I mostly ate cotton candy when it was a once-per-year event at the local fair and involved watching them make it beforehand. It was magical and a large part of the thrill was the "cool" factor of "You can do that?" which we seem somewhat inured to today, what with there being so much more that is both spectacular and prosaic at the same time.
Cell phones
Space flight
Air travel
Modern medical miracles
And then cotton candy became something you buy off the shelf at Kmart or whatever and it pretty much ruined the magic of it. I ate a few because I could, but it really wasn't the same.
The value of cotton candy was never the chance to eat something sugary. It was the chance to eat something magical that belonged in faerie tales, something that seemed like it shouldn't exist because it was a food that was mostly air and seemingly defied physics.
Cotton candy was food for thought. It was food for a young child's imagination. Tasting it was such a minor element of the whole thing.
Do yourself a favor and buy yourself some of the grapes they now grow that taste like cotton candy. My experience is that I eat one and am shocked to find that it tastes exactly like cotton candy. And then when the taste fades, I find myself unable to believe the judgment of my 30-seconds-ago self and have to eat another one in disbelief that they really taste like cotton candy.
> The value of cotton candy was never the chance to eat something sugary.
It was that, plus the mouth feeling and "magical experience". If it did not taste like sugar (ie. did not contain sugar), kids would fancy it less, if at all. You cannot simply discount one or the other; it is the whole experience as a package.
I'd even go as far as say that for me, it was part of going to a traveling carnival or amusement park (if I was so lucky that my parents allowed me to eat this). Nowadays, kids have different choices. It goes without saying that if it is more common, it is less special.
> The value of cotton candy was never the chance to eat something sugary. It was the chance to eat something magical that belonged in faerie tales ... Tasting it was such a minor element of the whole thing.
I don't agree that this is true in general. It doesn't have to be one or the other, it can be both. Kids love sugary things, and it also has an appealing "melt in your mouth" texture.
Anyone watching Dr. Stone? (Japanese Anime). It's got some fairly annoying anime clichés but the main story is fascinating.
Basically tech disappeared from the world but not the knowledge (won't go into why to keep it short). The guy with the knowledge is in a race to get his tech level up to protect himself from stronger people. In the process he's having to reinvent tech from scratch.
At one point the makes a cotton candy spinner. First he makes cotton candy to test. Then they poor in liquid copper to make copper wire (no idea if that's actually possible but the show claims the science is sound).
The web was so much simpler to design for before smartphones. This site is nice and cozy on my desktop but on mobile it gets all sideways scrolly and pinch zoomy.
I wonder how mobile might have evolved differently if there was a hypothetical arficial restriction: there shall be no concept of responsive mobile design; it's all desktop shaped.
There was no responsive web then. These column-based grid sites worked alright.
For the first year or so I disliked the sites that redirected me to a mobile version (like m.wikipedia.org), since I considered my iPhone perfectly capable of rendering the desktop version.
Anyone remember Opera Mini, and how it could squeeze just about any site into just about any viewport width? I never used it on a smartphone, but I enjoyed playing with it on the desktop, it was like magic. Not always pretty, but very functional.
This isn't the best website to make your point because the website uses tables and hard-codes widths. Had it taken the simpler approach of no hard-coded widths, then it would be both desktop and mobile friendly with even less effort. It's like 5 pages of content, even the sidebar is superfluous.
Tables + hard-coded sizes in the HTML are the opposite of simplicity. It was a big hack, not something I look back with a smile.
Was it easier back then though? Because now you have all of these website creators that let you make a website with no coding needed at all. It seems way easier now, just with less motivation for anyone to make a website of their own now that social media is such a big thing
I don't think it was easier, but there was less pressure to get it right, so the barrier to entry was lessened.
Now one has to worry (they had to worry then, it just wasnt as publicly well known or visible) about accessibility, identity theft, domain theft, natonal and specific laws that must be worked around, scams, marketing, lawsuits, etc.
Back then you'd just throw up your geocities site about (Fox owned) X-files Scully fan-fic and be on your merry way; now you have to worry about an ad somewhere generating revenue from you having had posted Scullys' face, prompting a foreign script-kiddy to harass you with threats of legal tattling if you don't pay his bitcoin ransom, and when that's all done you receive a DMCA complaint from Fox to forward the revenue or take down Scullys' face, anyway.
One can see why domain experts are more prevalent now. There's a lot more ways to shoot yourself in the foot.
Website creator suites have just about always existed, well at least since the internet had any level of popularity, anyway.
I haven't seen a statement this wrong since someone last said they like Internet Explorer 6.
Web design back in those days (around 2000-2005, say) was terribly frustrating. Getting, for example, such a column layout to work across browsers involved either tables or a thousands tricks to get it working in CSS, in more than one browser. And those were the times we still believed in semantic markup, making frivolous tables and divs almost sacrilegious.
Today, it isn't uncommon for a website developed on, say, Firefox to flawlessly work in Safari and Chrome as well. Back then, you were about halfway done when it worked in one browser, because the other one needed different set of abominable tricks for its different set of bugs and inconsistencies.
Expectations also weren't quite as low as you make them out: All the cool kids did Java applets or Flash, two very annoying plugins, non-free binary blobs hiding their code and content from the world, but occasionally letting anyone who sends the right handshake remote-control your browser.
I find with age my eyesight is getting worse, to the point I now have to wear reading glasses to read the instructions on a soup can etc.
One thing this has forced me to do is request desktop sites to be loaded from my browsers options menu to allow me to "Pinch Zoom" in order to read the text.
I like the fact that I dont have to do this exta step on YC , it is one the reasons I frequent HN.
I still have 20/20 vision at my mid-age and get cranky at small fonts. This site appears to be at 14px. Which looked bigger back in the day. I found myself bumping it up to read better
Wouldn't you just, best case, get this website? I have no issue with this website "as is": it loads in a desktop format on my iPhone and I can read it fine, no horizontal scroll possible. If I consider the text too small, I can choose to zoom in on the column of text (by just double tapping it: no pinch zooming needed), and the gesture recognizer is good enough to make horizontal scrolling at that point require some "intention" (so just a little slop in either direction is ignored). I say "best case", because "worst case", without any kind of responsive design, you get something with a line length much wider than this and then the text would be so small that you couldn't read it zoomed in much less zoomed out and would actually be forced to scroll.
I'm with you on this. Mobile tailored versions of websites should be a bit better when you're on mobile, but I find that most of the time there's so much extra whitespace and wasted screen real estate (and sometimes missing features) that "request desktop site" gives me a better experience even on mobile for anything where I'm not just reading text.
It's a nice nostalgic reminder of what the web used to be - when it was just made up of people wanting to express their interests.
A time where ads, tracking and Javascript weren't a thing.
3 big graphical ads, and if you click on the "best sites" thing on the bottom, it links to an analytics site. On mobile, so I'm not really setup to investigate further.
But I do miss sites that were done just because someone loved something.
Or somebody testing how many bot votes they need to get Hackernews attention. If I were to do one of these tests I would do with a very unrelated/uninteresting page/post.
My guess is that it was originally submitted with a different title, which the editors have since changed to the title of the linked site, making it impossible now to understand why it was submitted or the context of the older comments.
Cell phones
Space flight
Air travel
Modern medical miracles
And then cotton candy became something you buy off the shelf at Kmart or whatever and it pretty much ruined the magic of it. I ate a few because I could, but it really wasn't the same.
The value of cotton candy was never the chance to eat something sugary. It was the chance to eat something magical that belonged in faerie tales, something that seemed like it shouldn't exist because it was a food that was mostly air and seemingly defied physics.
Cotton candy was food for thought. It was food for a young child's imagination. Tasting it was such a minor element of the whole thing.
We've grown jaded.