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This is a web page

justinjackson.ca

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Re: This is a web page

#311

Post by dwd »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #279
petercooper wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because other people have given good answers, I just wanted to add.. the Web was so much better linked together back then. Prior to Altavista made searching useful most of the time, it was common to rely on jumping from one site to another through plentiful link pages, web rings, and lists of resources that people had put together. There was also Usenet which people often posted links on and which was sorted by topic…

>There was also Usenet which people often posted links on and which was sorted by topic and a handy way to find stuff. When my college roommate showed me how to download a graduate student's thesis from Usenet, I thought my head was going to explode I thought it was so cool. Here I am, halfway across the country, and I can download, read and cite some grad student's paper from the University of California Berkeley. I…

You had alt.religion.kibology and the first crowd-sourcing app in The Internet Oracle.

The technology changes but we seem to keep reinventing the wheel every time the cart gets overcrowded.

Re: This is a web page

#312

Post by visarga »

euxneks wrote: post #249
petercooper wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because other people have given good answers, I just wanted to add.. the Web was so much better linked together back then. Prior to Altavista made searching useful most of the time, it was common to rely on jumping from one site to another through plentiful link pages, web rings, and lists of resources that people had put together. There was also Usenet which people often posted links on and which was sorted by topic…

ah.. web rings.. I remember babylon 5 web rings... Nostalgia's a hell of a thing.

If we knew back then what is common knowledge today, we could build an early version of Google search in a few months. Web spider, parsing HTML, extracting links and text, computing Page Rank and then making an inverted index to look up info by keyword. Imagine this would have been 100 times better than Yahoo's links and Altavista's search.

By the way, syntax highlight thinks "Altavista" is a spelling error. Talk about becoming the footnote of history. Google was the company that took the lead from AV and now Google's own browser can't understand their main competitor of 10 years ago. AV did it to themselves, putting all that shit on the homepage and not providing good results. LOL

Re: This is a web page

#314

Post by devb »

petercooper wrote: post #239
simpleglider wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great anecdote. Out of curiosity, how did you find the site? I had just turned four at the time, so I don't quite remember what browsing the Internet was like then.

Because other people have given good answers, I just wanted to add.. the Web was so much better linked together back then. Prior to Altavista made searching useful most of the time, it was common to rely on jumping from one site to another through plentiful link pages, web rings, and lists of resources that people had put together. There was also Usenet which people often posted links on and which was sorted by topic…

Does anyone know why altavista.com and altavista.digital.com were different? I just remember preferring the digital.com version for some reason.

I wish I could go back in time to 1996... everything on the internet seemed so much more meaningful, not to mention textual (because images took so long to download).

Re: This is a web page

#315

Post by MichaelGG »

vacri wrote: post #299
MichaelGG wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure YouTube is transported over HTTP. Not sure about Netflix but I wouldn't be surprised. HTTP has become a generic TCP wrapper for the common request->response pattern.

Wireshark doesn't think so: 9792 42.750939000 74.125.109.232 10.1.1.21 TCP 1506 [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]

Dunno, I tried loading a YouTube page and capturing packets. Only ports in use were 443 and 80, even to the cdn-like hostnames (bla.c.youtube.com). First packet shows "GET /videoplayback?...."

Re: This is a web page

#316

Post by dk8996 »

adventured wrote: post #69

"At it's heart, web design should be about words." No. The web is not just a place for text / words, that is not its heart and soul, and therefore neither is that the case for web design. It really never has been. I see no great argument in favor of words being the core over any other form of expression. Today's bandwidth more than allows for beautiful video, animation, high quality graphics and photos, etc. Or low k…

I agree. I think the old way was about content now it's about a apps. One of those, if good, solves a problem.

Re: This is a web page

#317

Post by hboon »

makeset wrote: post #273
teh_klev wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is hipster about that? Your statement makes no sense. I'm 46 and started using the "internet" in 1992 - usenet, gopher, FTP et al. Then came the World Wide Web". Altavista was really all there was before google, why is that "hipster"? That's like saying you were a hipster for using horse and carriage before Henry Ford started mass producing cars. If anything being an early adopter of Google seems more "hipster"…

Between Altavista and Google, alltheweb.com (FAST Search) also had their day. I was in charge of a major web portal around 2001, and we were contracting out site search queries to FAST. One day I got a call from a new company named Google. The guy said he could give me a better price than FAST. I asked what price. He said, "Any price."

Little nugget:

the FAST Search guys sold alltheweb.com to yahoo.com and focused on enterprise search (i.e. they sell/license their software to companies) with customers such as newspaper companies, yellow pages companies and government agencies. They were then acquired by Microsoft a few years ago and rolled into their Sharepoint offerings.

Re: This is a web page

#319

Post by [deleted] »

leephillips wrote: post #233
morsch wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his point is that it's a communication system that facilitates communication amongst everyone . And everyone can communicate in words, typed out[0]. And not everyone can produce or effectively communicate using beautiful video, high quality graphics and, I guess, responsive design. [1] It's interesting to wonder what the next-common "wide area" communication mode is -- photos are widely shared, but is there a…

"not everyone can produce [...] responsive design" Notice that the page is automatically responsive, and is perfectly usable on a phone, tablet, or anything else. If your page has no CSS styles it will be perfectly responsive. If it's not, you've messed up that nice feature of the web with your stylesheet. Now you probably think you need to learn about media queries to make it work again.

[deleted]

Re: This is a web page

#320

Post by jon_dahl »

simpleglider wrote: post #156
ChuckMcM wrote: post #34

First time [1] my in-laws saw "the web" they were trying to find information about vacation spots in Brazil but their travel guide was obsolete, I found a web page a student had written up about where the best places to stay and see were in Brazil. I could almost see the dots connect when they realized that someone they didn't know, in Brazil , had written up a piece of information at some point that they were now se…

That's a great anecdote. Out of curiosity, how did you find the site? I had just turned four at the time, so I don't quite remember what browsing the Internet was like then.

Quick answer: links. Hypertext. It's important enough to the original vision of this whole contraption to actually be the name.

While were reminiscing... In 1994, the web felt like technology. You typed in "http://" and it felt exotic. You were connecting to a server. Literally: _a_ server. You wondered what would happen if you hit the same address with gopher or (more likely) telnet.

As often as not, something would happen.

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