FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997) • Hacker News Board

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#131

Post by alexharrisnyc » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 2:15 PM UTC

vital101 wrote: post #130

Back when I was in middle school I used a copy FrontPage 98 at school to generate frames for my Star Wars site and then finished up the rest at home with FrontPage Express. A few years ago I restored the site after finding a broken version of it on the WayBack machine. http://re-cycledair.com/starwars/Entrance.html

> Approx. download time: 2 hours and 9 min. at 28.8 kbps

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#132

Post by nix0n » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 2:21 PM UTC

p4bl0 wrote: post #51

Are there good free (as is free software) WYSIWYG website editors nowadays?

SeaMonkey (used to be Mozilla) Composer is free and WYSIWYG but the website you make will be very 90s looking.

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#133

Post by thedaemon » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 2:24 PM UTC

Although it's just a footnote on this page, Microsoft GIF Animator is still the easiest and most useful GIF animation tool out there. I have yet to find anything quite as easy to make animated GIFs. I haven't used it in years though, not sure if it's still floating around and if it runs on a modern OS.

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#134

Post by subir » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 2:38 PM UTC

anentropic wrote: post #75

subir wrote: post #40

FrontPage 97 was the first WYSIWYG tool I ever used, since graduating from the humble text editors. IIRC, I got a free upgrade to FrontPage98. Coupled with Visual InterDev, it formed the core of my webdev workflow. At the time Macromedia was making terrific advances in this space. Ca. 1999-2000 I moved to Dreamweaver, Ultradev, Flash and Paint Shop Pro(liked it better than Fireworks; story for another day).

isn't that back to front? you were supposed to graduate from WYSIWYG tools like FrontPage, which generated utterly awful markup, to writing proper HTML yourself in a text editor

Yeah, I guess I started off the hard (wrong?) way. The first few websites I built was typed out on notepad. Progress was slow and excruciatingly difficult. Then, I discovered FrontPage and my productivity went through the roof :) Of course, the markup generated was garbage. I understood none of it and for all I knew, this was the way forward!

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#135

Post by cube00 » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 2:38 PM UTC

Fond memories of looking for that free web hosting with Microsoft FrontPage Extensions enabled to make my forms work.

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#136

Post by lwerdna » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 2:39 PM UTC

I pirated frontpage around 97,98 and used it to make garish homepages with all the elements we consider sins today: frames, lens flare, flame gifs, and background music. This was a formative experience that contributed to my career and life today.

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#137

Post by trading_wheels » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 2:43 PM UTC

thedaemon wrote: post #133

Although it's just a footnote on this page, Microsoft GIF Animator is still the easiest and most useful GIF animation tool out there. I have yet to find anything quite as easy to make animated GIFs. I haven't used it in years though, not sure if it's still floating around and if it runs on a modern OS.

I loved and used Image Composer for years after I'd moved on from Frontpage; I remember havng to install FP solely to get a copy of it (and some of the other tools like GIF animator)

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#138

Post by fluxsauce » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 2:46 PM UTC

lwerdna wrote: post #136

I pirated frontpage around 97,98 and used it to make garish homepages with all the elements we consider sins today: frames, lens flare, flame gifs, and background music. This was a formative experience that contributed to my career and life today.

Playing around with a tool is still using it. Who cares if it's ridiculous? Getting anyone to be engaged with something new is way easier if they're passionate about it. If a kid wants to edit a video about farts, they're going to learn what it takes to make that fart video, and I applaud them.

Also, the marquee tag is mission critical.

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#139

Post by joshstrange » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 2:56 PM UTC

Frontpage was terrible for the web in many ways but damn it if I didn't love it to death when I first figured out how to use it and made my first websites with it. It was my first "code" editor in a long line (Frontpage -> Notepad++ -> Coda -> Sublime Text -> Sublime Text 2 -> PHPStorm -> IDEA Ultimate)

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#140

Post by sequoia » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 3:05 PM UTC

cntlzw wrote: post #95

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.

Agreed. When the web technologies were more simple and rudimentary and HTML page hosting free and easy for beginners (e.g. geocities), it took very little to start writing HTML, adding some tiling background images, gifs and midis to express yourself. The variation in website look and feel back then was extreme.

Myspace then Facebook (plus forums) obviated the need to build your own site to express yourself online, and disdain for "poorly designed" sites, i.e. general snobbishness, I think discouraged people from messing around. I love that old web! You can still do something similar on Google Sites or similar, but of course it's more constrained.