Related to this, I had trouble finding examples of pre 1996 web design. The internet archive has a lot from 1997 onwards. The oldest live examples of sites from that era, that I know of are:
As a student at liu who had no prior knowledge about lysator it's always interesting to see lysator links in the wild, they seem to pop up when least expected.
How come the site is hosted at lysator and how come it's still up?
Sidenote: The man hosting the site has a very on-topic profile page[0].
David was a pinball fan like myself and couldn't attend the expo in Chicago that year.
I was commiserating on Usenet about not being able to find affordable hosting for the website. This was way before hosting-only companies were available or even Geocities. David stepped up and generously offered room on Lysator.
As to why it's still up, I'm not sure. There was a short period where it looked like it was offline, but it's back now. Perhaps because Expo '94 is on a lot of "oldest websites that still work" lists.
Lysator is incredibly nostalgic for me; when I was just starting on the internet around 1994-1995, a lot of my favorite websites were on lysator, including the gigantic Wheel of Time Index.
And this one from CNN (still 1996, but appropriate representation of that 1995/96 era when design had changed a bit from the earlier plain white backgrounds & basic text layouts):
I actually watched the debates and couldn't believe Dole closed out his first debate with Clinton imploring youngsters to "tap into" his "homepage" (the above link)
Oh, man. Dole/Kemp was definitely designed in the "Make sure everything fits on a 640 × 480 display, and downloads reasonably fast on a 14.4k modem" era.
I think it's fascinating the change in how we view site navigation. Another commenter gave a link to an old Microsoft site that had links all over the place. But for the most part, it seemed like sites started to standardize on navigation vertically on the left side. Now, we generally see them horizontally on the top, or in hamburger menus. But it's interested how that paradigm shifted. It seems like vertical side navigation would be more prevalent now, given how much wider monitors are.
With wider monitors, my browser is actually narrowed. I split the screen in half and devote one half to the browser and the other half to a text editor and terminal. I used to have two monitors to do that, but now just one is fine, but the side effect is that I browse in a pretty narrow window. A narrow window also makes reading somewhat nicer on some sites, since it's harder to read very long lines of text.
>> A narrow window also makes reading somewhat nicer on some sites, since it's harder to read very long lines of text.
Curious to know how this works with ad-heavy sites. Do responsive sites display differently then too?
Been flirting with going to a single 32" monitor for a while. Just wondering if you think it's worth it with your experiences since I do development as well and have a similar setup (one monitor for editor and smaller laptop for browser/terminal) and would like to hear your input.
I use an adblocker, so it's hard to know what ads do (though I disable it on some sites that I believe to be reasonably trustworthy about ads, and that I want to support, like reddit and some major newspaper sites; though I tend to pay for a subscription for sites that I really want to support and continue to block ads).
But, generally, it's fine. Most sites are entirely usable. There's a few that are quirky, but generally, modern websites are designed to scale down to tablets and phones, so they don't act too weird for a narrow lapptop/desktop browser.
I think the most common problem is sites that switch to hamburger menus at too high a resolution (so I get the mobile hamburger navigation on some sites, even though it's kinda silly looking and slightly less ergonomic). It's not super common, though. Most switch to hamburger a little lower than my browser width.
I recently got the Dell 42.5" 4k monster (P4317Q), and while the dpi and color reproduction aren't good enough for serious design work, I'm able to divide my desktop into thirds for browsing and text editing. I usually keep a browser on the left, documentation in the middle, and a terminal on the right. I still get a little giddy when I turn it on every morning. What I really want is for apple to start producing 42" 8k "retina" screens, but I won't hold my breath. :)
Ha, well it is a recreation and obviously not the original. They didn't have the original code so they had to work out how it was made. There's a readme which explains the process: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/discover/1994/readme.html
Is microsoft.com currently not loading for anyone else? I'm getting ERR_SSL_UNRECOGNIZED_NAME_ALERT in Chrome, but I'm not seeing it mentioned anywhere else (e.g. Twitter).
Frames have been improved into iframe and then deprecated in HTML 5.
Frames were a nightmare. You can't link to a page in frames, you can't bookmark it either. Frames break the back button. Come in via search engine? You're only in the main frame, your navigation frame is missing. Want to print? Lol, good luck with that. You always ended up (either intentionally or unintentionally) with a browsing session within someone else's unrelated frameset.
Nitpick: iframes haven't been deprecated in HTML5. In fact they've been extended with new attributes like sandbox and srcdoc. Loading content via javascript is often a better approach but iframes allow you to sandbox content from your website's context, e.g. to prevent XSS attacks etc.
Ironically, I think you'll have much better luck looking at web design books from that era, instead of links on the web. I just pitched a bunch of my design books from that area, and they were full of "cutting edge" examples.
If you want to go all the way back, UNC still hosts ibiblio.org, which has links to the first website at CERN http://info.cern.ch/ and TBL's first page.
My web page is still around http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~keithn/ it was mostly done pre 96 .... not that it was really well designed, I just spammed bezels and had a play with this new cool java thing.
http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/T...
http://oreilly.com/gnn/gnnhome.html
http://www.trincoll.edu/zines/tj/tj12.02.93/tjcontents.html
The BBC also donated its Networking Club to the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/bbcnc.org.uk-19950301