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Building a website like it's 1999

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Re: Building a website like it's 1999

#71
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you and the author both misunderstood what we really lost. I don’t think that what we miss the most is the old 90’s patchwork of gif style. Not that I’m not nostalgic of it, of course I am. But what I miss is the fact that back in the day, owning a little part of the internet was the normal thing and, contrary to nowadays profiles on social media, this space was really yours. It was as awful as what people’s…

This is the most salient point. The lost feature of the 90s web is the content , not the GeoCities aesthetic. Web pages were quirky not because of gifs but because someone lovingly collected a bunch of Dragonball Z images or wrote summaries of X-Files episodes and put those up for others to enjoy. Some people put up recipes or stories or whatever. Most amateur homepages weren't a monetized side hustle, just content a…

I truly don't understand this argument.

First of all, people post extremely niche and personal content on their social media feeds. Heck, my own Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram feeds are mostly comprised of stuff on the same level of quirky ingenuity of the early web. So if your issue is with the presence of this type of "content", then I really don't see it.

Secondly you might argue, like many others, that the true problem is not that the content is here, but it's not the norm. It's not the norm to have a website, it's not the norm to be fragile and personal and quirky online. But even if that were the case, why do you care? There is more "90s-style" content today that there were in the 90s. You don't have enough time to live on this earth to read it all. Do you care if "in proportion" they don't make up the same share of the total webpages like they once did? Doesn't the sheer number of them not satisfy you enough?

Re: Building a website like it's 1999

#72
But you still can use HTML4 and it will work on modern browsers. That's the best thing about the web - backward compatibility (until google steps in and does something silly). Use time appropriate image formats, like gif and jpeg, probably even bmp, and re-do navigation with iframes.

Re: Building a website like it's 1999

#73

This is fantastic, but not fully in the spirit of the old web. Personal pages looked like they did because they were essentially outsider art: the product of experimentation by teenagers and rank amateurs, who had no idea what we were doing. In 1999 we were using Netscape Composer and FrontPage Express, because they came with our browsers and were fun to explore. Only a web professional could use these tricks today t…

> FrontPage           

we love to see it

Re: Building a website like it's 1999

#74

This is fantastic, but not fully in the spirit of the old web. Personal pages looked like they did because they were essentially outsider art: the product of experimentation by teenagers and rank amateurs, who had no idea what we were doing. In 1999 we were using Netscape Composer and FrontPage Express, because they came with our browsers and were fun to explore. Only a web professional could use these tricks today t…

HoTMetaL!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HoTMetaL

Re: Building a website like it's 1999

#76

This is fantastic, but not fully in the spirit of the old web. Personal pages looked like they did because they were essentially outsider art: the product of experimentation by teenagers and rank amateurs, who had no idea what we were doing. In 1999 we were using Netscape Composer and FrontPage Express, because they came with our browsers and were fun to explore. Only a web professional could use these tricks today t…

> FrontPage           

Having cut my teeth on FrontPage, I remember being unreasonably happy with the markup generated by DreamWeaver.

Re: Building a website like it's 1999

#77
post #23

A few weeks ago I realized that my personal website from 1999 is still up and unchanged, just copied from one host to another: https://anioni.com/pauli/site1999/ I made this when I was 19, before I changed career ambitions to programming. Maybe it’s moderately interesting as an actual 1999 website time capsule. There’s no CSS because IIRC it didn’t work very well in Netscape 4. Layout was done with tables and frames.…

really love both the site and the work on the site

Re: Building a website like it's 1999

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FrontPage           

Having cut my teeth on FrontPage, I remember being unreasonably happy with the markup generated by DreamWeaver.

No-code.

What’s old is new again.

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