Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026

macroteam

the prediction wasn't even wrong, it just split in two. deploying a static site in 2026 is genuinely easier than 1998. you drag a folder into netlify and you're done, no ISP instructions, no FTP client, no guy with a tarp. what exploded is everything before the deploy. and the funny thing is the actual complaint buried in this thread, "i don't want to paste my nav into every page and update it by hand," is the exact problem we've spent 25 years re-solving. frames, then SSI, then php includes, then templating engines, then the whole frontend framework industry. react is, underneath everything, a really elaborate way to not repeat your navbar.

slau

What a brilliant piece of writing. I remember almost every single step—safe for actually getting angry emails. Maybe I ended up being the one writing them. 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.

superkuh

SSI is still the perfect balance of just enough power to do templating with .html fragments with a minimal attack surface and no maintainence from version churn. It's stable, it's tested, it's left alone. It's in most major webservers as a core module. It's as good now as it was in 1998.

rado

Completely ignoring accessibility

dpe82

And there were a bunch of WYSIWYG editors in the mid-late 90s. It seems like everyone had one, including Netscape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer