Dr. Quinn official website from 1998, still online
drquinnmd.com
drquinnmd.com
My naive assumption is that the site works well enough, and overhauling it or moving it to another platform (even a common one, that wouldn't require as much individual upkeep) just isn't worth it.
I had a professor in college with a website like this, where it was updated each year with new course material, but still used the same Netscape Composer-generated layout from the late 90s: http://meseec.ce.rit.edu/
The course material was still relevant and being updated - more things are changing than just the year. It works well enough, and I assume he has better things to do than revamp his website.
Why should the interchange of information have to change in style as often as the clothing of fashion aficionados?
Old styles have the benefit of being done in a time where you just couldn’t do as much so the purpose of exchanging information got more focus.
Fashion is something to be aware of and wary of... looking like it was designed recently is a good way to attract people, but it’s also a good way to attract people only interested in surface appeal instead of substance.
UX and screen design are relatively new fields. I'm certain we'll eventually reach an equilibrium, based off a few decades of learnings and experience.
Because of Material Design, Rust or because of the management. Using the brain is hard so they choose the path of least resistance.
> Old styles have the benefit of being done in a time where you just couldn’t do as much so the purpose of exchanging information got more focus.
Yes, but, but, but now we have RAM and disk space and processor power. Why not use it ?
> Fashion is something to be aware of and wary of... looking like it was designed recently is a good way to attract people, but it’s also a good way to attract people only interested in surface appeal instead of substance.
The problem is that _only_ attracts people only interested in surface appeal instead of substance.
There’s definitely something to be said about focusing on the goal of a site and knowing when a fancier presentation is actually necessary.
Here's a pretty run-of-the-mill example:
Look ma, no CSS!
<font size="4" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0000FF">The Dr. Quinn Mega-Set released October 28, 2008.<br>
The Dr. Quinn Slimline set released October 20, 2009.</font>http://www.dolekemp96.org/main.htm
Someone must have a decent list, some kinda of "Awesome 90s" list on GitHub or something?
Original Web Design by Presage Internet Campaigns
To Learn more about Bob Dole, Please Visit the Dole Institute
This Web Site is Presented for Educational Purposes by 4President.org
It was a fun and easily-profitable era if you knew even the basics of web/graphics.
Ah, I miss the 90s.
The Dr. Quinn website takes 6 seconds to DOMContentLoaded on a 56k connection. The CNN website (my goto for bloated webpages) takes only 1 second on my "high speed" 40 Mb/s connection.
As for responsive. A lot old websites were built specifically for 800x600 displays, and look janky or are a tiny square in the corner on larger resolutions.
Accessed via https://www.spacejam.com/1996, the landing page contains a Google Analytics 4 tag. GA4 was released in late 2020. Strangely, the GA tag is absent if you navigate to the (otherwise identical) landing page on https://www.spacejam.com/1996/jam.htm.
There's also an old Omniture tag, with a copyright notice from 2008. Omniture was acquired by Adobe around that time, and was renamed to Adobe Analytics almost a decade ago.
The other pages have Google Tag Manager (first released 2012) installed. However the container fails to load, as either the account or container has since been deleted.
I'm slightly surprised there's no old Urchin tags floating around, then the site would be a kind of museum of web analytics services.
Web dev version being that it resizes & reacts to the size of your screen.
2. 159.8 KB, if I’m reading the inspector in Safari correctly. Nostalgia of a different sort.
If I were a kid today I'd wonder why old people ever bothered watching television or browsing the internet at all.
At the same time, I probably wouldn't even notice that famous Beatles recordings were recorded in mono.
Designing for the web in the 90's and early 2000's was so much more a matter of picking the right trade-offs to make. Shitty trade-offs like "should I make this button worse to shave off 100 bytes? By itself it won't matter, but if I do it to all the butons and icons, that first page load might be a whole second or two faster..."
Also it was rare to see more than 48K in my experience, 40K on many lines. Memories of reconnecting and forcing a 36k6 symmetric attempt (anything standard above had upstream at half the rate if down) rather than getting 48 down & 24 up, or less, because I had things to upload and needed the upstream "speed"!
You're right that it was rare to get full 56Kbps especially on the early modems and especially on the dreaded winmodems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softmodem).
All that said, I also seem to recall that at least in major cities 56Kbps never really went anywhere as cable modems started becoming widely available.
I also remember a fairly amazing story about how a user (which I never spoke to, but others had) finally diagnosed their own problem where their 1.5 Mbps ADSL connection would have a problem at approximately the same time each evening as when the street lamp turned on. Those old Alcatel 1000 DSL modems had notoriously bad problems with interference.
It isn't even their doing, it is a PayPal asset served from a PayPal domain (one referenced by their developer docs so not something just pretending to be them).
https://www.jonathancoulton.com/2008/10/10/funny-story/
> What’s amazing to me is that it hasn’t really mattered in any significant way. I’m sure I sweated like crazy over the stereo placement of this or that element during the mixing process, and then I just plastered over all those details with stucco, and turns out nobody really cares. Not even me, apparently.
As far as my personal experience, I've noticed a stereo effect as being kind of cool on one song, and severely detrimental on one other song. Overall, my world would be better if every track was in mono.
(What's the problem? "Pineapple Princess" plays on a Pandora channel of mine in stereo. I listen to Pandora with headphones. The particular stereo implementation is that the bass only plays in one of the ears. It's truly awful.)
(This one, in case there are multiple covers: https://www.pandora.com/artist/annette-funicello-childrens/a... )