Comment by dada78641 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dada78641 | Hacker News Reader

In case anyone is interested, this is what it looks like on Internet Explorer 5 in Windows 9x: https://i.imgur.com/g668yBy.png

What's happening is that the <h3> tags are all nested, since they don't auto-close in this situation, and modern browsers define the <h3>'s size as "font-size: 1.17em;" which of course adds up over time. I'm not sure how IE5 interprets the page. Maybe I can get an older embedded version of Firebug to check.

I think it's important to not break even older websites even if they have totally busted HTML, but this is probably such a rare case that no one ever thought of it, and at this point it'd probably be much more disruptive to try and "fix" it.

Of COURSE there's someone on Hacker News with a Windows 9x PC/VM lying around to prove what's going on in a decade old website.

I hate to be the one to say it - but if it was first tested on IE5, that's over two decades old. I really wish it were just the one!

I absolutely love that

Makes you wonder just how many versions he went backwards through before he found the one that it rendered correctly on.

The problem is that these older websites depended on lax HTML parsing behavior, which still exists but has since been standardized in extensive detail.

It’s quite likely this site was already broken in other browsers, or even other versions of IE. And really, it’s not even broken now, the content does render. It’s just difficult to use.

And it’s not as if there aren’t a slew of sites that render differently on Wayback for a variety of reasons. This is in no way meant to disparage the Internet Archive, but I don’t think it’s a reasonable expectation that a site hosted in a way it wasn’t set up by its creators will always accurately render the way it did in its original context.

I really want to know if you just had that VM lying around, ready to go haha.

And if so what godforsaken reason would you have for doing that.

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