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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

The oldest snapshot on Archive.org is from November 1996: http://web.archive.org/web/19961112181513/http://www.nytimes...

Back then, they even had a low-bandwidth version of the site: http://web.archive.org/web/19990117023050/http://www.nytimes...

The website included various tutorials on how to use it, including a guide that covers the different browsers. None of the browsers listed are actively developed today: http://web.archive.org/web/19961112182937/http://www.nytimes...

edit: A couple of other observations:

- How many other content websites have published for nearly this long and yet have their oldest articles remain on their original URLs? Most news sites can't even do a redesign without breaking all of their old article URLs.

- I like this Spiderbites feature -- a sitemap of a year's worth of articles (likely for webcrawlers at the time): http://spiderbites.nytimes.com/free_1996/

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That awkward moment when website you made 20 years ago is better to read articles.

Seriously. No big list of social media icons. No big sidebar of "most emailed" and "recommended for you." Actual structure to the front page.

I once saw a scene in a movie from the 1990's where the character used the NYT website to look up an article. My reaction: jealousy.

Pro-tip: click the print link for clutter free reading. Works on a lot of news sites.

I wonder which big company will say, "Enough is enough. We are just irritating our readers/customers with all the lag time, and utter confusion."

Right now, if I see a website winding up; I hit that X with the speed of a mouse hitting the stimulant lever. I don't think I'm alone.

None because the majority of users don't care and click those social links.

Not necessarily the majority of users, but the users who draw in more traffic. Sites court some users more than others.

Similarly, sites that sell products don't care how many users they have, they care how many users buy. And they optimize accordingly.

>"That awkward moment when website you made 20 years ago is better to read articles."

Am I the only one who thinks that the whitespace heavy and well designed NYT modern site is better? Good line height, good type choice, very good readability.

As opposed to times new roman at 1.0 line height, is that really the pinnacle of readability? Eight grade book report format?

I hit Reader Mode instantly for all articles. Too many distractions.

I agree. With ad block on, I think the current NYT site is very nice to read.

It's a bit of a joke, but yes NY Times does a good job :)

I use a low brightness setting on my laptop because I am uncomfortable looking at bright screens for extended periods of time. I prefer the body text to be #000 on something close to #FFF (this website uses #828282, which is fine for me.) The Times uses #333 for their body text which is probably enough contrast for bright screens, but it is noticeably poorer on the dimmer screen that I use. I don't see a reason to make the text more difficult for the people with poor vision, especially elderly, who on the whole have poorer vision, to read. I can use extensions and overwrite their CSS to change this, but I shouldn't have to.

The fixed headers are very annoying on small laptops, where vertical screen space is already limited. It makes no sense to stuff the main navigation menu into a hamburger bar on the FRONT PAGE of a newspaper web site so that a tiny amount of white space may be added to the sides.

A navigation bar shouldn't scroll down the screen with me and steal screen space when I'm reading an article. I would rather hit the back button, change tabs, or scroll to the top and click on a different section when I'm done reading an article. And the layout is just ugly when Javascript is turned off because there is no spacing between the full size images and the body text.

"Please open your window to the width of this line of text."

I wish I was a web developer in 1996!

> I wish I was a web developer in 1996!

As someone who was actually developing websites in the years 1996-1999... no, you really, really don't.

CSS1 was released in December 1996, just to give you an idea.

So you basically didn't give a shit about how the website looks and just focused on the content? Sounds cool :)

No, people gave twice as much of a care how the website looked, and the tools were basically tables. The bottom line for getting hired as a high-level web designer was "can this person look at 1000+ lines of table markup and be patient enough to figure out how to prevent our email address from going off the page in an 800px browser window".

I only wish. The marketers were in full force. We'd do "slice and dice" design, where a designer would mock up the full page as single graphic in Photoshop, then we'd slice that image into multiple, and reassemble in tables (no reliable CSS!) with font tags.

Today we argue about how much JS is too much, or if there is such a thing, but back then if you wanted the markup to change you sent a request to the backend and rerendered the entire page with the small change you desired.

Loading a page was an exercise in patience, as a first pass on a _decent_ page would get you the text and highly pixelated images, then subsequent passes (and you could watch the screen redraw from the top down multiple times) would reduce the pixelation to LESS BUT STILL pixelated versions.

Some sites were just Word documents that had been "Save as HTML" -> These could be MB of markup, and basically impossible to edit.

Plus, almost immediately, the browser wars began and rather than arguing over how to push the standards, they had none, and just tried to establish their own, incompatible vision.

Basically, once the general populace was the target for content, you were no longer allowed to just worry about the content.

Oh, good grief. That brings back terrible memories of infinitely nested tables and transparent PNGs. And the font tags. The font tags.

I didn't even mention imagemaps.

Times Machine (http://timesmachine.nytimes.com) is great for browsing around old NYTimes articles.

Love low bandwidth versions of sites. I use http://thin.npr.org most of the time and it's great.

I checked the markup for the second example you posted here and I found REALLY some weird HTML tags like <nyt_header>, <nyt_text>, <nyt_footer> ...etc

Anybody have any idea what are these?

My guess it's leftover semantic markup from whatever internal system they were using to author the page.

Since older browsers will skip rendering tags (or rather just pretend the tag wasn't present at all) that they don't recognize, custom HTML editors and CMSs can inject metadata as custom html tags in order to help track page sections.

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