111–120 of 218 posts
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.
I don't get it. Maybe someone can explain why these style and many other at the time were so hedious given that in print for a century preceding it, we had beautiful color, font and layout.
Some other smaller things also contributed but I don't think they were such big deals:
- Lack of good compression on both transfer of data and file formats, necessitating simpler designs and palette-based image formats.
- Graphics acceleration was generally slow so smooth animations were out.
- Image creation/editing tools were practically non-existent and digital cameras were rare so it makes sense that the resulting pages that have had designed assets were scary-looking.
You can say what you want but these were great times! Everyone could make their own little ugly homepage and it was exciting. People didn't really judge each other or bragged about how this tech is better than that. I kinda miss it.
I made some groovy table-based sites by setting up the table layout with the FrontPage GUI and then editing the raw HTML it generated. It taught me HTML and opened the doors to web development for me. Same story using Visual Basic and my segway into programming.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love how they laid it on the line. “If you want to do web development, you need to actually learn web technology” Now if someone would tell web developers that if you want to write desktop/mobile apps, you need to learn native frameworks..... What are newer FrontPage alternatives? The Internet and the web have changed drastically since the days when FrontPage was a very common website editor. Almost every modern we…
Many, many "drag and drop" web based alternatives. Webflow,ukit, even Adobe edge on the desktop.
You can say what you want but these were great times! Everyone could make their own little ugly homepage and it was exciting. People didn't really judge each other or bragged about how this tech is better than that. I kinda miss it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because like all Microsoft products of the 90s it regarded interoperability as a threat. It produces ugly HTML that works best in IE Just like nowadays with chrome!
Can you give some examples?
- AirBnb[1]: "We'd always recommend that you use Google Chrome to browse the site: we've optimised things for this browser. Thanks."
- Seamless[2]: "Safari is not a good browser to use with our website. Google Chrome work better with our website or you can download the app."
- DirecTV Now[3]
- IDAT solutions[4] (some random thing I found while searching)
- Countfire[5] (ditto)
Groupon said something similar as well but walked it back. Whatsapp's web app didn't support Firefox initially but does now.
Could browse through Web Compat[6] as well, though I'm not sure if this site is more about sites that should work in FF but don't, or Firefox bugs.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/4/16805216/google-chrome-onl...
[1]: https://twitter.com/AirbnbHelp/status/752829250198245376
[2]: https://twitter.com/Seamless_Care/status/942798540396474368
[3]: https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/7/15758274/directv-now-googl...
[4]: https://www.idatsolutions.com/faq/
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…
You have to remember how primitive web technologies were in those days. CSS was released in December 1996 but didn't get good, consistent browser implementations until the early 2000s. Besides CSS your layout and styling options were frames, tables, tags (and don't forget you can only use the pre-installed fonts on the user's system), or just bypassing HTML altogether by designing your page in Photoshop and exporting it as an imagemap (better hope all your users have 56k or ISDN or have lots of patience). Oh yeah, and don't forget to test your site at 640x480 with 256 colors.
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…
Form over function. Fun, original formatting was more important than coveying information well.
Keep in mind that displays sucked. Unless you had a Trinitron or similar quality display, you probably had a crappy 14" 4:3 screen with awful dot pitch, wildly inconsistent colors, part of the screen noticably fuzzier than the rest, and you likely could only have 256 colors (and your browser might not even select them optimally). You'd select a different window and the VGA palette would reset, making the now-background window look like a Pollock painting.
There was too much awful going on for people to care. Besides, the vast majority of pages were simple black text and blue links on a white background. As long as you didn't use the blink tag, nobody got upset.
