Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

mars.nasa.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 60 posts

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#41

Post by Tempest1981 »

halotrope wrote: post #20
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.

Incredibly the more features and bloat one adds to the pages the less likely it is to stay functional/not be hacked etc. The first iterations of the Web where nearly perfect for information retrieval / linking of actual information. We spent the last 20 years adding videos and adding tons of crap that make the whole experience worse and are quite detrimental to the signal to noise ratio on most websites.

It's all an effort to stimulate the reader's brain, to keep them engaged. First text, then images, now video. Next VR?

Just like TV shows that use frequent animated overlays, and ever-changing camera angles. If things stop moving, we reach for our smartphones.

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#42

Post by pavlov »

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…

56K .gif image ... something that would have taken a full second to download on a 56K connection

Actually 8 seconds, because modem speeds were/are measured in kilobits per second.

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#43

Post by fogleman »

dandelany wrote: post #19

Wow, this website in particular was extremely formative for me. I was 10 in '97 and I was so excited about Pathfinder. I remember asking my librarian about it, who showed me how to use the library computers to access "the Internet" and look up the images it sent back. I think this was the first time I really appreciated the power of the web, and I've never looked back. Almost got a little emotional seeing this page s…

Ditto. I remember looking at Pathfinder images on a computer in the town library in 1997. I was in 10th grade.

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#44

Post by bluedino »

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…

>> Nobody expresses surprise that, say, Fight Club is still available to watch

You would if it was on a streaming service. How many times have you watched something on Amazon/NetFlix and go back to watch it at a later date and it's unavailable?

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#45

Post by elihu »

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…

I agree it's a shame that static content is more ephemeral than it should be, but I also worry about dynamic content and how the whole experience of using the web isn't snapshot-able. For instance, I can't really go back and browse the front page of Reddit, or look at Google News or just search the Internet of ten years ago.

In fifty years, it's going to be really hard to explain to people who weren't there what it was like to use the web in it's early days. We'll have lots of archived data from that time, but the experience can't be re-created.

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#46

Post by TeMPOraL »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #26
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. )

At least you get to zoom in, which is not true with most of the mobile websites these days.

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#47

Post by TeMPOraL »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #41
halotrope wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incredibly the more features and bloat one adds to the pages the less likely it is to stay functional/not be hacked etc. The first iterations of the Web where nearly perfect for information retrieval / linking of actual information. We spent the last 20 years adding videos and adding tons of crap that make the whole experience worse and are quite detrimental to the signal to noise ratio on most websites.

It's all an effort to stimulate the reader's brain, to keep them engaged. First text, then images, now video. Next VR? Just like TV shows that use frequent animated overlays, and ever-changing camera angles. If things stop moving, we reach for our smartphones.

And the effort is made to make people pay attention to crap. Just like TV shows, if website is not crap and has actually engaging content, users won't reach for smartphones.

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#48

Post by leeoniya »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #26
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. )

You can add an html meta tag that would solve the mobile issues you're describing, without CSS.

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#49

Post by roywiggins »

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.

Not really true for old-enough movies. Old celluloid sits there and gets older and then bursts into flame.

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#50

Post by LeoPanthera »

leeoniya wrote: post #48
nothrabannosir wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. )

You can add an html meta tag that would solve the mobile issues you're describing, without CSS.

If you set initial-scale=1, isn't width=device-width redundant?
Post reply on HN