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Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

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Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#131
post #50

I need to send this to the people who designed the website for one of my favorite local pizza places, Dino's ( https://www.dinostomatopie.com/ ) -- they did _really_ well, generally, but no matter how hard you try, some things come through: the fonts rendered as text are perfectly crisp at whatever absurd DPI this Chromebook has.

This is the greatest website I have ever seen. It even looks good on mobile. That’s a major achievement with their stylings.

The funny part is that it was a pretty common look for 1997. They even tastefully refrained from the "under construction" image.

The other common look was the simple document, such as https://cr.yp.to/djb.html

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happy to report that I was able to download the zip file and run the executable on my Ubuntu box with Wine. It was quite surreal to see Netscape installer running on my 4k monitor. I was even able to open the browser and navigate to Google. Sadly https://www.dinostomatopie.com/ and http://www.dinostomatopie.com/ failed to open with a message saying "Netscape and this server cannot communicate securely because the…

You have to run the old browsers through a local proxy you configure yourself a lot of times these days if you're really interested in surfing the web with it. I'm about to go to sleep but there's ones that forward https as http, convert webp and png to gif, strip JavaScript to prevent the browser from locking up, etc. There's a real world use for this in crazy companies where people are forced on some old browser. T…

When you wake up, I'd love to hear more about this. I've searched for https ==> http proxies before and didn't find much.

I'm aware of https://github.com/tenox7/wrp but converting everything to a gif is quite a bit more destructive!

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#133
As a fun little Easter egg, you can get the classic Mac font Chicago (the system font all the way up to Mac OS 9 and early iPods) in HiDPI glory on all current Apple devices. Use Latin characters with the Thai-language font Krungthep.

Putting it in your CSS works out of the box, but to use it in your terminal or word processing app, you have to go to the fonts app and enable non-latin fonts and then select it (but it is already installed).

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#134
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is glorious. The only way I could tell with any confidence it wasn't real was the clean, modern HTML and CSS (get with the program folks, this should be non-validating XHTML 1.1!) Nice easter egg from the source code: -->

topgun.mid actually exists.

And I guess I've just found the most authentic and ridiculous way to play a midi file on somewhat modern macOS: run winamp in wine.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#136

I can appreciate all sorts of tech nostalgia, but reading the intro my first thought was "wow this is cognitively impairing me" and then "please don't". Achieving it is surely a feat, but the actual effect is to make it as hard now to use my computer as it was over 20 years ago, because the type is illegible.

That's fair enough, i think it's a matter of taste, really. For me, it evokes a warm sense of nostalgia for a simpler time. Not that it necessarily was, and definitely not that it was better – i was a kid back then, so that has definitely coloured my memory of it all. I see this more as a "just because we can" art project, than anything else. EDIT: it also occurs to me that i have tons of respect for the hours of eff…

This is probably the God of "just because we can" art projects: https://www.windows93.net

This is a cool project but the end result doesn't really look like it does on real hardware

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#137
post #50

I need to send this to the people who designed the website for one of my favorite local pizza places, Dino's ( https://www.dinostomatopie.com/ ) -- they did _really_ well, generally, but no matter how hard you try, some things come through: the fonts rendered as text are perfectly crisp at whatever absurd DPI this Chromebook has.

This is better than 50% of websites out there today. I can find all the buttons, the functions of things are clear, and I know how to contact the owner. The menu is text instead of PDF, and the whole thing appears to run properly without javascript enabled.

The brilliance goes beyond the web design. From that menu:

"DINO would like you to know that more than three toppings will be expensive and won't be any better."

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#138
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happy to report that I was able to download the zip file and run the executable on my Ubuntu box with Wine. It was quite surreal to see Netscape installer running on my 4k monitor. I was even able to open the browser and navigate to Google. Sadly https://www.dinostomatopie.com/ and http://www.dinostomatopie.com/ failed to open with a message saying "Netscape and this server cannot communicate securely because the…

What's the point of forcing HTTPS? It's a pizza place, not a bank.

It's faster. http://www.httpvshttps.com/

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#139
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happy to report that I was able to download the zip file and run the executable on my Ubuntu box with Wine. It was quite surreal to see Netscape installer running on my 4k monitor. I was even able to open the browser and navigate to Google. Sadly https://www.dinostomatopie.com/ and http://www.dinostomatopie.com/ failed to open with a message saying "Netscape and this server cannot communicate securely because the…

What's the point of forcing HTTPS? It's a pizza place, not a bank.

encryption works much better when it's setup without discrimination. I mean not the encryption itself; in the end, it's a tool not the aim.

Re: Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

#140
post #124
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are blurry fonts on 1080p screens, which are the default to this day and essentially required if you seek high refresh rates on a budget. Everyone without a retina screen is wrong, according to you. And yet, fonts used to look just fine on our terrible screens.

I didn’t say that - I said that if your screen is not retina-like, then you have to adjust operating systems that are now developed for retina-like screens. I have not seen a blurry font on Mac since 2012 - with the exception of legacy programs that don’t use modern libraries, because (again) modern libraries and modern screens simply don’t give you blurry fonts . If you have some legacy tech in your stack, then you…

Ah, the usual "you're using it wrong".

Apple can tweak their font rendering and favor hi-DPI screens if they want, but there's no excuse for messing up with settings that worked well in the past. Is it that hard for mac OS to automatically adjust these settings?

Apple sold their awfully shiny 27" Thunderbolt display until 2016 after all.

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