated the web and minimalism is not always desirable.
Most are missing the point that this heavy use of js or new frameworks like tailwind creates a polarising experience. These things don’t open in older browsers or OS(iOS, android).
This is a problem that few seem to grasp. Now I need a new phone or latest OS just to view my bank website because somebody thought giving new animations within the dashboard is a good idea, because those frameworks are only supported by new browsers, and management need to adopt modernity every quarter.
Web is unnecessarily bloated.
_the_inflator
I, too, lament the fact that some dude laments about others. ;)
Technically, the dude is right, but stating the obvious doesn't help. Simply saying "Let's do something like 1996 while appreciating 2025, because!" would have caught my sympathy.
I like projects like these, but lose sympathy when these people trash others as phony; The "purity is the ultimate sophistication" is a dogma.
Roll everything back? "Hey, stop doing Java or Go, let's go X86 Assembly instead because in the end your code is only an abstraction and the magic happens in the compiler and linker, which produce a gargantuan bloat of X86 machine language instructions."
We could say the same about "pure HTML". Which standard? Why not text files?
PS: Has someone already written a browser for HTML in pure X86 yet? It is about time, I guess.
(I love Assembler, do quite some 6510 and 68000 assembler stuff. But it is hard. Brutally hard. I am glad we evolved from there.)
graham1776
I love this. My wife calls them “art projects”. It’s freeing. Yes you build ideas and abandoned them. But so does an artist. Enjoy the creation even if it doesn’t turn into a business.
And yes domain collecting is real.
Arch-TK
It's funny to talk about non-essential CSS and then to use a grey background.
I don't think any CSS should be essential, but I think tasteful changes to make your website look unique for those who have it enabled is totally appropriate.
E.g. https://kramkow.ski/
szszrk
I instantly love the SVG animation ("the badge") and how it feels ok, while continents are flat and just move side to side :)
azdle
For people who are excited about this idea, this coming Saturday is HTML Day: https://html.energy/html-day/2025/
esher
Resonates with me. I think I am a wheel re-inventors too. I also like amateur, dilettante and the spinning globe here: https://lilly.art/
fauverism
I used to love... - https://shift.jp.org/ - https://dhky.com - https://praystation.com - https://burodestruct.net/ - https://www.netbabyworld.com/
I feel good about the future when I see... https://os.ryo.lu/ https://neal.fun/
Somewhere on a zip are my IE 5.5 bookmarks. I'll stumble upon them again one day and remember how excited I was to surf the web on my 233mhz G3.
unavoidable
I've been looking for a community of exactly this! This website layout/feel scratches a really deep itch. Let's make a hand-crafted web of enthusiasts and bring back 1999 all by ourselves! :)
mxuribe
Oh wow, are in luck! These kinds of communities have been building up over the last few years (maybe decade or so?), and now they're quite prevalent. I was about to share a few links (like indieweb.org, fediring.net, etc.)...but, then remembered stumbling upon the following blogroll/link page that does a wonderful job of capturing some really good starting points: https://shellsharks.com/indieweb
Enjoy! :-)
net01
have a look at this https://512kb.club/ this is a list of websites that are all handcrafted to be under 512kb of data
raytopia
I'd recommend looking into Neocities.
nurettin
Albeit it won't feel the same without windows 98 viruses, php exploits, yahoo! chat and flash animations.
unavoidable
Some of the sites on this "web ring" (amazing!) definitely have Yahoo chat like applets and GIF animations that remind me of Flash. I miss Flash (kind of).
marinbala
Loved the article. It inspired me to write my own related article on my website: https://marincomics.com/bringing-back-the-weird.html
Not sure my site qualifies as hobbyist enough. It is the work of an enthusiast (me) but I used Bootstrap for styling and layout. I use some JavaScript. The site also starts with an animation I made using Tumult Hype. All this is probably too much for a true hobbyist site. Still, I regard my site as my hobby.
The thing that’s usually on my mind when people are lamenting how the Web has evolved is that all the tools are still there to build websites however you want. So the lamentation is really, “other people are doing things in a way I don’t like and that upsets my experience.”
Which is this mix of… yeah I guess that’s true. I feel the same. But also, I have absolutely zero right to really externalize that grievance. People can do whatever they want for good or bad reasons, whether I’m equipped to understand those reasons or not.
But what we can do is be the change we want. Just make my own little oasis. Find other oases and hook ‘em all up.
Which then got me thinking about if there could be a special Web Classic experience we could voluntarily hook into. Maybe someone runs a search engine that only indexes crawled pages that have a X-Web-Classic header or whatever. If people actually want it enough to put the work in, can’t we make it? I guess corporations would come to capitalize on its success if it became successful. But I’d be willing to fight that battle if we got to that point (ie. curation or tech limitations or whatever…)
I’d love a browser that I switch into Web Classic Mode and it pretty much only reaches these resources. Example.com doesn’t implement an X-Web-Classic header response? Give me a 404. Does it try to load cross origin resources that aren’t X-Web-Classic? 404. Straight to 404.