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I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

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Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#81

Post by davehtaylor »

adventured wrote: post #63
ChrisSD wrote: post #39

Related 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…

There's always the famous Dole Kemp '96 campaign site (a fair representation of mid 1990s web design): http://www.dolekemp96.org/main.htm And this one from CNN (still 1996, but appropriate representation of that 1995/96 era when design had changed a bit from the earlier plain white backgrounds & basic text layouts): http://edition.cnn.com/EVENTS/1996/year.in.review/

I absolutely adore that CNN 1996 site. Man, designs like that were great.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#82

Post by observation »

hmhrex wrote: post #54
ChrisSD wrote: post #39

Related 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.

It loaded so fast!

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#83

Post by davehtaylor »

ChrisSD wrote: post #39

Related 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…

I think it's fascinating the change in how we view site navigation. Another commenter gave a link to an old Microsoft site that had links all over the place. But for the most part, it seemed like sites started to standardize on navigation vertically on the left side. Now, we generally see them horizontally on the top, or in hamburger menus. But it's interested how that paradigm shifted. It seems like vertical side navigation would be more prevalent now, given how much wider monitors are.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#84

Post by kronos29296 »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #66
andai wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please clarify?

1. Download the internets. 2. git the diffs. Privacy comes because if everyone has the internet in their local cache (lol), then external servers can't say what YOU are REALLY looking at.

Best of luck trying to scale git. Microsoft took 3 years and they didn't add Office and Windows to it. And they nearly rewrote their own version of git.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#85

Post by kronos29296 »

stesch wrote: post #57

Can't see the article with NoScript. :-)

They should make sites incompatible with NoScript illegal. Back in my days (lol its just 10+ years) they used plain text for Web pages and used javascript like custom animation in presentations. Now only javascript is there with some html sprinkled in between.

P.S the rest of it was in Flash though. So no back button for you.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#86

Post by Frondo »

77pt77 wrote: post #70
CharlesDodgson wrote: post #45

I 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.

I just miss that it was mainly text and could be used in a terminal without missing much. More content density, better S/N ratio.

Not specifically directed at you, but sort of directed at you:

I wish everyone who pined for the 25-years-ago days of mostly text pages would, instead of pining, just go out there and produce that content they want to see.

Instead of pining, start writing. Hosting is cheap or free, browsers still parse simple HTML, there's nothing stopping anyone from creating a return to that simpler form.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#87

Post by sah2ed »

mintplant wrote: post #74
sah2ed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

No. It's only needed to playback archives of web pages that only work with old JavaScript libraries enabled.

But then again there's WebRecorder for exactly that.

https://webrecorder.io/

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#88

Post by observation »

andai wrote: post #44
SubiculumCode wrote: post #35

The solution to link rot (and to privacy invasion) is to download the internet.

Could you please clarify?

A few organizations have a text copy of the web. They could potentially offer a service like "WWW in the year 20XX".

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#89

Post by dep_b »

CharlesDodgson wrote: post #45

I 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.

I remember browsing the internet was much more of a networked thing. If you want to know what it was like you could take a look at Wikipedia, where you still can get lost in a never ending deeper web of links. However WikiPedia is a very cleaned up version of the early web. It lacks animated .gifs for sure.

But the difference with Wikipedia was that people would maintain a Links section full of interesting stuff and people would join web rings for various subjects, interlinking vastly different sites. Finding information often happened through Yahoo! (AltaVista was there too but it was lacking the quality of handpicked results) through a tree based discovery system, to continue through whatever you could find through links on an interesting page. Exchanging links was something that really frequently happened.

It resulted in an internet where you just kept clicking and discovering and digging. Sometimes also frustrating as browsers lacked tabs and I would navigate all links one by one by loading it and going back. I would forget how I arrived at a certain page sometimes because it was so deep and I never found the breadcrumbs again.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#90

Post by jedberg »

whatever_dude wrote: post #15

I'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…

I actually downloaded a copy of the NYT article I was quoted in in 1996 specifically because I feared it would fall off the internet at some point.

It's behind a paywall now, but at least I have a digital copy!

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