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18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

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Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#231

Post by scarface74 »

bjornjajajaja wrote: post #182
ath92 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this website still works fine, the actual HTML that Frontpage generated isn't exactly easy to maintain if Frontpage stops working for whatever reason. The author of this website is basically stuck using whatever version of Frontpage supports the markup of his website. And I bet there have been plenty of people who used who are no longer able to maintain their website because their editor no longer runs on their…

Microsoft has been fairly good at allowing older binaries to run on newer systems. Apple is pretty annoying in this regard. There’s a lot of software that doesn’t work on versions maybe only 5 years old. A lot of software doesn’t need to change to be honest. Microsoft word for example. Word processing: you sit down and type stuff, maybe change the font once or twice. I guess the collaborative features are nice being…

You haven’t tried to run 16 bit software on 64 bit Windows have you?

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#233

Post by paganel »

user5994461 wrote: post #198
paganel wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also helps if you self-host, I have personally self-hosted a subversion repository with my own projects using Trac [1] for 10 years now. [1] https://trac.edgewall.org/

Trac has been end of life for some time. It doesn't run on python 3. There are open bug tickets about it that have been stale for years. Maybe it will be upgraded now that python 2 is officially dead, but given it wasn't so far and there was no effort in that direction, I wouldn't bet on it.

Most probably it is EOL, but it still works for me, I only need it to browse the code from time to time and to look at some past commits.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#234

Post by bluGill »

untog wrote: post #99
danielbarla wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want something to last, don't base it on something that won't last. and > I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to build a site to last 25 years without numerous redesigns, build a static HTML page. While simplicity is a great way to future proof things, I'm not convinced that this argument in general would work nearly as well without the benefit of hindsight. One could be forgiven for confusing it wit…

I think you can generalise the advice: remove as many processing steps as you can. It's not so much that you needed to guess that HTML was going to be as long-lived as it is, it's that HTML is the final product that actually loads on the users computer, and those tend to stick around for a long time (or at least be emulated). The code that lives on a backend server somewhere, not so much. For what it's worth, I don't…

Google controls the major web engine. I don't trust google to not deprecate parts of html over time because the new shiny is "better". I would rather maintain markdown generators which I can update to change the markup to whatever the latest google insists needs to work instead of rewriting all my documents.

I'm currently tasked with writing a UI for a machine that has a 25 year expected lifespan before wear means it is replaced. This is a real concern - think about where computers were 25 years ago and try to find something you are sure will work and look nice.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#235

Post by TheFlyingFish »

dredmorbius wrote: post #207
theandrewbailey wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an interesting line of thinking though: exactly what properties of HTML make it so long lived? I've thought about this on and off for a few years. Here's what I've come up with: 1. Popularity. You can't really display anything in a web browser without it, blank pages with one AJAX script notwithstanding. 2. Ease of use. Open a text editor, type some markup, save the file with .html, and open in a browser. When…

I'd argue your #3 is wide of the mark. It's not that there's a well-defined open standard. It's that browsers will eat any old crap that's thrown at them and turn it into something plausible, if not precisely what the author intended or reader really wants. Yes, there's a standard, and yes it's open. It's observed far more in the breach, as a few minutes with a validator on well-known sites will demonstrate. Your com…

>It's that browsers will eat any old crap that's thrown at them and turn it into something plausible, if not precisely what the author intended or reader really wants.

Reminds me of the fairly prescient "In Praise of Evolvable Systems" essay from 1996: https://web.archive.org/web/20190409041249/http://www.shirky...

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#236

Post by ajross »

scarface74 wrote: post #231
bjornjajajaja wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has been fairly good at allowing older binaries to run on newer systems. Apple is pretty annoying in this regard. There’s a lot of software that doesn’t work on versions maybe only 5 years old. A lot of software doesn’t need to change to be honest. Microsoft word for example. Word processing: you sit down and type stuff, maybe change the font once or twice. I guess the collaborative features are nice being…

You haven’t tried to run 16 bit software on 64 bit Windows have you?

True enough. Though to be fair the last new version of a Win16 OS shipped 26 years ago, and Win32 became the standard API in consumer products 24 years ago. There are degrees of worry here. Software of the vintage you're talking about was contemporary with System 7, and the closest ancestor to current OS X was called "NextStep 3.3".

The point upthread was that genuinely useful stuff gets retired just a few years after release in the Apple world, and I think that's broadly true. It's true with hardware too -- professional audio people are stuck with truckloads of firewire hardware that they can't use with their new laptops, for example.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#237

Post by ygjb »

scarface74 wrote: post #231
bjornjajajaja wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has been fairly good at allowing older binaries to run on newer systems. Apple is pretty annoying in this regard. There’s a lot of software that doesn’t work on versions maybe only 5 years old. A lot of software doesn’t need to change to be honest. Microsoft word for example. Word processing: you sit down and type stuff, maybe change the font once or twice. I guess the collaborative features are nice being…

You haven’t tried to run 16 bit software on 64 bit Windows have you?

Not to be snarky, but if there is a need to do this, it's pretty easy. If there is a real need, it is pretty trivial to do with VirtualBox or DosBox.

Those applications from 20 years ago running in emulators will work far better in 20 more years than Apps from today that stop working due to remote service dependencies to force vendor lock-in.

It is endlessly amusing to me that the more tightly integrated the cloud services get to conventional computing tasks, the more likely we will end up with Vernor Vinge style programmer archaeologists from A Deepness in the Sky...

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#238

Post by melq »

_fh5n wrote: post #134

As an Italian, reading this is site is absolute bliss. There's just so much to discover. I really suggest non-Italian speakers to automatically translate it with Google and dive into it.

I can't believe how well google translates this. Is there something about Italian that lends itself to english translation or is translate getting this good with other languages too I wonder?

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#239

Post by ssijak »

I have a 'personal' website which is also about 18years old. It was the first website I built while in elementary school, also in Frontpage. I uploaded it to I think Geocities or something like that, I think it was Yahoo related hosting, can't remember exactly, but it was free hosting.

Some 'fancy' JS effects do not work on the page now, but it is still up. I forgot about and remembered it few years ago and checked it to find it still up. But I can't remember where could I login to see the files and what are the credentials so it makes me giggle that it will stay up for who knows how much longer as a small part of my past :)

http://dzigi.itgo.com

http://dzigi.itgo.com/o_autoru.htm "about author page" with a bio and pic haha

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#240

Post by woodrowbarlow »

Santosh83 wrote: post #210
generationP wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you just keep editing the html in a text editor? Frontpage's generated html isn't that unreadable.

Presumably the author used a WYSIWYG editor in the first place because he is not a technical person, so for him/her to now not only learn enough HTML/CSS/javascript to turn to hand editing but to also understand Frontpage's noisy output would probably take enough effort that they might rather decide to shut down the site if they're not able to continue using Frontpage. Hiring a dev to redo the site is another option…

ironically, i bet the author has learned more technical skills by maintaining a system that can continue to run their version of frontpage than they would have if they had just taught themselves HTML from the start.
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