Yuji Oshimoto: Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4+ or Explorer 4+ | Hacker News Reader

Yuji Oshimoto: Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4+ or Explorer 4+

04.jp.org

103 pointsda0248 comments

Here is my favourite from the "DHTML" era: http://www.ozones.com/

I can't believe that people don't even remember that word anymore. Just getting this crap to work at all, let alone look good, or work cross-browser, was a miracle. This is the before browsers had developer tools at all and often you'd have to guess what was wrong when you had layout or styling issues. Years later, firebug came and fixed a bunch of that. Script errors were arcane and horrifying.

Sigh. We needn't have suffered through so much in the dark ages of the web :-) I don't miss any of that at all, aside from the cool looking websites.

I lost countless hours trying to replicate the DHTML effects from ziggen.com (Sigurd Mannsaker) - that site repeatedly demonstrated an utter mastery of Dynamic HTML (without making your mouse cursor have a trail...)

Some similar era sites that evoke memories...

* k10k.net (http://www.cubancouncil.com/work/project/kaliber-10000)

* http://www.chapter3.net/imperium/

* http://www.zeldman.com

* Joshua Davis' Dreamless.org and Praystation

Man, k10k and Joshua Davis' stuff were the first stops for every designer looking for inspiration at my old job circa 2000-2004.

http://swanky.org

I love K10K pixels, specially those related to Jakob Nielsen, :)

My favorite from back then was MyWebOS.

Long dead, doesn't even have a Wikipedia article, but it impressed me that they could do a desktop GUI back then without resorting to Java or Flash.

Bitmap fonts!

Out of a sense of general nostalgia I have to post my favourite website of all time: http://superior-web-solutions.com

Play on a Flash-capable browser, turn up the sound and definitely do not skip the intro.

Whoever built this was an insane Flash genius, the like of which we'll never see again. Thankfully.

wow that site is awesome

Accidentally burned 15 minutes on this part of it: http://superior-web-solutions.com/Broadband/Studio1/Studio1....

Hahaha!! That site was hilarious!!

But seriously, since we had "Responsive Web Design" as a "Good Thing", most web pages look the same these days!!

They don't have to and mostly that's a function of dominant business using similar styles because they work.

Plenty of creative site designs out there but we aren't in the creative wild west for business designs anymore.

Sad, but it's also a sign of maturity.

My favorite is the wasabi cartoon which ends with the word "true": http://superior-web-solutions.com/Broadband/Studio1/cartoons...

Wow, that is amazing. As much as I do hate Flash, it certainly made it easy for people to make interactive craziness on the web.

This reminds me of lots of old sites. For example: http://www.forrestwalter.com

I've been sentimentalizing lately about that old space-conserving style with very rigid boundaries (really for conservative monitor support) as nowadays we are all over the page and the typical site is often a mess in many ways.

Totally unrelated, but I found this entry on his blog really interesting:

くしゃみをする度に　頭の中で何かが　海ぶどうを噛み潰したような　プチっと弾ける感触があって　その後　頭皮の下を暖かい感覚が　じんわりと広がっていく　それはたぶん　ゆっくりと死んでいるのだ。

Rough translation:

"Every time I sneeze, it feels like something goes POP inside my head and bursts like a sea grape, and afterward a warm sensation starts slowly spreading from under my scalp. I think this means I'm slowly dying."

It's the last post on the blog, from 2010...

I'm a bit 'out of the loop' here I'm afraid. I Googled a little and he seems to be a designer? Of fonts, apparently?

Some one help me out here?

I found a lot of websites like these to be very inspirational back in my early computing days (think 2002 or so). The illustration and design community seemed to be very alive back then...I remember getting my hands on Adobe Photoshop 6 and digging tutorial after tutorial. Maybe in another life I would have been a graphic designer.

Ah, the screenshot changes on refresh.

Seems to all be various Famicom/NES games. I've spotted Castlevania, Donkey Kong Jr., Kung Fu, and Spy vs. Spy so far.

Oh my. I was a contractor at Netscape in the summer of 1997, one of two who worked out of the Mountain View campus. JavaScript. Layers. Embedded custom Java widgets.

Does this mean I have 20 years of JavaScript experience? Feels more as if the first ten years have cancelled out the past ten years, mutually annihilating, leaving weird traces in the fog chamber I use for a brain.

Have you written about your experiences @ Netscape or any other company from the 90s? I would love to read the good/bad/ugly aspects of that period.

How about some HTML 2.0? https://www.warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm

http://i.imgur.com/exGePCA.png

Ditto

http://i.imgur.com/UJFM9vA.png

I was hoping to see some awesome <layer> tag action, but it wasn't to be.

Is it time to whip out Cameron's World again?

http://www.cameronsworld.net/

I miss this web.

I actually do not, even though I was around back then and had a page like this.

I find the site impossible to see, navigate, understand. We've come such a long way towards more usable, user-friendly sites.

I'd argue the exact opposite. Our sites these days are sluggish at best. Ads do their best to stop you from doing whatever you went to the site to do. Designs focus on flashy effects and pictures rather than content.

Whenever I click a link, I wonder what kind of crap I'll be greeted by this time, hoping that It'll be plain text and nothing else.

Almost all text is a GIF with all-caps monospaced 8px font. Yeah, okay, I get nostalgia, minimalism and all that, but arguing it is actually readable or accessible, well…

Yeah, that specific one has the old "all text as image" thing (still big in Asia).

I am arguing against "we have come so far", as I do not find the current web pretty nor pleasant.

Its up to you how you design your websites. Don't use an ad business model, don't use flashy effects. Write HTML. You don't have to use the latest React + nosql for a business info page.

Of course - I'm a big advocate of a plain HTML file for static content, and "content first", javascript-free-unless-necessary design.

I don't get to design the pages I visit, though, and the React, background videos, interrupting ads and others are very popular fetishes.

Yeah, it's pretty awful. It's unreadable, it's not clear what can be interacted with, or what I'm being shown. Apparently if you refresh you get a different image? I dunno. I have no idea what this site is trying to show me.

People miss sites that don't carry 50mb of JS, ads, tracking, and sites that all look the same.

I don't miss this style of site. However, I do miss the web that existed at the same time as this.

Simpler markdown, less centralization and commercial crap, discoverable on search engines, and generally less crap getting shipped in my face.

Remember that those old sites were designed for CRT monitors which had different characteristics.

Such as 800 x 600 pixels, interlaced at 60Hz and arranged on a curved 17" screen. Designing for 1024 x 768 would be pushing it, had to play safe with 800 x 600 for common sense usability reasons.

On a 14 inch monitor, 800x600 pixels gave about 72dpi, while 1024x768 gave a much less legible 90dpi. At the time, a point would equal a pixel. So the average user in 1995 had a 14 inch monitor and ran at 800x600.

However, I've never seen interlaced 800x600.

Reminds me of current websites that only work with Chrome.

What I like most, is that per default it barely looks different than many other modern pages for me. It's blank as the iframe (for modern pages some required js) is loaded from a different domain [0] and uMatrix blocks that.

[0]: http://dsg4.com/04/

OT, but there was a great site from this era (2005 or so) that I cannot remember the name of. I think it was the portfolio of another japanese designer, or at least I think it had a japanese name. The whole website was in Flash, and it consisted of literal hundreds of small demos (labeled with a progressive number), for example I remember a series of different clocks with creative design and animations, or many pseudo-games where you moved your mouse or click on abstract shapes and stuff happened. I think at some point it also had a page where users could move a pointer with the mouse and all other online users could see all the movements in real time, or something like that. Does it ring a bell for anybody? I've been thinking about it for years but I absolutely cannot remember what it was called...

Oh, man, I do.

Here's my fav old school site: http://www.bionic-systems.com/archive/portfolio2001/

If anyone can find a web archive of Eddie Designs I've been looking forever for it. I can't remember the URL.

The link section is a world of nostalgia for me. Lots of websites that were truly amazing in 1997-2000

Man, this brings back memories: I was visiting this and k10k.net daily for inspiration.

threeoh.com (link from 04.jp.org) works much better in modern browsers ;)

I'm impressed it's still archived there.

I remember visiting this site when I was a kid!

Those bitmap fonts <3

Nostalgia!

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