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Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

mars.nasa.gov

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Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#31

Post by leeoniya »

halotrope wrote: post #16

That Page must have been really expensive. Fully responsive, seemingly tested on iPad and iPhone back when mobile browser penetration was much lower compared to now. Incredible loading times, maybe they used a lot of asset preprocessing/compressing to make the page load that fast. One thing that bothers me is that there is no Google Analytics. Without good tracking they might not be able to optimise conversion rates…

you can make the site look 2017 and still work at incredible 2005 speeds by just sprinkling some CSS3

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#32

Post by anexprogrammer »

avar wrote: post #8
olliej wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember when you could browse the internet on a 56k modem? Can you imagine trying to do that today? "Here download 1meg of JS because i want to have a link, but didn't want to write "

It's extremely amusing to see someone nostalgically complain about huge JS assets, when every subpage on that site has a 56K *.gif image as a [1], i.e. something that would have taken a full second to download on a 56K connection. Just like 1MB of JS takes about a second to download & render on your current >1MB/s connection. Back in the day people used to complain about these huge background images just as much as p…

Even if NASA had made every link a 56K GIF they would have slowly lazy loaded with an image outline and Alt text shown allowing you to navigate.

Compare visiting a simple blog post on many sites now. You visit the page, get a brief period of NO text while some slow JS loads. Then all the page assets will bounce around as other elements and JS is loaded, then there's a major refresh as the lazy loading font shows up.

The images are now often deliberately blurred and detail free (Medium) - to show how clever they are using lazy loading. Well, when it triggers successfully, which I find isn't that reliable. Had they provided a very low res starter image rather than blurry obfuscation it'd give something over progressive JPGs.

I'd say the user experience has worked out to be a lot worse. Of course it's higher res and prettier. That's avoiding even mentioning the many who still pay for bandwidth.

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#33

Post by [deleted] »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #26
halotrope wrote: post #16

That Page must have been really expensive. Fully responsive, seemingly tested on iPad and iPhone back when mobile browser penetration was much lower compared to now. Incredible loading times, maybe they used a lot of asset preprocessing/compressing to make the page load that fast. One thing that bothers me is that there is no Google Analytics. Without good tracking they might not be able to optimise conversion rates…

Haha. But is it? I'm having a very hard time reading this on a phone. The text is too small and when I zoom in (unlike on desktop) it doesn't reflow. I don't understand this "no css is best css" trope.. this is unusable on mobile. (Explicit note of the obvious which should go without saying: not a criticism of the page. Just about this HN meme of revering css-less pages. )

[deleted]

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#35

Post by tunap »

biofox wrote: post #25
avar wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's extremely amusing to see someone nostalgically complain about huge JS assets, when every subpage on that site has a 56K *.gif image as a [1], i.e. something that would have taken a full second to download on a 56K connection. Just like 1MB of JS takes about a second to download & render on your current >1MB/s connection. Back in the day people used to complain about these huge background images just as much as p…

At least they had a link for an all text version. I wish more sites today had a lo-fi option.

Now we get to play whack-a-mole script blocking.

Been noticing less 'Print' versions these days, too. So much for convenience & 'save the trees' if you want to print out a page without the secondary cruff.

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#36

Post by Alex3917 »

nxc18 wrote: post #27
halotrope wrote: post #16

That Page must have been really expensive. Fully responsive, seemingly tested on iPad and iPhone back when mobile browser penetration was much lower compared to now. Incredible loading times, maybe they used a lot of asset preprocessing/compressing to make the page load that fast. One thing that bothers me is that there is no Google Analytics. Without good tracking they might not be able to optimise conversion rates…

Its not a single page application though. That really hurts usability. As a user I want to load the entire web application up front, then deal with JavaScript loading nonsense constantly. Why should big powerful servers do the work when I have my battery constrained smartphone/laptop to do the heavy lifting?

Angular is basically just IKEA for web pages.

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#37

Post by marcosdumay »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #32
avar wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's extremely amusing to see someone nostalgically complain about huge JS assets, when every subpage on that site has a 56K *.gif image as a [1], i.e. something that would have taken a full second to download on a 56K connection. Just like 1MB of JS takes about a second to download & render on your current >1MB/s connection. Back in the day people used to complain about these huge background images just as much as p…

Even if NASA had made every link a 56K GIF they would have slowly lazy loaded with an image outline and Alt text shown allowing you to navigate. Compare visiting a simple blog post on many sites now. You visit the page, get a brief period of NO text while some slow JS loads. Then all the page assets will bounce around as other elements and JS is loaded, then there's a major refresh as the lazy loading font shows up.…

The text used to bounce all the time too when images were loaded by then.

Unless, of course, one used a very modern browser, and the page author cared to annotate every image's size. Something that nearly nobody did.

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#38

Post by brudgers »

halotrope wrote: post #16

That Page must have been really expensive. Fully responsive, seemingly tested on iPad and iPhone back when mobile browser penetration was much lower compared to now. Incredible loading times, maybe they used a lot of asset preprocessing/compressing to make the page load that fast. One thing that bothers me is that there is no Google Analytics. Without good tracking they might not be able to optimise conversion rates…

People forget that web pages require maintenance. This is a great example of the benefits that come from keeping plenty of spare HTML on hand. Though I hate think about the cost of to taxpayers of a

in 1997...and the

tags? Well that's just plain over engineering. Oh wait, it's Nasa.

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#39

Post by booleandilemma »

sametmax wrote: post #12
eponeponepon wrote: post #10

Am I the only one to find it a little sad that "oh wow, ${some.website} is still online!" is such a common sentiment? It seems to me that the default should have been for content to persist, and the surprising events should have been content that disappears. I mean, 1997 is not even twenty years. Nobody expresses surprise that, say, Fight Club is still available to watch - but on the web we seem to expect near-total…

It's because a website requires an active will to be maintained online, while a movie, while released, just sit here on its medium.

This is one reason why the "programming is gardening, not engineering" metaphor is apt.

http://www.artima.com/intv/gardenP.html

Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

#40

Post by [deleted] »

sametmax wrote: post #12
eponeponepon wrote: post #10

Am I the only one to find it a little sad that "oh wow, ${some.website} is still online!" is such a common sentiment? It seems to me that the default should have been for content to persist, and the surprising events should have been content that disappears. I mean, 1997 is not even twenty years. Nobody expresses surprise that, say, Fight Club is still available to watch - but on the web we seem to expect near-total…

It's because a website requires an active will to be maintained online, while a movie, while released, just sit here on its medium.

[deleted]
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