Today I built a silly webpage by hand in a couple of hours. (I’m not going to tell you what it was, except that it was frivolous af.)
I started out by looking for a template, but everything I found was way too involved, so I ended up writing the HTML and CSS from scratch, throwing it in a cloud-hosted directory, and nudging the DNS settings to point there.
This turned out to be a ridiculously nostalgic experience. I built a lot of weird little websites like this when I was about eleven years old, saving the HTML of sites that I liked so that I could access them when the phone line was being used by someone else, and changing pieces around to figure out how it all fit together.
It struck me that:
a) by this measure I’ve been doing web dev for almost a quarter-century now 😳
b) there is nothing stopping me from making websites this way. I can still write HTML and yeet it out there if I want to, no matter what it’s for. Pages load quickly. It’s not fancy. It works. Underneath it all, the web is still there.
If you feel so inclined, I can highly recommend seizing an afternoon, taking a silly webpage idea, and having a play.
And yeah, I realise that knowing how to make a website happen is something that requires additional layers of expertise (a lot of which I didn’t have when I was eleven).
Plain HTML has its limitations. It’s not going to do everything for every use case.
But it sure does a hell of a lot, and there is so much fun you can have messing around with it, even without publishing your page to the web. (And when you’re ready to put your cool, weird site out there, there are plenty of places you can get help with that.)
@attacus It's a shame there isn't really something like Geocities anymore that's popular you can throw a half baked HTML page attempt up on. I had so much fun with that as a teen
@joannaholman@attacus this is almost precisely what @glitchdotcom enables — we have millions of people doing this in the community, and would warmly welcome you or anyone else who wants to build and share fun web stuff made by real people
@attacus my favorite example of simple web design is a multinational corporation, one of the 10 wealthiest companies in the world, and this is their web site (made in word? by a nephew?) https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ view source & weep / LoL 😂
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