What a glorious time period.
Interestingly, it would’ve been impossible to share this writing with as many people as the author did by publishing it on mastodon and then it ended up on HN in 1998. The network effects are real.
Looks like its getting a ton of traffic
Spinner and load bar at the top
That was more than offset by the unmetered internet connection + decent browser, but that’s a feature not everything.
My mate had an iPhone, and it had an app where you could pretend to drink a pint of beer.
The mobile web pre-iPhone was terrible. Nobody used it, nobody wanted to use it, and nobody wanted to build it. At best there was a shitty cut back version on the `m` subdomain. WAP/WML were terrible and didn’t give you anything close to the real web, and XHTML Basic was still-born.
The iPhone came along with its “desktop class web browser” and it genuinely worked. Steve Jobs got on stage and told everybody if they wanted to build apps for the iPhone, they should be web apps. Then he told everybody Flash was terrible – which it was – and that we should all use open standards instead.
Practically overnight, everybody commissioning websites wanted them to be “iPhone-compatible”. They did not ask for mobile sites – they specifically asked for them to be iPhone-compatible.
And because WebKit was open-source (thanks to it being based upon KHTML), all the other phone vendors took the code and ran with it, including Android.
This is why I say there is no single organisation that has done more to push the mobile web forward than Apple. The difference in attitudes and capability towards the mobile web changed practically overnight, and it’s directly attributable to Apple’s intentional actions to develop and promote the mobile web.
macroteam•1h ago
lelanthran•12m ago
That specific use-case is now replaced by having a single, small webcomponent for client-side includes.
Is a much better dev-XP than configuring the server, then tying your sources to that specific server.