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.
What real web are you going to get when there's no 3g, much less a reliable signal on a lot of places.
Wap worked well for actually relaying information.
How old are you? I'm betting mid-twenties.
Visual voicemail was, and is still a fantastic feature, and phones without it existed for an embarrassingly long time afterwards. I don't remember the last year I had to dial a special number and type in my password, in order to get my voicemail read off to me one at a time in order, but... it was not a small number year.
That was more than offset by the unmetered internet connection + decent browser, but that’s a feature not everything.
It got a bit of traction, I think they did ok.
Out of interest I checked. I live in New Zealand and iPhone revenue is about 60% more than my countries GDP.
My mate had an iPhone, and it had an app where you could pretend to drink a pint of beer.
Sure, UI was way worse compared to UIKit but in term of features Symbian phones were light-years beyond the iPhone at least until the iPhone 4.
It's hard to make objective judgment when you're in one tribe's trench.
At least now I can leave people long, rambling voice notes with the excuse that I'm behind the wheel!
The mobile-web world before the iPhone was one where mobile devices were second class citizens; desktop "real" websites first, and scaled down versions of those sites second (for mobile devices). The information itself was readily available to both, even if the presentation was lacking on the latter.
Jobs knew the only way to win was to not play the same game, because the open web is an even playing field. If you control a new platform on the other hand, you can't lose. So here we are, with locked down, dumbed down toys determining the standard.
Judged purely as a "Let's give Ted a call"-phone, it was fucking bad compared to the competiton. They killed it in other areas, don't get me wrong, but not at being a phone.
Is it easier to build or repair a radio now than it was when they were first sold? A computer? A car? A washing machine? A vacuum cleaner?
"Build"[1], yes. "Repair", not really. A lot of things (like radio) can be an isolated module you just drop in.
Right now a bright HS student can produce a clock radio by plugging together an arduino, an I2C FM receiver, I2C display, an I2C audio amp and a speaker. Pop it all into an enclosure and you have a real clock radio.
Compare to building a clock radio back in 1990 - you'll have to understand how to wire up an op-amp, the principles behind op-amps, how to drive the readout from a clock, etc.
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[1] By "build" I assume you mean "assemble from parts".
3D printers are mostly still repairable and far more reliable and usable than a few years ago when the majority of the hobby wasn’t making stuff, it was tuning the printer to work reliably. Bambu and California may be signalling that the enshittification inflection point is near.
Not quite the same level, but home/hobby electronics with tiny microcontrollers is more accessible than ever before thanks to the availability of cheap ESP8266/32 clones.
And there are some obvious individual counter-examples - Framework computers, or repairable blenders[0]… but you’ve got to pay a premium for the privilege.
But broadly you’re totally right - in the modern world, by the time something becomes a mainstream product aimed at general consumers, there’s a profit to be made and it’s likely on a downwards path.
This fact (which is 100% true) makes me so angry about CSS. They had a really good idea—separate structure from content. But they didn't design CSS about what people Actually Wanted To Do, so for what, a decade plus? CSS was this steaming pile of hacks and hoops and bullshit. Designers wanted 3-column layouts. They wanted pinstriping. They wanted drop shadows. They wanted to center things vertically. And rather than make those dead simple, they made them all pains in the ass. Why spend all that time designing and developing and proselyting a technology, without ever thinking about what sort of thing people will want to do with it?
Unfortunately, the simple way was to use display: table-cell, and Microsoft didn’t implement that part of the standard until Internet Explorer 8, released in 2009. And since old browser versions stuck around longer back in those days, it was several years after that before web developers could count on it.
If it weren’t for Microsoft abandoning Internet Explorer development for five entire years once they got a browser monopoly, you could’ve been doing this in a much simpler way more than a decade sooner.
You’re blaming the W3C for not putting an easy way to do it into the standard but they did put it into the standard. It’s just what they put into the standard didn’t matter – Internet Explorer had >90% market share so Microsoft didn’t care about the standards and paralysed the industry for over a decade.
A truly vast amount of the weird hacks we had to do back then was simply papering over the shortcomings of Internet Explorer.
You really think that bit was hypothetical?!
Somehow around the 2010s we all decided that everything in the web had to become "reactive" and "asynchronous" - which is a fancy way of saying things can theoretically happen at any time but realistically if you try to make it happen in ways that don't resemble the previous serial approach you get weird race conditions - and instead of making sure this was implemented in HTML now we have to write another web browser on top of our web browser in javascript, using a thing called shadow DOM.
Also somehow now you have to understand how the internet works at protocol level unless you want way worse performance than that page written in Dreamweaver 20 years ago.
But this is fine because this is the way big companies run things, which we all know they always make the correct decisions like giving their AI full access to their login and password recovery process.
squarespace?
> and we - us fucking foss nerds or whoever - should've made it.
wordpress?
That specific use-case is now replaced by having a single, small webcomponent for client-side includes.
<cs-include remote-src="..."></cs-include>
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.
Also missed the HP IPAQ.
Looks like its getting a ton of traffic
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