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FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

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Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#171

Post by rayiner »

Aardwolf wrote: post #99
olalonde wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

Because you could just read the text and view the images without being disturbed by 3 floating elements you have to close first, then when you scrolled 25% down some new thing popping up in your way, then when you scrolled 50% down some other annoying thing happening, and when at the end of the article suddenly it changes into another one, all while some video starts autoplaying but not without first having a wait du…

Yes! And also, because you weren't running a little program to display each page, the back button actually worked. (Compare what HN does when you follow a link then hit back to what Reddit does.)

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#172

Post by reitanqild »

tjoff wrote: post #57

Man, look at that site. Unimaginably fast, works perfect on mobile, no clutter and readable. It truly has gone downhill since then.

Fast, yes.

Really bad on my mobile (equally bad as a number of mobile web sites today, only different).

Web site I dealt with earlier today: lose state when I go back.

This page: unreadable small fonts (and it takes months between every time I complain about that). And when I zoom it doesn't reflow the text so I have to scroll back and forth to read it.

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#173

Post by reitanqild »

disiplus wrote: post #23
kumarvvr wrote: post #5

"WebMaster". I see this term a lot in older sites. "WebMasters click here !" sort of links. What does it really mean? The term.

there was also this thing between webmasters, called banner exchange. that's how you got new traffic to your website. i remember when i did my first gaming review site up in high school i was trying to get my banner to as many other sites as i could and they would get the place on my site. i remember tweaking my banner in macromedia flash :)

I wish we could go bac to this again.

Link to the pages you find interesting. Forget SEO. Find more pages by following recommendations. Allow ourselves to create "ugly" pages.

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#174

Post by adrianhel »

tallblondeguy wrote: post #117
barrystaes wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some examples?

This article from The Verge[0] cites some support Tweets: - AirBnb[1]: "We'd always recommend that you use Google Chrome to browse the site: we've optimised things for this browser. Thanks." - Seamless[2]: "Safari is not a good browser to use with our website. Google Chrome work better with our website or you can download the app." - DirecTV Now[3] - IDAT solutions[4] (some random thing I found while searching) - Cou…

First of all: I agree that this is bad and that these developers should choose portable tech when building these sites.

But as of now, Chrome is and has for a long time been the only browser to support:

Shadow DOM: https://caniuse.com/#feat=shadowdomv1

Custom elements: https://caniuse.com/#feat=custom-elementsv1

CSS Paint API: https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-paint-api

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#175

Post by tomc1985 »

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

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#176

Post by tinus_hn »

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...

It actually found new ways to write HTML that ‘accidentally’ crashed the current version of Netscape Navigator.

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#177

Post by dclowd9901 »

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.

I proudly proclaim to my younger cohorts that I was once in a Space Quest webring. I wear it like a badge of honor!

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#178

Post by tinus_hn »

timrichard wrote: post #66
gattilorenz wrote: post #28

The whole domain is amazing. Just look at this page, updated LAST YEAR: http://www.telecommanderhosting.com/ec/framed_Microsoft_OS.h... Look at the waving Win 95 logo! Not to mention the "office clipart guy" in the homepage... I am just suprised that the obligatory "under construction" gif is missing!

Where's the hit counter? Don't forget to sign the guestbook.

I remember that was from IRC trolling, would you please /sign my guestbook?, as the /sign command would sign you off of the server.

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#179

Post by sangnoir »

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.

> People didn't really judge each other or bragged about how this tech is better than that

I judged people - IIS was terrible and you were better off with Apache, mod_perl and CGI.pm. I still can't believe how far ahead of its time CPAN was!

Re: FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

#180

Post by lukewrites »

degenerate wrote: post #102
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.

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.

Ah, tables…I spent so much time tinkering with them to try to get my pages looking right.

And then came the day in high school when the computer club advisor told us about Netscape supporting frames. Frames were _so_ exciting.

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