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Building a website like it's 1999

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21–30 of 99 posts

Re: Building a website like it's 1999

#21
post #18

I bet you some people got really annoyed when written language was standardized and people couldn't simply spell things willy nilly using "their creativity". Every time you read a book you are looking at thousands of years of typographical standardization, but you don't lament the fact that they "all look the same". In fact, if you took a book out of the library shelf and saw it was written in a weird font (i.e. papy…

I think you and the author both misunderstood what we really lost. I don’t think that what we miss the most is the old 90’s patchwork of gif style. Not that I’m not nostalgic of it, of course I am. But what I miss is the fact that back in the day, owning a little part of the internet was the normal thing and, contrary to nowadays profiles on social media, this space was really yours. It was as awful as what people’s…

For a long time letters were only written by hand. Nowadays the only people writing them by hand are the people who truly want it.

In the early days you really had no choice. There was no WordPress, no MySpace and no Github Pages. It was the norm because it was the easiest thing to do if you wanted a presence on the web. If something like Facebook existed in 1993 let me assure you a whole lot of people would have been contempt with just creating a profile there and calling it quits.

There are more personal websites today than there ever were, people who want to be creative on the web always find a way.

Re: Building a website like it's 1999

#23
A few weeks ago I realized that my personal website from 1999 is still up and unchanged, just copied from one host to another:

https://anioni.com/pauli/site1999/

I made this when I was 19, before I changed career ambitions to programming. Maybe it’s moderately interesting as an actual 1999 website time capsule.

There’s no CSS because IIRC it didn’t work very well in Netscape 4. Layout was done with tables and frames. The front page looks oddly tiny now, but I guess it was the correct size on a 1024*768 screen. I remember being happy about coming up with a frame trick for vertically centering that menu box. (A classic web design conundrum!)

Re: Building a website like it's 1999

#24

I bet you some people got really annoyed when written language was standardized and people couldn't simply spell things willy nilly using "their creativity". Every time you read a book you are looking at thousands of years of typographical standardization, but you don't lament the fact that they "all look the same". In fact, if you took a book out of the library shelf and saw it was written in a weird font (i.e. papy…

Mind that this was the amateur section of the web. By 1999, professional websites had become pretty complex (often more complex than they are at average nowadays) and invested considerably in navigation. (There was still some experimentation going on, as building a website was also a question of ambitions, which included improving on what was considered a common or average standard. Website navigation was the most obvious one and was also a creative challenge with prominent awards having dedicated categories for this. No way you could have gotten away with a "hamburger" in 1999. ;-) )

As for the modern web and amateur content, does a post in some infinite-scroll content compilation really compare that favorably?

Re: Building a website like it's 1999

#25

Marquee and blink are fun. Any site that removes them for the sake of accessibility is killing the whole idea of nostalgia and a 90s vibe. Go out in the world. There is marquee and blinking text everywhere, on billboards, ads, and marquees. Put real life things on the web isn’t a crime.

Meh, I don't miss marquee. They were always too slow for me, I just wanted to read the content.

Re: Building a website like it's 1999

#28

I bet you some people got really annoyed when written language was standardized and people couldn't simply spell things willy nilly using "their creativity". Every time you read a book you are looking at thousands of years of typographical standardization, but you don't lament the fact that they "all look the same". In fact, if you took a book out of the library shelf and saw it was written in a weird font (i.e. papy…

>There's a reason why Wikipedia has kept basically the same layout since forever, because it works.

I wish other designers and developers internalised this. The constant treadmill of redesigns common with seemingly all modern software development undervalues the users' mental model and muscle memory for how the site works.

I guess it would be shit for job security though.

Re: Building a website like it's 1999

#29
post #23

A few weeks ago I realized that my personal website from 1999 is still up and unchanged, just copied from one host to another: https://anioni.com/pauli/site1999/ I made this when I was 19, before I changed career ambitions to programming. Maybe it’s moderately interesting as an actual 1999 website time capsule. There’s no CSS because IIRC it didn’t work very well in Netscape 4. Layout was done with tables and frames.…

I like this layout, which is really how I remember the late-1990s web:

https://anioni.com/pauli/site1999/work/nurminen1-01.html

A well considered arrangement of structure, content and design. Something we do not get to see that much anymore.

Re: Building a website like it's 1999

#30
post #23

A few weeks ago I realized that my personal website from 1999 is still up and unchanged, just copied from one host to another: https://anioni.com/pauli/site1999/ I made this when I was 19, before I changed career ambitions to programming. Maybe it’s moderately interesting as an actual 1999 website time capsule. There’s no CSS because IIRC it didn’t work very well in Netscape 4. Layout was done with tables and frames.…

You know it's funny, those demo scene photos would probably be thought of as AI generated these days. Maybe it's the 'dreaminess'?

Dare post them on Artstation? xd

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