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Web Design Museum

webdesignmuseum.org

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Re: Web Design Museum

#81

Note if any maintainers are here: some of the captures, like Habbo.com, are done with ClearType enabled, when it was in fact only available from 2006 with IE7. The blocky text rendering was a significant part of the look and feel of those websites.

Some sites, like Time.com, prerendered parts of their text antialiased to an image.

Re: Web Design Museum

#82
post #51

Man, this was the time when me (and every computer literary teen) fancied himself a dev and webdesigner. And we were like, considered geniuses too - for being able to code some PHP and copy some cool designs :3 good times

[deleted]

Re: Web Design Museum

#83
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was the last time you really needed that? I haven’t had to in years, and I work in .gov. The only thing I see is needing to enable Flash and that was awhile ago.

I see it frequently in testing. But then, I'm on the web dev side. Sometimes if I see a web site I think might be too ambitious, I'll open it on each of my testing machines in different browsers, and about 70% of the time, my hunch is right, and it either fails on one or more, or the output looks significantly/unusably different.

It’s interesting because I also do a lot of web development and have really been enjoying being able to develop in Firefox and not need to worry much about things working in Chrome/Safari, with a little care checking caniuse.com for the newest things.

Re: Web Design Museum

#84
post #77
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was the last time you really needed that? I haven’t had to in years, and I work in .gov. The only thing I see is needing to enable Flash and that was awhile ago.

Last week. For some reason just over the past month or so, a couple times Google Hangouts has randomly decided it doesn't support Firefox one day, then work fine the next. A bit further back (maybe a year or so?), I've also had issues with Youtube and my bank's website. Both of those seem to have been fixed, though.

That’s probably just Google’s aversion to paying for QA. I get the same kind of problems in Chrome and their apps which randomly go away after clearing the cache, resetting the app, etc. I suspect the root cause is that most of their developers want to work on cool things rather than fixing the previous round.

Re: Web Design Museum

#85
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it frequently in testing. But then, I'm on the web dev side. Sometimes if I see a web site I think might be too ambitious, I'll open it on each of my testing machines in different browsers, and about 70% of the time, my hunch is right, and it either fails on one or more, or the output looks significantly/unusably different.

It’s interesting because I also do a lot of web development and have really been enjoying being able to develop in Firefox and not need to worry much about things working in Chrome/Safari, with a little care checking caniuse.com for the newest things.

Firefox-first definitely seems to be the way forward for web developers. We fell into the trap of Chrome-first and ended up having to fix everything for FF and IE, creating a lot of work. Soon discovered that if we just developed for Firefox everything would generally "just work" in the other browsers.

Re: Web Design Museum

#86
post #22

It is impressive how design has changed thru the years. Just compare the 1996 Space Jam web https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/space-jam-1996 with its current design https://www.warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm

> The jamminest two minutes of trailer time that ever hit a theater. It's 7.5 megs, it's Quicktime, and it's worth it. Click the graphic to download... Oh god if only the modern web was 10% as light-hearted as this was

It's a site for a kid's movie.

Re: Web Design Museum

#87
post #44

Looking at these older websites (for me thats 1996—2002) I remember spending a lot of my time on figuring out how they really worked underneath it all. It was truly an exciting time where the differences in design and style for websites were big. Today, you don't really see personal websites anymore, and things have somehow become streamlined and pretty much just standard. There is hardly any wow effect on the web an…

I don't think you follow the right people/channels. I see a wow effect every week. Edit: some examples... http://taotajima.jp/ http://mathis-biabiany.fr/ http://robinmastromarino.com/ https://demos.littleworkshop.fr/track

I really enjoyed taotajima.jp until I tried to use my ‘back’ button.

Think there is a way to get the same effects without turning a page scroll into a page load?

Re: Web Design Museum

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny to see them marketing their machine as a means to copyright infringement.

Buying music on iTunes or CDs and then burning it onto CDs to eg put into hifi systems or car stereos is not copyright infringement. It was a way to play music that was bought online and a way to make mixtapes of legitimately owned music. Saying that advertising a CD burner is inciting copyright infringement is like saying that advertising a knife’s sharpness is inciting stabbings

Ah, ripping (eg CDs to iTunes) & mixing was and again is unlawful in UK.

Re: Web Design Museum

#89
Many of those sites were designed with such bandwidth, resolution and color constraints. I wonder if they could add some sort of toggle to see display those images in the original intended resolution, or what was common for its day. The jump from 640 to 800 to 1024! The Web-safe 216 colors. Modems from under 3+, to 14, 28, 33, 56 kbps, ISDN, T1 and broadband! you had to use lowsrc attribute in tags while the better image loaded, or pre-loading images in javascript. Glad all of that is over, glad I lived through it.

Re: Web Design Museum

#90
post #79
post #28

It makes me sad that the web design museum is mostly made up of corporate sites. Companies didn't take the web too seriously in the 90s and early 2000s...at least as it pertains to design. If you wanted to look at good design back then, you went to fray.com, glassdog.com, 0sil8.com, zeldman.com, and others I don't remember. Oh boy those were the days...

They had k10k on the first page which I remember well. powazek.com was also great. It's a surprise that zeldman isn't on there, his site is still going strong. What was interesting to see was kottke.org that's been showing up on HN for a long time [0] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31413

Zeldman:

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/jeffrey-zeldman-1999

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