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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb

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.

That was more than offset by the unmetered internet connection + decent browser, but that’s a feature not everything.

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.

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.

"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.

[0] https://www.openfunk.co/pages/re-mix

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.

That specific use-case is now replaced by having a single, small webcomponent for client-side includes.

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You really think that bit was hypothetical?!