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 to simulate that appearance.
The click-and-drag tools and absolutely garbage code generators were integral to the experience, because they brought in the weirdos who didn't know we were doing it wrong. We learned, but lost something along the way.
I only had Notepad (the default Windows text editor). I longed for Microsoft Frontpage and HoTMetaL and Dreamweaver. Looking back, I'm glad gained experience on the native experience rather than through the editor abstractions because it forced me to learn.
Hotdog Pro was everything to me. Going from Notepad to Hotdog opened my eyes to the future of the Internet. It set me down a path where I would eventually get my first paid tech gig working at my local newspaper in high school maintaining the photo departments daily web presence.
I think the comparison to outside art is very apt, although I think the boundary between professional and amateur was porous. Professionals wrote the tools amateurs used, they wrote the books and references at least some of those amateurs consulted, and I imagine they originally wrote at least some of the snippets that got copy and pasted endlessly. In theory, a return of the old web (aesthetically and socially) could involve people copying snippets like these. As you mention, the current web's complexity makes that unlikely, unfortunately.
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. The front page looks oddly tiny now, but I guess it was the correct size on a 1024*768 screen. I remember being happy about coming up with a frame trick for vertically centering that menu box. (A classic web design conundrum!)
It's so much harder to pull it off with the huge range in screen sizes and resolutions. Back then you could make an 800x600 (or maybe even up to 960 width) design and it would work on 99% of the monitors (rarely did anyone have more than 1024x768).
I think the range in aspect ratios is the bigger problem. It's hard to get around without resulting in a nasty reactive design where everything keeps shuffling around as you resize the window.
Sure, very solvable nowadays with media queries, flex box, grid, screen width and height units, etc. These features didn't exist in 90s CSS.
But even though the tools exist today, it is still challenging to do well. Agreed that aspect ratio variability is a bigger problem (we can no longer count on 4:3 as the standard).
I have a 4K monitor on my desk with 100% scaling, and one of the things that always gives me a chuckle is maximizing a browser window.
Most websites just stop getting wider after a certain point, which is fine because you wouldn't want to read a line of text that long anyway. It's usually a column in the middle maybe 1/3rd of the screen.
The typical thing was a fixed width container table wrapped with <CENTER> tags. Then you set textalign on that table. Voilá your table fit all your content with a fixed size/aspect but would float center on the page of someone with larger than 800x600 or whatever minimum you designed for.
While numerous websites settled for a fixed width indeed (I think, this was mostly a US school of thinking), responsive designs were somewhat doable with table layouts. What you couldn't do was a general change of element order etc. (However, you could respond in JS using `document.write()` on first render.)
I had the same thought earlier this year when I saw what Midjourney is capable of. The style that I’d spent many years in my youth trying to master was now available at a push of a button.
It felt like I had dodged a bullet by switching to programming instead of pursuing an art career. That happened primarily because I realized fairly quickly that my talent was quite limited and there were thousands of better artists in this space, everyone competing over the Internet. Specializing on a programming niche felt like a better long-term plan.
I had a love-hate relationship with MS WordArt. So much time trying to capture a manager's vision for their slide in yet another PowerPoint presentation or doc.
Coding up simple WordArt-like effects for the web can be fun - making sure the results are responsive and accessible, of course. Making them interactive just adds to the joy!
Ok you got me, I feel nostalgic.
What strikes me most is that those people from 90th were putting their creativity into something only handful of people will ever see, they were effectively shouting to void.
I would love to be still able to discover low-ranging websites like this. I remember somebody shared some alternative search engine?
> What strikes me most is that those people from 90th were putting their creativity into something only handful of people will ever see, they were effectively shouting to void.
Well you had visitor counters and guestbooks. There was obviously no expectation to go "viral" and have millions of visitors, but it felt social in a different way. More like a small cozy neighborhood, less like a train station.
I made a website for my amateur games at the time, with the requisite visitor counters and guestbook. I was fortunate enough to find an archive somewhere, and saw someone who worked at a library had come across my site and left some encouraging words. For me, that was the best part of the web back then.
Oh, I feel like it’s quite the opposite! As a teenager I created a crappy non-English website about a topic that interested me, added it to a few local search engines (which worked more like directories) and it got tons of traffic, engagements with the guest book etc. Today, if you just create a website and have it crawled by the search engines, it will get no traffic at all.
I think mmm.page[1] gets at a good 2022 model of this. People can create very personal websites without learning about HTML and those sites can be conveniently viewed on mobile.
I really like how I can switch styles in the top right corner.
I'm not necessarily nostalgic for the design from the '90's web, but the openness and sometimes weirdness of personal sites/blogs is something that I miss (and can really appreciate if I do find it).
Side rant: I have probably looked up more about this CLS (cumulative layout shift) thing that now I hate the word "just". "Just" do this, "just" do that. Bollocks. Tomorrow it will be something else. There are already at least three ways to handle image width and height. It is easy they say. Use the first approach if the image is an important of the main subject of the page. Use the second approach if the image is purely decorative and not an integral to the main subject of the page. Use the third approach if you are an idiot (I made this part up because I forgot what the third one was for).
I see this website does not have width and height in all of its images.
For example, in the image below, the author clearly knows the dimensions of the image are 1000px x 743px.
However, they didn't include the dimensions and the CLS is green under 0.1 (0.087 mobile and 0.045 desktop in my test [pagespeed]).
I opened developer tools in my firefox nightly browser, set throttling to GPRS, and disabled cache in my network tab and I reloaded the page.
I clearly see text push down as screenshots appear.
So do width and height / aspect ratio not matter any more (did they ever)?
I absolutely hate feeling like an idiot because I can't keep up with what matters and what does not.
<pre>
<figure>
<picture>
<source srcset="/img/blog/build-1999/geocities1.webp" type="image/webp">
<img src="/img/blog/build-1999/geocities1.png" alt="A brightly coloured website that says 'Welcome to Tom & Sherry's Proud Grandparents page. The Proud Grandparents page was created to show pictures of our grandchildren to family and friends, and an occasional Web surfer. The grandkids, our pride and joy, and their parents have made us very proud. Okay, let's see the pictures!'">
</picture>
<figcaption><a href="https://geocities.restorativland.org/Heartland/Ridge/1217/">... Proud Grandparents Page</a>
</figcaption></figure>
</pre>
Apart from the style & aesthetic, there was this great & glorious period of time on the web from around 1997 to 2004 (rough estimate) where broadband was was still rare enough the web designers had to assume slow dialup connections and at least try to keep page size low.
During this time, if you had broadband and a moderately fast computer, browsing the web lightning fast.
Then came the frameworks and, especially after smartphones, the adaptive web for small mobile-first(ish, or second or whatever) screen sizes and the bloat began. Previously you only had to worry about pages that dumped flash ads or used flash for every UI element, they were still slow. Then everything became about as slow as before.
I still think browsing is a bit faster than the dialup days, but not as fast as the golden age from '97-'04. It seems now that page loads sizes & javascript CPU load expand at roughly the pave of computing power & bandwidth availability.
Which means it's a pretty awful experience for anyone on a low end computer w/ broadband that barely meets the definition.
I bet you some people got really annoyed when written language was standardized and people couldn't simply spell things willy nilly using "their creativity". Every time you read a book you are looking at thousands of years of typographical standardization, but you don't lament the fact that they "all look the same". In fact, if you took a book out of the library shelf and saw it was written in a weird font (i.e. papyrus) and with weird formatting, unless it was poetry you would put it right back and never touch it again. Same happens when you read a scientific paper and you see it's clearly written with MS Word.
This fetishization of the "old web" initially works when you're just browsing some terse blog or personal web page from people you don't even know, but the moment you want to actually search for information on the web this style of websites immediately becomes annoying. There's a reason why Wikipedia has kept basically the same layout since forever, because it works. If I want to know about medieval history I can navigate Wikipedia in a matter of seconds. On the other hand, good luck navigating through the same information from the personal blog of some retired medieval professor. And what if you want to switch topic and read stuff from another blog with a completely different layout? God help you.
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 tastes and minds are but it had, well, personality. And you really owned it. It was awful because you were awful but that was ok because everybody is awful. If it was nice, that was because you took the time to make it nice.
It’s not the style I miss, but the fact that it was the result of a real person’s hobby.
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 about the creators' interests.
Unfortunately today a lot of passion content lives in social media silos. Some still survives on the web, though now on Wikis rather than homepages.
I don't miss the GeoCities aesthetic of the 90s web, I suffered through the design to get to the interesting content. The design wasn't the important part.
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?
>First of all, people post extremely niche and personal content on their social media feeds.
In the old internet you could be reasonably certain that people where sharing because they wanted to share. There was no ulterior motive of profit, growing a large following, etc. It felt more genuine. Today, most people who actively post seem to be trying to build a following to become an "influencer".
It could be that this is a product of lack of discoverability of differently motivated content, but that lack of discoverability is still directly caused by what the modern internet is (its incentives and what is promoted by the giants in the space: engagement).
Gemini[1] and other small nets seem to capture some of that old share-with-no-ulterior-motive vibe, but we will see how long it lasts.
> Heck, my own Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram feeds are mostly comprised of stuff on the same level of quirky ingenuity of the early web.
This is exactly a problem I mentioned. You've got content on three social networks only one of which is readily crawlable by search engines. Twitter and Instagram are silos that really only want registered users to have access to content in their silo.
As to your second point you're ascribing to me an argument I did not make. I was pointing out that the amateur web of the 90s wasn't quirky because of garish colors or animated gifs. It was quirky because people put up passion projects. Seeing some "90s style" page that just puts animated gifs and garish colors is completely missing what made the web incredibly interesting.
For a long time letters were only written by hand. Nowadays the only people writing them by hand are the people who truly want it.
In the early days you really had no choice. There was no WordPress, no MySpace and no Github Pages. It was the norm because it was the easiest thing to do if you wanted a presence on the web. If something like Facebook existed in 1993 let me assure you a whole lot of people would have been contempt with just creating a profile there and calling it quits.
There are more personal websites today than there ever were, people who want to be creative on the web always find a way.
Mind that this was the amateur section of the web. By 1999, professional websites had become pretty complex (often more complex than they are at average nowadays) and invested considerably in navigation. (There was still some experimentation going on, as building a website was also a question of ambitions, which included improving on what was considered a common or average standard. Website navigation was the most obvious one and was also a creative challenge with prominent awards having dedicated categories for this. No way you could have gotten away with a "hamburger" in 1999. ;-) )
As for the modern web and amateur content, does a post in some infinite-scroll content compilation really compare that favorably?
I'd argue the inconsistency in design is not limited to old websites. If anything, it's far worse with modern websites, since they aggressively re-style interface elements and frequently invent their own paradigms. Scrolling may re-arrange the content of a document, sometimes a desktop website has mobile paradigms like hamburger button causing a laggy menu to appear, often with buttons with no label that are decorated with minimalist line-art icons that are about as easy to parse as Linear B. Links are replaced with buttons, which are never natively styled and rarely clear that they are buttons. You have to click and find out. Sometimes clicking in a blank area causes something unpredictable to happen. Scrolling up or moving the mouse cursor to the edge of the window may cause pop over-elements to cover the text. The design is constantly shifting and moving around as ads are loaded randomly within whatever you're reading. Resizing the window may cause UI elements to move around, or to appear, or be hidden. Clicking a link may cause the ephemeral state of the document to change. The back button doesn't work after this happens. Sometimes scrolling down breaks the back button as well.
>There's a reason why Wikipedia has kept basically the same layout since forever, because it works.
I wish other designers and developers internalised this. The constant treadmill of redesigns common with seemingly all modern software development undervalues the users' mental model and muscle memory for how the site works.
One factor that makes me prefer that retired professor's website is that it works perfectly with reader mode, which a JS heavy website isn't guaranteed to.
The point of people who fetishize the old web is about the quirkiness of the websites. If you just slap a reader mode on them all the aesthetics vanishs and only the html shines, which is a whole other topic
> This fetishization of the "old web" initially works when you're just browsing some terse blog or personal web page from people you don't even know, but the moment you want to actually search for information on the web this style of websites immediately becomes annoying.
This. I see a lot of people being angry at UI changes on bug platforms with the reason that "they all look the same", but unless the platform is a blog or a personal site, having some standardised look helps reading and avoid being distracted.
I totally agree with you.
Language standardization, typography, and published vs unpublished works are all in separate domains.
Language standardization is not typography and we have figured out typography for the most part before language standardization. Look at the American English 'argument' vs the British English 'arguement' or 'color' vs 'colour'.
I also just so happen to have a collection of German children's books - the font family each uses is different, but it's still German.
I liken web sites to digital magazines and newspapers. These have an artistic quality to them in terms of content, structure, pictures, etc.
Would you not think it bland if every newspaper or magazine on the planet used the same structure, font-face, and voice?
I remember learning how to write html w my friend when we were in middle school. The hardest part was content. We decided just on lists of things we liked and didn’t like. I remember adding things to these lists was super fun and we put a lot of thought into what was there and why.
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.
Late 90's, I was using a website framework in a no-sql object database, with an outliner for coding.
There was a three pass rendering system, and I was writing with CSS, but in the final filter I was string replacing font-face in in place of the classes because or poor support in browsers.
The 5KB to 10KB pages of that era appear more complex than minimalist 1MB pages of today. You could save 100 or even 200 webpages on a 1.4MB floppy disk.
Frankly speaking I do not understand why a blog like yours is getting so many hits , whereas surely something like this written by me or 99 percent of the users in HN can never get such traction. I understand the reason for this is that you are somebody whereas we are nobodies. That’s why I don’t think that outside this niche of people who appreciate this idea it wound really take off. We are not going to wake up tomorrow to see the internet filled with 90s style websites. Those days are gone my friend.
Dunno. HN is actually a powerful "viral engine." Lots of people without an internet following (including me) have had stuff blow up unexpectedly, and it's not world-class research or anything.
The click-and-drag tools and absolutely garbage code generators were integral to the experience, because they brought in the weirdos who didn't know we were doing it wrong. We learned, but lost something along the way.