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FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

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Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#41

Post by kristopolous »

OskarS wrote: post #36

You know, good design principles weren't invented in 2006. There was plenty of good design in the 90s in other industries (publishing, newspapers, magazines, advertising, academia, ...), but apparently fucking nothing of that filtered down to webdesign. I mean: yes, technology was limited. I get that you couldn't have free range with things like typography and that CSS wasn't a thing yet. But for the love of god: a t…

I'm so glad we've learned these days with 10,000KB of JS for 1KB of text rendered in tiny, hairline thin fonts on no-contrast backgrounds.

It's honestly always been bad ... before the web you'd dial into terminal based systems (BBS) and be assaulted with a perverse amount of ANSI escape codes and 8-bit extended ASCII flying around the screen and blinking at you (interfaces like this: https://s0.mundogamers.com/uploaded/bbsmenu.jpg). In between the two eras even IRC and UseNet got full of crufty ASCII art followed by leet-speak spelled weirdly cased words...it was illegible, unappealing and awful.

Having the maturity to know when to stop and having the control to know what not to do have always been talents far more rare than we'd prefer.

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#43

Post by ddtaylor »

maaaats wrote: post #7

Born in 91, I was the perfect age to be obsessed with Harry Potter. When I was around ten, an older kid in the neighborhood helped me make a Harry Potter themed website using FrontPage (the Express version I think it was named). Small, random event that end up having a big effect on my life. My hobbies, what&where I chose to study, the friends I got there etc. I can trace back to this.

Similar story for me, but with a Dragonball Z fan site. Internet, I'm sorry.

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#44

Post by janlaureys »

k_ wrote: post #27
pjc50 wrote: post #17

Oh god, the horror. Not just the ugly webpages, those were the ubiquitous style at the time. No, FrontPage pioneered deep ugliness, because like all Microsoft products of the 90s it regarded interoperability as a threat. It produces ugly HTML that works best in IE, and it has an optional upload mechanism that requires IIS on the server side. https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/frontpage/th...

At my current job I am rewriting a 25 year-old VB application into a web-based application, and the majority* of our documentation is written in FrontPage. The horror, indeed. *: Well, sort of.. there are bits scattered everywhere, I had to dig into email archives to find some specifications.

Medical sector ?

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#45

Post by donatj »

I used Netscape’s Composer for a while, then Frontpage. It was the sheer frustration of trying to get it to do what I want that lead me into actually learning and mastering HTML.

I was told by a number of “experts” at the time that I was silly and WYSIWYGs were the way forward. It’s some 20 years later and thus far they’ve still never really worked very well. Also, man that makes me feel old.

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#46

Post by pvg »

OskarS wrote: post #36

You know, good design principles weren't invented in 2006. There was plenty of good design in the 90s in other industries (publishing, newspapers, magazines, advertising, academia, ...), but apparently fucking nothing of that filtered down to webdesign. I mean: yes, technology was limited. I get that you couldn't have free range with things like typography and that CSS wasn't a thing yet. But for the love of god: a t…

What were we thinking?

Nobody was thinking this was 'web design'. You're looking at a consumer product and a specific 'novelty' theme in it. Just like nobody thought Comet Cursor was UI design.

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#47

Post by Terretta »

hb3b wrote: post #34
pjc50 wrote: post #17

Oh god, the horror. Not just the ugly webpages, those were the ubiquitous style at the time. No, FrontPage pioneered deep ugliness, because like all Microsoft products of the 90s it regarded interoperability as a threat. It produces ugly HTML that works best in IE, and it has an optional upload mechanism that requires IIS on the server side. https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/frontpage/th...

The server interaction features also worked on Linux! https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/202198/how-to-insta...

And BSD. Early on, we ran the first and largest MS FrontPage 'certified' web hosting provider, we enabled it on BSD with content in the same Unix home directories we gave our dialup clients.

Folks who made web sites in those days and paid $20/month to host them provided a pretty compelling library of content compared to today's pay-per-click 'blogosphere'.

I liked the "put up or shut up" pay-to-host model, driven by your beliefs, not your readers.

And despite the pretty garish things that happened in that web design era that FrontPage memorialized (rollover buttons!), kudos to Vermeer for democratizing web site creation.

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#48

Post by carlob »

nicolaslem wrote: post #30

> Microsoft FrontPage 98 also now provides support for the Channel Definition Format (CDF) which is a really keen way of broadcasting your web content to an end user's Windows desktop. You can "push" content to your visitors without having them seek you out daily for updates. It looks like this used to be the precursor of RSS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Definition_Format

And desktop notifications

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#49

Post by petercooper »

One related tool that's often forgotten, I find, is Microsoft Publisher. Publisher 97 had an option to build and export an entire site 100% visually. I had family members use it to build their complete personal sites.

It was a pretty clever system, too. It built layouts automatically using complex tables, split out text where it could, used image maps where it had to, etc. It wasn't something you'd be proud of using but it was the fastest tool for non-technical users at the time and would probably even hold up pretty well now(!)

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#50

Post by dchest »

kumarvvr wrote: post #39
tangue wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's embarrassing to say but in my company, I'm still "the webmaster". And by reading your question I conclude that it's because no one has any idea about what I'm doing.

It's too grandiose a term honestly. And it does not really convey the role the role-holder does. It's a really confusing term. I guess the term came around when the web was still young and was used as a precursor to "guru".

Nothing grandiose, it's derived from "postmaster" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmaster_(computing)) — a person responsible for a mail server, which itself is borrowed from the IRL postmaster, a head of a post office. Likewise, "webmaster" is a person responsible for a web site.
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