I've got a book about javascript from 1995. It mentions closure once and says something like "... but you'll never need to use that feature of the language."
How I laughed.
I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
171–180 of 335 posts
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#172A 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…
The one I hate is when I find old forum posts explaining how to do something in the physical world and all the embedded photos are broken. Not because the image host went out of business or the user deleted them, but just because they didn't log in for a year and the host deactivated their account. This is why whenever I link a photo I upload it to my own server and I never change the URL.
Also 500px (I think--if not a similar image host) has recently banned all 3rd-party images, at least at the free level, which has broken a TON of the old forum posts I want to see. It was the defacto image host, kind of like imgur is now.
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#173I'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
Hopefully not anymore: https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#174Can'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.
That's just silly. The dynamic nature of javascript is what caused the explosion of websites around 2007, due to the advent of jQuery. Saying we should all go back to plain text is just being an old grump. Should it be overused? No. Just like GIFs shouldn't have been overused on Geocities.
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#175I'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've updated my portfolio before and noticed that as well. I usually include a screenshot or two when I first add a project, so at least that remains.
If the site goes down later, I just remove the link and don't worry about it. My code from 15 years ago is probably atrocious, so I'll consider it a small blessing :P
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> It lacks animated .gifs for sure Um excuse me what do you call this masterpiece https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Ellipses...
Wow! That's nice. I started to imagine how it could be used in a geeky clock.
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
For whatever reason, my site (Hollywood/Academy/4430) disappeared from Geocities before the mass archival happened. I certainly didn't delete it. I search for it once a year, hope springs eternal.
I similarly look for the first page I ever created. I was maybe 14 years old and created a pretty thorough Goldeneye 007 fan site, with walkthroughs etc, on angelfire. I distinctly remember a misspelling in my url--- /liscensetokill --but I can't be sure of my parent category anymore. I think /mi5/ Haven't seen it in over 15 years, though.
I was in geocities/South Beach/lounge but I can't remember the number and it annoys me. I know for a fact archive.org indexed it but they didn't at all after geocities moved to ~ urls. (That was after the Yahoo buyout IIRC)
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it richer and deeper now? Maybe at the fringes, but I feel that the internet today, with my emphasis being on the "inter" (different) "net" (networks) part of it, is far less deeper or richer than before. What we basically have reduced to are a bunch of siloed netowrks such as Facebook. When I searched for something when Google first came out I got a mix of results from a variety of sites I had never heard about.…
I'm beginning to think that there is a niche for a peculiar kind of a search engine. A search engine for static almost-none to none JavaScript pages. It would penalize pages for ad-network usage. I would really like to not have in search results most sites that try to monetize on my attention. I want raw facts and opinions. No click-bait to grab my attention or feed my internal cave man with rage. No ad-networks or d…
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#179A 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…
The one I hate is when I find old forum posts explaining how to do something in the physical world and all the embedded photos are broken. Not because the image host went out of business or the user deleted them, but just because they didn't log in for a year and the host deactivated their account. This is why whenever I link a photo I upload it to my own server and I never change the URL.
I apologize in advance as there's no non-morbid way to ask this but... what happens to the images on your server if you die tomorrow? It would be exactly the same situation, right? They would exist until your bill is due in a couple years then your account will be deactivated and your images will linkrot.
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#180Related 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…
The Space Jam (film) website is a golden example and I find it amazing that it is still functional:
https://www.warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm
(1996)