7 ms·

The reason websites aren't designed to last is not due to ever-changing design trends; it's because the web is inherently ephemeral. For a website to continue t

by sekao 5y ago

The reason websites aren't designed to last is not due to ever-changing design trends; it's because the web is inherently ephemeral. For a website to continue to be available requires continuous effort and expense to run a web server, update SSL certs, etc. This automatically shortens the time horizon when you're developing for it. I think the way to get more "timeless" software is to build a platform where the code and the data can be brought offline. PWAs do the first but not the second. The data needs to be in an enduring format like SQLite that can be queried offline. With that kind of system, an app or game (and the accompanying data) could remain usable 20 years from now, long after its author stopped distributing it.

jstummbillig 5y ago
> The reason websites aren't designed to last is not due to ever-changing design trends; it's because the web is inherently ephemeral. For a website to continue to be available requires continuous effort and expense to run a web server. This automatically shortens the time horizon when you're developing for it. Interesting thought, but I don't think that's quite it. Everything is ephemeral to some degree. Everything will require a combination of resources to keep something available continuously. For example keeping books around is not exactly free. Yeah, we usually "just have it in a bookshelf at home", but if you think about what that actually entails you'll probably start wondering if that book actually appreciates all you've done for it. When running a home server becomes as simple as building an IKEA shelf, and when making a website is a native as writing on pen and paper, we will have a lot less bookshelves and more websites just being around and with that the expectation of them being around and zero understanding of how or why. No consideration being paid to routing, backup, space, bandwidth, because there is nothing to consider. Something that is magically and reliably available for money, like electricity. If you move you just bring the box and it works again as soon as you plug it in, like any desk lamp would. Technology is still way too hard and inaccessible for that to be a thing.
- ehnto 5y ago
  So much of the web is commercial now, including social media which, whilst full of personal writing, would disappear the moment it no longer promises returns. To that end, so much of the web has a limited product-lifecycle, and the purpose of the websites are not at all the same as the purpose of a book. I think the way people build websites reflects this commercial reality more than anything else. Could you self host an HTML file on your PC? Totally, and you'll likely always have a PC around so long as you care about websites, so the analogy of the bookshelf I feel is similar to this. But most websites are not books, they're more like storefronts of knowledge, and when the stores shut down we lose access to the knowledge they held. I can say this with some anecdotal confidence, as my personal website is some HTML that I haven't maintained in years but still works perfectly, yet almost every piece of software I've written in my professional life is gone, in many cases so too has the company that asked me to make it.
- enobrev 5y ago
  You could potentially keep a website "on a bookshelf at home" as well, provided the database is small enough. It doesn't even need to be SQLite. No matter the data format, you could get a fully running website on a raspberry pi, maybe with a subset of the data. I'm picturing a bookshelf of raspberry pis in custom "boxes" like a collection of 8-tracks. Pull one out, plug it it, turn it on, and connect to it. Considering the majority of my 20 year web-building career is long gone, this idea kind of intrigues me.
  - immibis 5y ago
    IPFS does this.
    - xyzzy123 5y ago
      I believe that content addressed storage had to be built open-source because it was ultimately not in anyones corporate interest to further it. It's interesting to reflect on the kinds of technologies which are clearly possible, but never seem to get built because they don't centralise control. Truly offline apps, and actually working device-to-device networking fall in this bucket I think. Yes, there are power and privacy considerations but it's pretty clear none of the big players want those technologies to take off.
    - WJW 5y ago
      As long as you bother to pin the content of course, otherwise you have to hope that someone else does. But if you have to store the data yourself anyway, why not go even simpler and store the content in a folder on your hard drive?
      - immibis 5y ago
        That's the point: if you want to put the website on your bookshelf, you can pin it. Storing websites on your hard drive tends to break URLs; content addressing solves that.
  - jstummbillig 5y ago
    To normies this is incredibly far from a bookshelf. What is a raspberry pi? What is the sqlite in doesn't-even-need-to-be-sqlite? Why do I have to care? The highest level of questions you would need to be aiming for on the hardware side are: Where do I put this thing? Where did I leave the power chord? How do I turn it on? If it doesn't turn on, you have someone repair it as you would any other electronic appliance. Can't be repaired? Get a new one. As soon as you plug it in it automatically fetches the automatically created backup. How? From where? What about encryption? The user is not qualified to answer any of that and should not be expected to care or expected to be involved into the decision. If I want to get involved with how electricity gets to my power socket I can look that stuff up on the internet. In the meantime just make it work without any intervention and with 99.9% reliability. Us techies (maybe subconsciously) still lean way too much towards trying to involve users with the stuff we care about, when most of them just want our work to be invisible. Hide the complexity. Make it seamless. Make all tech a power socket.
burntoutfire 5y ago
I think the main reason is low initial cost of investment. It's just easy and cheap (in terms of money/effort) to create a website, so people make lots of them for whatever far-fetched ideas they have. They don't intent to build a website for decades to come, because they don't know if they'll even continue to maintain it in six months' time - so they naturally gravitate towards the cheapest/easiest/most ephemeral solutions that get the job done for now. At scale, it results in the web resembling a shantytown.
novalis78 5y ago
This reminds me of flash …
- khendriksson 5y ago
  Oh so many wonderful memories…
causi 5y ago
Not to mention how the modern web is also inherently much harder to archive than the old one. Permanently archiving an old site was an easy as dropping the URL into HTTRACK and bam, you have a full working copy on disk. Modern ones have so much dynamic and cross-linked content you might be able to get the text and images in the right layout.
- ciphol 5y ago
  Depends which website. Any fully client side website can be archived and easily accessed forever. The sites which (actually) require server side code tend to be large and commercial.
donkeybeer 5y ago
Native software has been doing this for ages, its nothing new or difficult. It is a matter of choosing technologies that we can be sure have a good chance of existing and working the same years into the future. Well written C code is one such example. None of the experimental flavor of the month stuff is going to endure, what endures and keeps enduring is stuff like ANSI C and attempting to use only standard features of POSIX/windows api etc.
atoav 5y ago
In my experience "durability" is not even a metric to those typically deploying most small websites (e.g. think about the website for a small company) consider. They just put some wordpress on some webspace, that is maintained by some hoster and call it a day. If something doesn't work the company will call them. If people like these have problems with technology, they call people like me — I ask them why they don't just take a static site instead and they look at me sideways and ask me how they would then do a animated sliding gallery without a wordpress plugin. They use the tech they use, because that's what worked for them so far. They don't use it because it is rationally the best choice.

by sekao 5y ago

jstummbillig 5y ago

> The reason websites aren't designed to last is not due to ever-changing design trends; it's because the web is inherently ephemeral. For a website to continue to be available requires continuous effort and expense to run a web server. This automatically shortens the time horizon when you're developing for it. Interesting thought, but I don't think that's quite it. Everything is ephemeral to some degree. Everything will require a combination of resources to keep something available continuously. For example keeping books around is not exactly free. Yeah, we usually "just have it in a bookshelf at home", but if you think about what that actually entails you'll probably start wondering if that book actually appreciates all you've done for it. When running a home server becomes as simple as building an IKEA shelf, and when making a website is a native as writing on pen and paper, we will have a lot less bookshelves and more websites just being around and with that the expectation of them being around and zero understanding of how or why. No consideration being paid to routing, backup, space, bandwidth, because there is nothing to consider. Something that is magically and reliably available for money, like electricity. If you move you just bring the box and it works again as soon as you plug it in, like any desk lamp would. Technology is still way too hard and inaccessible for that to be a thing.

ehnto 5y ago
So much of the web is commercial now, including social media which, whilst full of personal writing, would disappear the moment it no longer promises returns. To that end, so much of the web has a limited product-lifecycle, and the purpose of the websites are not at all the same as the purpose of a book. I think the way people build websites reflects this commercial reality more than anything else. Could you self host an HTML file on your PC? Totally, and you'll likely always have a PC around so long as you care about websites, so the analogy of the bookshelf I feel is similar to this. But most websites are not books, they're more like storefronts of knowledge, and when the stores shut down we lose access to the knowledge they held. I can say this with some anecdotal confidence, as my personal website is some HTML that I haven't maintained in years but still works perfectly, yet almost every piece of software I've written in my professional life is gone, in many cases so too has the company that asked me to make it.
enobrev 5y ago
You could potentially keep a website "on a bookshelf at home" as well, provided the database is small enough. It doesn't even need to be SQLite. No matter the data format, you could get a fully running website on a raspberry pi, maybe with a subset of the data. I'm picturing a bookshelf of raspberry pis in custom "boxes" like a collection of 8-tracks. Pull one out, plug it it, turn it on, and connect to it. Considering the majority of my 20 year web-building career is long gone, this idea kind of intrigues me.
- immibis 5y ago
  IPFS does this.
  - xyzzy123 5y ago
    I believe that content addressed storage had to be built open-source because it was ultimately not in anyones corporate interest to further it. It's interesting to reflect on the kinds of technologies which are clearly possible, but never seem to get built because they don't centralise control. Truly offline apps, and actually working device-to-device networking fall in this bucket I think. Yes, there are power and privacy considerations but it's pretty clear none of the big players want those technologies to take off.
  - WJW 5y ago
    As long as you bother to pin the content of course, otherwise you have to hope that someone else does. But if you have to store the data yourself anyway, why not go even simpler and store the content in a folder on your hard drive?
    - immibis 5y ago
      That's the point: if you want to put the website on your bookshelf, you can pin it. Storing websites on your hard drive tends to break URLs; content addressing solves that.
- jstummbillig 5y ago
  To normies this is incredibly far from a bookshelf. What is a raspberry pi? What is the sqlite in doesn't-even-need-to-be-sqlite? Why do I have to care? The highest level of questions you would need to be aiming for on the hardware side are: Where do I put this thing? Where did I leave the power chord? How do I turn it on? If it doesn't turn on, you have someone repair it as you would any other electronic appliance. Can't be repaired? Get a new one. As soon as you plug it in it automatically fetches the automatically created backup. How? From where? What about encryption? The user is not qualified to answer any of that and should not be expected to care or expected to be involved into the decision. If I want to get involved with how electricity gets to my power socket I can look that stuff up on the internet. In the meantime just make it work without any intervention and with 99.9% reliability. Us techies (maybe subconsciously) still lean way too much towards trying to involve users with the stuff we care about, when most of them just want our work to be invisible. Hide the complexity. Make it seamless. Make all tech a power socket.

burntoutfire 5y ago

I think the main reason is low initial cost of investment. It's just easy and cheap (in terms of money/effort) to create a website, so people make lots of them for whatever far-fetched ideas they have. They don't intent to build a website for decades to come, because they don't know if they'll even continue to maintain it in six months' time - so they naturally gravitate towards the cheapest/easiest/most ephemeral solutions that get the job done for now. At scale, it results in the web resembling a shantytown.

novalis78 5y ago

This reminds me of flash …

khendriksson 5y ago
Oh so many wonderful memories…

causi 5y ago

Not to mention how the modern web is also inherently much harder to archive than the old one. Permanently archiving an old site was an easy as dropping the URL into HTTRACK and bam, you have a full working copy on disk. Modern ones have so much dynamic and cross-linked content you might be able to get the text and images in the right layout.

ciphol 5y ago
Depends which website. Any fully client side website can be archived and easily accessed forever. The sites which (actually) require server side code tend to be large and commercial.

donkeybeer 5y ago

Native software has been doing this for ages, its nothing new or difficult. It is a matter of choosing technologies that we can be sure have a good chance of existing and working the same years into the future. Well written C code is one such example. None of the experimental flavor of the month stuff is going to endure, what endures and keeps enduring is stuff like ANSI C and attempting to use only standard features of POSIX/windows api etc.

atoav 5y ago

In my experience "durability" is not even a metric to those typically deploying most small websites (e.g. think about the website for a small company) consider. They just put some wordpress on some webspace, that is maintained by some hoster and call it a day. If something doesn't work the company will call them. If people like these have problems with technology, they call people like me — I ask them why they don't just take a static site instead and they look at me sideways and ask me how they would then do a animated sliding gallery without a wordpress plugin. They use the tech they use, because that's what worked for them so far. They don't use it because it is rationally the best choice.