A Handmade Web •••
I evoke the term 'handmade web' in order to advocate for an ongoing active engagement with the making of web pages and of web policies.
In The Web We Lost (2012), Anil Dash writes: "In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites, instead of being dependent on a few big sites to host their online identity."
In February 2015 the online journal QUARTZ published an article with the provocative headline: Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet. As the article states: "This is more than a matter of semantics. The expectations and behaviors of the next billion people to come online will have profound effects on how the internet evolves."
In October 2014 the online journal GIZMODO published an article heralding The Great Web 1.0 Revival. Its author Kyle Chayka observed:
The booming size of today's mainstream social networks and the constant level of noise we have to deal with has inspired a sudden return to a time when the internet was quieter, safer, and more intimate… We're nostalgic for the close-knit, DIY nature of the early web, where everything was smaller...
The DIY aesthetics and practices of the mid-1990s have been embraced by
the anti-social network TILDE.CLUB, which hosts a small community of users on a single unix computer. For some, TILDE.CLUB serves as a platform for revisiting amateur web aesthetics in a contemporary context. For example, on her page, Olia Lialina invites users to view a new
net art work 640x480 - a 4-tab browser installation. For many others however, TILDE.CLUB has served as little more than a hip territory to occupy. Many pages remain blank.
http://tilde.club/~nickc/ http://tilde.club/~bwalker/ http://tilde.club/~willy/
In other corners of the internet, Web 1.0 aesthetics have never disappeared. My own website, including this page, which uses fixed-width table cells, is based on a template I created in HomeSite in 1997.
Web 1.0 aesthetics persist in source code and stated objectives of the massive Ubu Web site, an "independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts." On 16 December 2014, the founder of boasted on Twitter that "the whole damn site is still hand-coded in html 1.0 in bbedit, from templates made in 1996."
I shall put off updating my website templates until out-of-date design is no longer cool.
