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FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

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Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#211

Post by tonyedgecombe »

stevenicr wrote: post #205
stantaylor wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NetObjects Fusion! In 1996-7, I worked on AT&T's small business web hosting service, and it supported FrontPage and NetObjects Fusion.

I still have sites live that were built with NetObjects fusion. Still the best design / editor I've ever used, and I've tried so many. I recently found this thing called 'pinegrove editor' (I think that's' what it's called. looks the closest to something like it and modern. maybe blue griffon. Sadly drop and drop widgets with wordpress themes is probably the most widely used that is similar.

Pinegrow: https://pinegrow.com

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#212

Post by tonyedgecombe »

tomc1985 wrote: post #175
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...

Oh man frontpage HTML was ugggly! I remember I'd use "View Source" and look for Frontpage tags as a cue for whether a site's designers deserved a good mocking

I remember I'd use "View Source"

Rather than look at the actual design?

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#213

Post by sixothree »

arayh wrote: post #142
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.

Ah, the good old days where guestbooks and webrings were commonplace. I remember it was an exciting time to be on the Internet. I felt far more connected to people's personal pages back then.

When yahoo categorized results.

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#214

Post by stevenicr »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #211
stevenicr wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have sites live that were built with NetObjects fusion. Still the best design / editor I've ever used, and I've tried so many. I recently found this thing called 'pinegrove editor' (I think that's' what it's called. looks the closest to something like it and modern. maybe blue griffon. Sadly drop and drop widgets with wordpress themes is probably the most widely used that is similar.

Pinegrow: https://pinegrow.com

Yes, that's the one I was thinking about / been looking at tonyedgecombe, thanks!

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#215

Post by tomc1985 »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #212
tomc1985 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man frontpage HTML was ugggly! I remember I'd use "View Source" and look for Frontpage tags as a cue for whether a site's designers deserved a good mocking

I remember I'd use "View Source" Rather than look at the actual design?

IIRC FrontPage written-pages and hand-written (by people actually good at it) pages looked pretty similar in-browser, but the HTML that FrontPage produced was an atrocity

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#216

Post by icedchai »

dep_b wrote: post #100
BillyBreen wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netscape never charged users. Perhaps you’re thinking of Opera. The reasons IE won over Netscape are many, but bundling with dominant OS and embracing/extending standards such that sites only worked in IE was a big part of it. Heck, there was a whole antitrust case about just that.

> Netscape never charged users. Perhaps you’re thinking of Opera. No Netscape would officially cost you US$49 until 1998.

"Officially", Netscape had a "free trial" for 90 days. In reality, I personally don't know one person who actually paid. Some companies did buy corporate licenses.

https://www.fastcompany.com/27743/nothing-netscape

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#217

Post by Fjolsvith »

kristopolous wrote: post #41
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/upload…

Frankly, that was not an artistic example of the BBS scene. Here is one that had aesthetically pleasing features:

https://cleaner.ansilove.org/bbs.html

And, if you want to see a live version of a sweet looking BBS, check out this one in your telnet app:

telnet: absinthe.darktech.org:23

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#218

Post by kristopolous »

Fjolsvith wrote: post #217
kristopolous wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/upload…

Frankly, that was not an artistic example of the BBS scene. Here is one that had aesthetically pleasing features: https://cleaner.ansilove.org/bbs.html And, if you want to see a live version of a sweet looking BBS, check out this one in your telnet app: telnet: absinthe.darktech.org:23

Well sure, you can always cherry-pick good examples of anything.
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