It is especially true that, this post, written in 12 August 2014 is, in some ways, still so relevant today... Altought parts of it are badly inaccurate, for example I migrated these very pages to 2 newer technology since then...Anyway, I'll leave you to it so please draw your own conclusions!
The web is evolving, what we know to do, for the moment, is to copy, and also evil, from our USA slender friends.So, we are satisfied with obsolete technologies. What obsolete technologies? You will say. Practically everything you see on the Italian web right now is, hundreds of thousands of sites using as database MySQL, as a programming language PHP or ASP. In the Italian web landscape, HTML5 is usually embodied by some banner that appears at the bottom of the page, as to say: *Hey, we're so cool!
Actually converting a site to HTML5 for many developers means this change the code from:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC \"-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN\" \"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd\">
a:
<!DOCTYPE html>
I mean, that's cool, so we're all exceptionally good at this!. But then? the CMS, platforms, open source that has absolutely killed it in recent years and has produced platforms such as Wordpress and Drupal, MediaWiki and vBulletin which today still cover an impressive percentage of the total installations of the italian internet.
How obsolete?
I'm sorry to tell you... It is true that they update each year, but this is the period at which the main technologies mentioned above date:
PHP - born in 1994 link wikipedia MySQL - born in 1995 link wikipedia * Drupal - born in 2001 link wikipedia Wordpress - born in 2003 link wikipedia wow, not bad... The youngest is only 11 years old!
So, what about tomorrow?
Tomorrow perhaps we will have something better, the most adventurous have jumped to fish on jQuery and Ruby on Rails, while someone else tries his luck with nodejs, and in the meantime the "big" sites and networks continue to grow decrepit code and renewed templates. Today for this reason I opened a blog on https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnolan/ghost-just-a-blogging-platform, a project born from a 2013 kickstarter.
I will need to study this technology and understand its potential, I do not want to stay back and age with Italian web, I hope you will understand my motivations...
More thoughts will follow, if time allows, with elucubrations on the world of Italian web technology, the discoveries I make and of course I will investigate new technologies, some of which might be real improvements or simple thecn trends of the moment...
For now that's all, preparing a platform with nodejs took quite the toll on my free time, and I have other work to do, but expect to hear from me pretty soon...
Simone Messaggi
originally published on August 12, 2014 at simmessa.com and reprinted on medium.com