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FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

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Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#141

Post by OskarS »

amyjess wrote: post #125
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…

> 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. Actually, when computers started to be used for these things, a lot of traditional media went nuts and threw out their design principles in order to take advantage…

That's fascinating! Yeah, digital publishing tools really screwed with some classic designs there for a while. Great comment!

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#142

Post by arayh »

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.

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#143

Post by jypepin »

brightball wrote: post #126

People laugh, but this is how I learned HTML back then. I did something in Frontpage and then checked the code it generated to see how to do it with the tags.I still remember the Dreamweaver vs Frontpage vs Notepad arguments. I'm getting old.

Same as me here. The day I realised that what I was doing actually generated HTML and that HTML was actually the real thing was so eye opening to me. I got interested in HTML this way and that's how I got to engineering.

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#144

Post by js2 »

In the mid 90s while getting my CS degree, I had a side job as an SA at a small ISP. We also provided site hosting. One of our clients designed his site with FrontPage. This story reminded me of that, so out of curiosity I checked to see if the site was still around. Not only is it still around, it still looks like something straight out of the 90s. Behold:

http://lotteryamerica.com/

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#145

Post by Zardoz84 »

stantaylor wrote: post #113
degenerate wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made some groovy table-based sites by setting up the table layout with the FrontPage GUI and then editing the raw HTML it generated. It taught me HTML and opened the doors to web development for me. Same story using Visual Basic and my segway into programming.

It was pretty amazing to me that you could do WYSIWYG (wow, that's an anachronism itself!) valid HTML development, and then hand-manipulate the HTML and it let you put any invalid shit in there without complaining.

I remeber messing HTML stuff with HotDog

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#146

Post by mixmastamyk »

k_ wrote: post #27
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...

At my current job I am rewriting a 25 year-old VB application into a web-based application, and the majority* of our documentation is written in FrontPage. The horror, indeed. *: Well, sort of.. there are bits scattered everywhere, I had to dig into email archives to find some specifications.

Not too hard to cut and paste into another editor, the convert html with pandoc, or filter it with Python or other script.

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#147

Post by sorenjan »

barrystaes wrote: post #82
enriquto wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because like all Microsoft products of the 90s it regarded interoperability as a threat. It produces ugly HTML that works best in IE Just like nowadays with chrome!

Can you give some examples?

Google Earth's web client (which is really the only client Google seem to care about) only works in Chrome. It's not a web client, it's a Chrome client.

https://earth.google.com/web

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#148

Post by bootsz »

So much nostalgia... Was just thinking it would be neat to try to make a "Web Classic" version of the web without javascript and which only supports HTML 2.0 or 3.0. Maybe even bring back the 'blink' and 'marquee' tags :) . Kind of goes completely against the "one web" principle though, so definitely not practical. Fun to imagine having that kind of blank slate though.

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#150

Post by copperx »

stantaylor wrote: post #114
tgtweak wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many, many "drag and drop" web based alternatives. Webflow,ukit, even Adobe edge on the desktop.

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

NetObjects was brilliant, and sometimes miss it when I'm deep in CSS insanity.
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