I mean, this isn't all that surprising. Not unlike buying a twenty-year-old visitor's guide to a city and finding that a number of the shops and restaurants have closed, the stadiums have different names, etc.
But cool URLs don't change.
I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
71–80 of 335 posts
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#72Related to this, I had trouble finding examples of pre 1996 web design. The internet archive has a lot from 1997 onwards. The oldest live examples of sites from that era, that I know of are: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/T... http://oreilly.com/gnn/gnnhome.html http://www.trincoll.edu/zines/tj/tj12.02.93/tjcontents.html The BBC also donated its Networking Club to the Internet Archive: htt…
That O'Reilly GNN site is beautiful. I miss this simplicity.
Need 3MB worth of JQuery and some swooping in animations.
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#73Related to this, I had trouble finding examples of pre 1996 web design. The internet archive has a lot from 1997 onwards. The oldest live examples of sites from that era, that I know of are: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/T... http://oreilly.com/gnn/gnnhome.html http://www.trincoll.edu/zines/tj/tj12.02.93/tjcontents.html The BBC also donated its Networking Club to the Internet Archive: htt…
God I miss when the web was designed for people who could read.
Then you'll "love" Microsoft's 1994 page: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/discover/1994/
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Server-side rendering please save us.
Well, there's now Chrome headless which is slowly edging out PhantomJS for such use cases.
Are you suggesting running an entire web browser on the server-side just to render each client request to HTML?
That VC money must really be flowing...
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember when you could just mount \\ftp.microsoft.com\pub as a drive on your PC. Raw, unauthenticated, unencrypted SMB over the public Internet. At least it was read-only share. Good times.
I remember Geocities pages would always be trying to read from my floppy drive. People would not realize you had to upload your pictures before other people could see them and just would put D:\pictures\goatse.jpg as the src of the img tag because they didn't really understand the web (not that I blame them.) Of course, the browser had no problem trying to load local images from untrusted code on a remote host, secur…
Yeah, you had to remember to change all the links in the html because FrontPage Express kept saving the local full path so you could keep working on and previewing your site on a browser. HTTP server software (on Windows anyway) was so obscure that you had no idea how to get a free one running on your desktop unless you had access to Windows NT with IIS. All that changed when I installed Mandrake for the first time...
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#76I miss the optimism of the early web, when you could create a simple web page, join a web ring and going online was an event. It's richer and deeper now, but the rawness and simpleness of it all was enjoyable and novel.
Maybe Neocities should add a webring feature.
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Remember GeoCities? The web doesn't anymore. Bad example: http://reocities.com/
Mixed example. Only a small fraction of Geocities pages / content have been preserved. Most of it is lost permanently.
Rather the opposite, a very large fraction of the original pages have been preserved. Many of them were deleted long before by the owners themselves and/or rehosted elsewhere.
Original Geocities content is probably the oldest large body of internet content that will be preserved for many years to come and it will look roughly how it looked on Geocities because it wasn't relying on much of anything other than basic HTML and some images.
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#78I've had a similar problem. In updating my portfolio site recently, I noticed a vast majority of links were dead. Not just live projects published maybe 3 years or more ago (I expect those to die). But also links to articles and mentions from barely one year ago, or links to award sites, and the like. With a site listing projects going back ~15 years, one can imagine how bad things were. I had to end up creating a li…
beware: robots.txt can retroactively clear archive.org data
another reason to use archive.is
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#79A similarly really annoying thing is when you find old technet articles, stack overflow questions, or blog posts that seem potentially really useful, but that have broken images, broken links, etc... so the content (possibly extremely useful at the time) is completely useless now. It really stresses the importance of directly quoting / paraphrasing the content you want in your plain text, and not relying on external…
Wikipedia also hit pretty hard by link rot, nice thing there at least is that volunteers can try to fix it
For anyone curious, you can help fix dead reference links on Wikipedia in just a few seconds. If you find a page that has a dead link (or several), click the "View History" tab at the top, then click "Fix Dead Links" to run the InternetArchiveBot on the page.
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#80"It was possible to get on a text-based version of the internet for free in many areas, using only a modem and a phone line. An entire section of Free $tuff From the Internet offers up a lengthy list of free-nets, grassroots phone systems that essentially allowed for free access to text-based online resources." Makes me want to try to read a Markdown-only Internet browser, which treats native Markdown documents as th…
You would have to give up all the dynamic convienience we take for granted. Menus would be just links. Basically you would have HN like sites for the small ones and the big ones would have images. That's it.
On second thought that wouldn't be so bad considering the bloat we have to deal with nowadays. (1 MB per page for just news from sites like CNN ugh.)