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Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

mars.nasa.gov

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Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#21

Post by ant6n »

sametmax wrote: post #12
eponeponepon wrote: post #10

Am I the only one to find it a little sad that "oh wow, ${some.website} is still online!" is such a common sentiment? It seems to me that the default should have been for content to persist, and the surprising events should have been content that disappears. I mean, 1997 is not even twenty years. Nobody expresses surprise that, say, Fight Club is still available to watch - but on the web we seem to expect near-total…

It's because a website requires an active will to be maintained online, while a movie, while released, just sit here on its medium.

I wonder what would be the best way to 'fix' that.

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#22

Post by dragonfruit »

olliej wrote: post #6
OtterCoder wrote: post #2

This is brilliant! "Virtual Reality models and animations galore!" Quite a slice of history. It's amazing how much the internet has become gentrified since the days when a plain hypertext document sufficed for one of the biggest space agencies in the world.

Remember when you could browse the internet on a 56k modem? Can you imagine trying to do that today? "Here download 1meg of JS because i want to have a link, but didn't want to write "

It just makes me sad whenever someone mentions the efficiency atrocities of the modern web. This is unacceptable to me in my spirit but gotta live with it.

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#23

Post by stephen82 »

mhandley wrote: post #18

Too bad it's not running on the original webserver: Trying 54.230.79.254... Connected to d2cj35nmzi9erd.cloudfront.net. Escape character is '^]'. HEAD / HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request Server: CloudFront Date: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:34:50 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 551 Connection: close X-Cache: Error from cloudfront Via: 1.1 5a907351331cc8f5ed11d0a2d0f249d6.cloudfront.net (CloudFront) X-Amz-Cf-Id: FJ…

Yeah, they are on AmasonS3; I have just tested it myself:

        curl -vI mars.nasa.gov
	* Rebuilt URL to: mars.nasa.gov/
	*   Trying 52.222.171.112...
	* Connected to mars.nasa.gov (52.222.171.112) port 80 (#0)
	> HEAD / HTTP/1.1
	> Host: mars.nasa.gov
	> User-Agent: curl/7.50.1
	> Accept: */*
	>

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#25

Post by biofox »

avar wrote: post #8
olliej wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember when you could browse the internet on a 56k modem? Can you imagine trying to do that today? "Here download 1meg of JS because i want to have a link, but didn't want to write "

It's extremely amusing to see someone nostalgically complain about huge JS assets, when every subpage on that site has a 56K *.gif image as a [1], i.e. something that would have taken a full second to download on a 56K connection. Just like 1MB of JS takes about a second to download & render on your current >1MB/s connection. Back in the day people used to complain about these huge background images just as much as p…

At least they had a link for an all text version. I wish more sites today had a lo-fi option.

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#26

Post by nothrabannosir »

halotrope wrote: post #16

That Page must have been really expensive. Fully responsive, seemingly tested on iPad and iPhone back when mobile browser penetration was much lower compared to now. Incredible loading times, maybe they used a lot of asset preprocessing/compressing to make the page load that fast. One thing that bothers me is that there is no Google Analytics. Without good tracking they might not be able to optimise conversion rates…

Haha. But is it? I'm having a very hard time reading this on a phone. The text is too small and when I zoom in (unlike on desktop) it doesn't reflow.

I don't understand this "no css is best css" trope.. this is unusable on mobile.

(Explicit note of the obvious which should go without saying: not a criticism of the page. Just about this HN meme of revering css-less pages. )

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#27

Post by nxc18 »

halotrope wrote: post #16

That Page must have been really expensive. Fully responsive, seemingly tested on iPad and iPhone back when mobile browser penetration was much lower compared to now. Incredible loading times, maybe they used a lot of asset preprocessing/compressing to make the page load that fast. One thing that bothers me is that there is no Google Analytics. Without good tracking they might not be able to optimise conversion rates…

Its not a single page application though. That really hurts usability. As a user I want to load the entire web application up front, then deal with JavaScript loading nonsense constantly.

Why should big powerful servers do the work when I have my battery constrained smartphone/laptop to do the heavy lifting?

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#28

Post by bshimmin »

halotrope wrote: post #16

That Page must have been really expensive. Fully responsive, seemingly tested on iPad and iPhone back when mobile browser penetration was much lower compared to now. Incredible loading times, maybe they used a lot of asset preprocessing/compressing to make the page load that fast. One thing that bothers me is that there is no Google Analytics. Without good tracking they might not be able to optimise conversion rates…

Amazing what you could achieve with Adobe PageMill!

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#29

Post by avar »

stonogo wrote: post #15
avar wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's extremely amusing to see someone nostalgically complain about huge JS assets, when every subpage on that site has a 56K *.gif image as a [1], i.e. something that would have taken a full second to download on a 56K connection. Just like 1MB of JS takes about a second to download & render on your current >1MB/s connection. Back in the day people used to complain about these huge background images just as much as p…

The difference is this site has, at the very top, a link embedded in the sentence "Here is an all text version of this page." So while your comparison is apt, the difference is that bad web programmers no longer pretend to care, which is the underlying cause of the nostalgic bitching.

That's because "all text" was an actual accessibility concern back then, so you'd see that just like you'd see a "mobile" version now.*

It doesn't mean that web programmers care less, it just means technology moved on.

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#30

Post by resoluteteeth »

ant6n wrote: post #21
sametmax wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because a website requires an active will to be maintained online, while a movie, while released, just sit here on its medium.

I wonder what would be the best way to 'fix' that.

IPFS

https://ipfs.io/#why

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