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Comment by jsolson | Hacker News Reader

I need to send this to the people who designed the website for one of my favorite local pizza places, Dino's (https://www.dinostomatopie.com/) -- they did _really_ well, generally, but no matter how hard you try, some things come through: the fonts rendered as text are perfectly crisp at whatever absurd DPI this Chromebook has.

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This is better than 50% of websites out there today. I can find all the buttons, the functions of things are clear, and I know how to contact the owner. The menu is text instead of PDF, and the whole thing appears to run properly without javascript enabled.

* No scroll-jacking

* browser history actually works

* middle-click or ctrl+click on a link actually opens links in a new tab.

* No loading spinners, content is rendered immediately.

This site performs better than most SPAs.

* No modal prompts to sign up for a useless newsletter

* No enormous overlay asking me to approve cookies

The brilliance goes beyond the web design. From that menu:

"DINO would like you to know that more than three toppings will be expensive and won't be any better."

That alone makes me want to order a pizza from them.

dangerous

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_quattro_stagioni

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_quattro_formaggi

>the fonts rendered as text are perfectly crisp

Didn't you read the note at the bottom?

"This site is best viewed with Netscape. Download v4.7.2 by clicking here."

Clearly, you didn't follow the instructions for best viewing experience!

Ah, that's where it all went wrong, moving beyond Netscape 4!

This is glorious. The only way I could tell with any confidence it wasn't real was the clean, modern HTML and CSS (get with the program folks, this should be non-validating XHTML 1.1!)

Nice easter egg from the source code:

  <!-- <audio autoplay="autoplay" controls="controls"><source src="topgun.mid" type="audio/mpeg"></audio> -->

topgun.mid actually exists.

And I guess I've just found the most authentic and ridiculous way to play a midi file on somewhat modern macOS: run winamp in wine.

And now I have a new ringtone.

Finally, I can wear my love for top gun on my sleeve and—for the first time in a decade—take my phone off vibrate.

Edit: why is this so hard to do on an iPhone? Guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

using many apps with sound enabled is shocking after long periods of app silence. Social media apps sound like slot machines! So much pavlovian conditioning... Not sure how all that is still legal.

My god, they even have a working link to a zip file containing a Netscape Navigator exe. I hope that's on a CDN.

It's not, the download failed several times for me.

When it finally worked, I was disappointed to see that I couldn't get it to run on Win 10 (64-bit).

(It does appear to be a Windows executable, though)

I'm happy to report that I was able to download the zip file and run the executable on my Ubuntu box with Wine. It was quite surreal to see Netscape installer running on my 4k monitor. I was even able to open the browser and navigate to Google.

Sadly https://www.dinostomatopie.com/ and http://www.dinostomatopie.com/ failed to open with a message saying "Netscape and this server cannot communicate securely because they have no common encryption algorithm(s)".

What's the point of forcing HTTPS? It's a pizza place, not a bank.

It stops Comcast selling your topping preferences to other pizzerias

encryption works much better when it's setup without discrimination. I mean not the encryption itself; in the end, it's a tool not the aim.

It stops a man-in-the-middle attacker from trying to exploit your browser/extensions/password manager by injecting code into that site (once the cert is pinned).

It might also help with SEO? Google's been pushing for https everywhere.

You have to run the old browsers through a local proxy you configure yourself a lot of times these days if you're really interested in surfing the web with it.

I'm about to go to sleep but there's ones that forward https as http, convert webp and png to gif, strip JavaScript to prevent the browser from locking up, etc.

There's a real world use for this in crazy companies where people are forced on some old browser. This makes them not go down in glorious flames at every site.

When you wake up, I'd love to hear more about this. I've searched for https ==> http proxies before and didn't find much.

I'm aware of https://github.com/tenox7/wrp but converting everything to a gif is quite a bit more destructive!

back in the day I used RabbIT which handled both the https/http and the png problem but it looks like it hasn't been updated in years. It looks like squid can do the https problem (https://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/HTTPS).

This actually doesn't looks as easy to do in 2020 as it was in 2009. I also had luck at chaining proxies that did different features as well so one would do a certain transformation and pass it off to another etc.

I've also done partial implementations just using php ... you can preg_replace most things and it more or less works.

But yes I had assumed things had gotten easier but apparently they've actually become more difficult.

Not the original commenter, but mitmproxy (https://mitmproxy.org/) can do this out-of-the-box for a single site with its reverse proxy:

    mitmdump --mode=reverse:https://news.ycombinator.com

And then visiting http://localhost:8080 will direct to the site.

There's also a nice (though under-documented) scripting interface, so you could probably write a script that does this for all sites in regular proxy mode. I found an example of this here, though I didn't test it: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mitmproxy/IAJ0-MHVC0...

While this is useful for people with out of date browsers, a slightly more sophisticated use-case is where you render the entire web page remotely in a sandbox for certain classes of links, eg email links. This prevents a whole class of phishing attacks.

There are companies who will sell this to you but essentially it’s really headless Chrome running in the cloud somewhere.

That needs to be part of our webring! I contacted the webmaster.

https://www.lingscars.com/ Also comes to mind as too perfect on the font rendering side of things

Dear sweet FSM, Ling's Cars!

https://ello.co/ferdiz/post/P3wjS7HVW0Zq-7qdRMyVeA

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9574350

My favourite part of that website is the position:fixed ceiling fan GIF

https://www.dinostomatopie.com/dinostomatomenu.html

This place is great. A few commenters seem to think this is a joke or not a real pizza place. I assure you all, it is!

http://www.seattlemag.com/article/three-impressions-dino-s-t...

This is the greatest website I have ever seen. It even looks good on mobile. That’s a major achievement with their stylings.

The funny part is that it was a pretty common look for 1997. They even tastefully refrained from the "under construction" image.

The other common look was the simple document, such as https://cr.yp.to/djb.html

That is amazing. I'm adding them to the business directory!

I was disappointed when the guestbook link to Facebook.

That’s a real “blast from the past” vibe. I’m absolutely impressed!

The “Cocktails” section goes straight from one Springsteen reference to another (“Racing in the Street” and “The River”). I love it.

Holy crap, you can download Netscape 4.7.2 from that site..

And the Netscape download link still works :D

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