Make Front End Shit Again (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Make Front End Shit Again (2018)

makefrontendshitagain.party

397 pointssaaspirant169 comments

I'm on mobile.

It loads quick.

I saw no ads.

It was reasonable straight to the point: no explanation about this being grandmothers pie recipe or anything to that effect.

(In fact, if you consider the point of the website to be funny it is actually straight to the point.)

If it is fast, doesn't track me and provides the answers I need I can put up with some animations.

I'd say what we have today is far more problematic than a few animations.

Also, most surviving websites from that era aren't that bad when it comes to animation: use marginalia to search for food recipes and see what I mean.

Same experience here. It loads instantly when 99% of the sites need 30s to 1 min to load. It looks decent on mobile (not too big, not too small). Contrast is good, fonts are readable. This guy should give web design lessons.

> This guy should give web design lessons

https://twitter.com/NikkitaFTW

I would assume it's 'this girl', but I do agree

It looks like poo on mobile, no offence, but you can't see the whole page and you can scroll to the right and stuff. It's just ugly.

I loaded it on mobile too..

- Horizontal scrolling because it isn't properly responsive.

- it doesn't reflow when the device orientation changes

- no sound (there's an audio control so I guess there's meant to be..)

- the audio control sits over the flags

- wildly different text sizes everywhere

- so much layout shift

- from an error loading the Korean version I think it's running on a platform that tracks what users do (serverside tracking is mostly fine in my opinion, and unavoidable really, but it's still tracking).

It's fun, and oddly similar to my first website actually, but I'll take the modern Web over this sort of nostalgia every time.

Sound autoplay doesn't really work anymore in modern browsers.

And thank whatever deity you may or may not believe in that this changed. Yes, it sucks for these traditional websites, but advertisers abused it so much it hurt.

Indeed. The end of autoplay being on by default or not being a setting at all is a blessing far more than anyone worth their salt has even thought it could be a curse.

Shouldn't it be possible to still achieve auto-play using JavaScript? It's just a tiny bit more effort. :)

No, the browser checks the call stack of the javascript function. If the play() isn't a direct result of some kind of user interaction. It will just deny you from playing audio.

So play upon you open the page is no longer possible. You at least need to wait for the user to touch somewhere on the page.

Yeah there's all sorts of nonsense you can do to do autoplay. I kind of remember at one of my old jobs, to get autoplay working on some elearning courses, when the user clicked 'Start', we'd start the audio but not play anything, and then switch out the file that was played when required which would 'autoplay' as the user had already initiated the sound. At least that was the general idea afaik.

Only works well on single-page applications. A much more insidious strategy is to bind to the "Accept cookies" button.

and now all we need to do is the same for video...

Video does the same thing, except you can autoplay it if it's muted.

Oh man, you're right!

https://www.zombo.com/

(Defeats the whole purpose of the site hehe)

Upvote for serious criticism.

I still take this over:

- the noncompliant cookie warnings

- ... with >400 "partners" (yes, I have counted)

- works best in IE^HChrome

- 20 seconds loading

- written for Googlebot, instead of for a human like either the author or me. (Meaning it is bland, formula-driven.)

websites I often deal with as long as it provides the answers/entertainment I am looking for.

> with >400 "partners"

You can update the number to 500, as that's what Yahoo has (something like 530, but I don't remember for certain).

I was on a news site, might have been a newspaper site, and it had 640... beat that! :)

> - works best in IE^HChrome

There's a GIF at the bottom declaring "This page is best viewed with Netscape 3.0"

I'm chuckling silently over here. Well done whoever did it :-)

> it doesn't reflow when the device orientation changes

Does anyone design sites for landscape any more?

Who doesn't is the question? I view nearly everything on landscape mode, 'cause I don't like visiting websites with my phone.

> - Horizontal scrolling because it isn't properly responsive.

It actually is properly responsive: it has horizontal scrolling on desktop too, and by just the exact amount, no matter what the window size is. (At least on FF.)

> it doesn't reflow when the device orientation changes

When you lift a CRT and turn it sideways, it is usually done because it's placed incorrectly (no "reflow" wanted). It's also unusual to attempt to read a website on it at the same time you are risking injury.

And it's all done in Nuxt.js/Vue

It's full of tracking though.

That is sad to hear even if it loads instantly.

Does it have 400 "partners" too?

It’s actually built with Nuxt, a Vue framework [1]. I believe this style is called “faux retro”.

[1]: https://github.com/SaraVieira/make-frontend-shit-again/

The only thing worse about this than whichever 2020-era website was the "Right click is disabled!" as I tried to leave. (That made me chuckle). The other stuff is just nostalgia and not really related to the degradation of web UX. Irrelevant gifs and ugly colors are easier to ignore than 1000-page cookie dialogs.

For Firefox/Librewolf users, you can hold shift when you right click to bypass scripts that try to disable your ability to right click.

I laughed when that popped up for me. A very authentic experience.

The website makes bold claim of being best viewed in Netscape 3. That does not seem to be the case though https://i.imgur.com/WKpmd28.png

I love this! Netscape 3 was a pretty tough browser to get stuff (especially JS) working in.

Imgur was again an example of shitty design. I could not use iPhone’s quick look to check the screen shot. I had to open the page only to consent to all cookie usage, and after giving consent the image opened in the Imgur app. Why would it ask for consent again and again, and why didn’t it open the app immediately?

The hero we need.

I can see the alert() debugging already.

The whole website is nothing but nostalgia bullsh*t :D

I don't believe it was done by a nostalgic person - rather someone who wasn't really there at the time and just wants to mock it. The things that were great then have nothing to do with the ones presented on that page.

It's written with Vue js

Wow, that's the nostalgia at the bottom of your screenshot:

"27% of 3182K (at 1.5K/sec, 25:33 remaining)"

For me it's not nostalgia, it's reality. I could not believe that in 2021 i will experience internet like in 1996 waiting for an image to load. But it seems that we are cursed.

Someone once told me, “you will know what nostalgia truly is, when you see a younger generations nostalgia and think it’s still shit because you are too old for that to have been your childhood”.

The jQuery era is something I’d never want to go back to. Not because jQuery was bad, but because the basic DOM api was so poor, JavaScript was much more limited and incoherent, and webpages made anything outside of text input difficult (e.g. no voice, no gestures).

I remember when web pages looked like that. I used the same animations and hosted on Geocities.

It's shit. I got a smirk out of seeing it again, but I just felt embarrassed for 1998 me.

I remember when web pages looked like that... and it was AFTER I started making websites. I was scrolling through this page thinking "this stuff is too new, look at all these advanced features it's using". Flaming text? That's like 1999, practically cutting-edge! hahah :)

In this case I could alter that to: "You will know what nostalgia truly is, when you see a younger generations representation of nostalgia and you can point out all the anachronisms in it."

Netscape 3 and websites that looked like that: 1996

Geocities: 1994-1999 (so far so good)

jQuery: 2006

Blink: 2013

I think by Blink they meant <blink>

... wait... I hope!

That steven universe gif: 2016

Blink, the tag, dates back to the 1994 or so: http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag

That's what they're referring to in the page.

In 2006, I was reading [HTML, XHTML, and CSS Bible](https://www.amazon.com/HTML-XHTML-CSS-Bible-3rd/dp/076455739...), which was new-ish at the time and using Netscape as a daily browser, building sites using GeoCities. There were precursors to jQuery (cssQuery, for instance) that made it possible to do some things that Flash was too heavy for but you couldn't do in pure CSS.

And you bet your ass we were still building flashy, wild sorts of sites like that. Still do! Absolutely go check out stuff like Neocities.

Huh. When I read that I assumed Blink referred to the <blink> tag, but reading again you might actually be right that it means Google's browser engine. Truly anachronistic indeed.

I would've written that as <blink> though, but outside of that it would make more sense, yeah.

Sprinkling a little jQuery in a page to add interactive menus and AJAXify some form submissions was quite nice.

What I don't miss from the jQuery times is how painfully limited CSS was, e.g. to add rounded corners to an element (e.g. a button) required something like 11 nested elements (4 corners + 4 edges + 3 rows to contain them). The corners themselves needed image files: to support different background colours you could either use GIFs with transparent backgrounds, but they appeared "jagged" due to aliasing; you could use PNGs which support an whole alpha channel, but lose IE support; or you could create a bunch of different versions for each occasion.

I'm glad I do backend dev these days ;)

Hey why is it that all these sites are always about how the old web was good and we should make things like the old web, but the only thing they ever make is stuff about how we should make things like the old web.

I mean I would expect them to after making the first site suggesting you do it like this, to make a number of sites showing the aesthetic put to other subjects of interest. Like, Carl's Icosahedron Spot on the WEB might be an example site but no.

It's almost like they don't have anything else to say but make it like it used to be.

I browsed a bit and found this nice index on Neocities:

https://districts.neocities.org/

It's almost all content and little "make the web old", yet it still draws on the old and fun aspect of the early internet.

What people miss isn't the thing, it's the feeling that the thing was novel, exciting, and good enough to be appreciated. People stayed up late creating these quirky little sites full of copy-pasted GIFs and cursor trails and felt proud of them. In retrospect it feels like a simpler and less self-conscious time. I'm not sure if it really was, though. For example, the "under construction" convention was basically a way to say "don't judge my website too harshly."

So many people make websites that basically look like they are from the 90's (though without all the animated GIFs haha), and use basic features without any strictly-modern stuff. These are just a few off the top of my head:

https://cblgh.org/

https://technomancy.us/list

https://alexschroeder.ch/

http://100r.co/site/about_us.html

https://dataswamp.org/~solene/

https://rgz.ee/

https://www.bsdly.net/~peter/

https://codevoid.de/

https://www.undeadly.org

https://compudanzas.net/

http://altexxanet.org/

http://sdf.org/

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

https://www.repairfaq.org/

I stumbled across this one recently, from their Please Read at Least Once:

"A word about the philosophy of this site: These pages are declared to be a fluff-free zone! There will be no unnecessary, superfluous, or useless graphics of any kind - including but not limited to: dancing, gyrating, or other animated icons, colored textured backgrounds that are impossible to read through, or forced downloading of bit intense pictures that may be of no interest to you. Nor, will I ever expect you to use a particular brand of Web browser to be able to effectively access these pages. There are and never will be any advertisements, cookies, or other impositions on your time and space. In the time that it may take wading through a single monstrosity of the professional Web page designers at other sites, you will be able to find out what you want to know, when you want to know it! What a concept. :-) (Note, however, that your browser needs to be configured properly to make sense of the many ASCII diagrams, schematics, and tables. See the document: Suggested Browser Settings for font and other related information.)"

You might notice that the author of the website orignaly included a link section to a crapload of inspirations. Unfortunately CORS policy will block this section on most up to date browsers.

Thanks to Firefox devtools and a bit of quik & dirty regexp here is this list ;)

http://thatsthefinger.com/ http://hooooooooo.com/ http://tinytuba.com/ http://cant-not-tweet-this.com/ http://www.staggeringbeauty.com/ http://eelslap.com/ http://corndog.io/ http://burymewithmymoney.com/ http://www.trypap.com/ http://www.fallingfalling.com/ http://www.republiquedesmangues.fr/ http://www.partridgegetslucky.com/ http://weirdorconfusing.com/ http://www.rrrgggbbb.com/ http://www.koalastothemax.com/ http://beesbeesbees.com/ http://cat-bounce.com/ http://r33b.net/ http://www.sanger.dk/ http://chrismckenzie.com/ http://www.everydayim.com/ http://endless.horse/ http://corndogoncorndog.com/ http://www.pointerpointer.com/ http://www.ismycomputeron.com/ http://ninjaflex.com/ http://metaphorsofinfinity.com/ http://imaninja.com/ http://ihasabucket.com/ http://iamawesome.com/ http://www.electricboogiewoogie.com/ http://unicodesnowmanforyou.com/ http://www.wutdafuk.com/ http://www.nullingthevoid.com/ http://zombo.com/ http://onemillionlols.com/ http://pixelsfighting.com/ http://www.ascii-middle-finger.com/ http://buzzybuzz.biz/ http://yeahlemons.com/ http://www.1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111... http://fastcashmoneyplus.biz/ http://space-turtles.rocks/ http://rtr.hackedbygod.net/ http://www.vape.horse/ http://rayps.com/ http://akrepnalan.com/ http://terrorpigeon.us/ http://paulvm.com/ http://pudim.com.br/ http://originalhampster.ytmnd.com/ http://tacospin.com http://www.internetfortheday.com/ http://www.akrepnalan.com/ http://finger-frenzy.now.sh/ http://www.oldversion.com/windows/netscape-3-04 http://www.cutercounter.com/ http://www.cutercounter.com/hit.php?id=10190&nd=6&style=10

It's a shitty website, but still uses like 500mb of node_modules to build, that's not the way we should be going to.

So true. If you want to build an oldschool website do it the oldschool way! Otherwise it's kind of lame...

Might be part of the joke ;)

This appears to be very much on purpose.

It's like they got things reversed. What I miss about old web dev is the simplicity of the tooling: no complex build systems, "CI" was just uploading your changes via FTP (maybe using something like Dreamweaver's features for keeping track of which files you've edited), and basically zero server config.

What I love about the web now is the rich features of modern HTML, CSS, and JS. I no longer spend my days debugging weird browser quirks. What I hate most are the fragile build and server environments.

The GitHub repo made me lol: https://github.com/SaraVieira/make-frontend-shit-again

Ha, did not expect Vue and actual individual components.

Yeah, this joke goes a bit deeper than its veneer let on.

This is awesome hahaha

> It's complicated on purpose btw, I wanted to do it in ReasonML and GraphQL but I didn't have time as this was done in an afternoon hackathon

Yeah that‘s the good shit! Wait, what… JQuery?!

Mootools FTW!

Dojo would like a word.

Let's not forget about http://prototypejs.org/ & http://script.aculo.us/ for modern Web 2.O

Yea that one surprised me. Everything else was pretty spot on…but she needs to add a guestbook

And a hit counter

webrings, anyone?

I am off to buy a .party domain haha.

Amazingly the Homebrew CPU webring is still... Pretty good! The only extant webring I can think of.

https://www.homebrewcpuring.org/

once I actually add a bit more content to my site I'm planning to add my site to the merveilles/XXIIVV webring! https://webring.xxiivv.com/ :)

I miss webrings, mostly because I was too young to ever code one :)

and a world population counter that looks like the hit counter

and java applets for each navigation link button that have a gradient in the background when you hover over them

I still use jQuery but https://umbrellajs.com too.

And native DOM API as well.

Fetch is great. I never understood the need for installing axios when fetch works fine. I remember the good old days of XMLHttpRequest.

Axios has better errror handling.

Fetch doesn't have progress bars yet.

False, you can use response.body which is a ReadableStream. See https://fetch-progress-demo.glitch.me/ for a simple example.

I think the point wasn't that jquery was old, but it was way too new for the rest of the page. Everything on it screams mid 90s, and then jquery which is a good 10 years later.

Agreed, jQuery felt like an anachronism given the style of that web page. At most I'd expect a "remember DHTML?"

I guess the point is to make you feel something different, to explore and try to figure the website out. I remember accessing the "hack websites" with black background and red texts in comic sans while thinking "is it a dangerous website?" haha. Today we mostly take some template because it's "cost-efficient" and end up all looking the same with flat design, call to actions everywhere "buy" "talk to sales" "schedule demo", chat on the right bottom corner and so on.

When I wrote my last website (https://kakugo.ch) I factored in how to balance in trying to making it interesting yet presentable for the everyday audience. I don't know if I achieved that but I tried. A few things one can notice there: two easter eggs, a text written from the heart and some peculiar images. If you also have any more ideas, let me know, thanks :)

Recently I've also stumbled upon three.js which is awesome to build sites like this https://bruno-simon.com/. 3D modeling for websites is pretty neat. As the owner of this website said "i like to build websites that look like videogames".

I love the kakugo website’s aesthetic. It’s simple but it doesn’t come out flat.

Some of my friends are finding a lot of neat websites under https://neocities.org, a Geocities-inspired service. They are all light and easy to parse, so I hope everyone there the best!

If you have a friend who'd like to mess around with that style but isn't tech-savvy enough, I've had my share of fun on https://mmm.page

An adjustable volume bar? That's the equivalent of using Vue.js back in the 90s.

Sorcery.

EDIT: Jokes on me. This site is built in Vue.

That website was built on Vue? POSERS!

We need a simple modern serverless hit counter image like every site used to have back in the day. Maybe a S3 bucket that hosts the hit counter image and then a lambda cron job that wakes up every few hours to crawl the S3 bucket access logs, aggregate the hit count, and write out a new counter image to the bucket.

You can still make shit websites. Lots of people do. The problem is, they're more fun to make than to visit. So don't get huffy if potential visitors go to social media instead.

> The problem is, they're more fun to make than to visit.

This is not true. https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

I don't understand. That is not a shit website.

Nor is it fun to visit (more than once).

This one lacks hyperlinks ( the h in http(s)).

>So don't get huffy if potential visitors go to social media instead.

Which is also shit, albeit more expensive shit. Facebook looks like a Fischer Price toy due for a recall.

We prefer to call it "appropriate for the key demographic".

Like it or not, people had to be really creative to get things done the way they wanted.

Their creativity paved the way for new features, whether with HTML, CSS, JS, security, and whatnot.

There are a few things here with `width: 100vw`. This is annoying on platforms that don’t use overlay scrollbars because 100vw is wider than the page and so forces a horizontal scrollbar, and I don’t think it was done deliberately. All should be changed to `width: 100%`.

(The viewport units are fundamentally stupidly broken by design, including scrollbar areas, so that if your website has scrollbars they will give you a wrong answer, that the actual viewport width will be things like 17px less than 100vw. There used to be a convoluted way of unbreaking the units with the mild side-effect of forcing the presence of a scrollbar—it involved `overflow: scroll` on the body element, from memory—but Firefox was the only one that implemented it and after some years they collectively gave up and removed it from the spec. So now I say there are literally zero completely legitimate and reasonable uses of viewport units, though there are a few uses where the amount of error is tolerable, though still not a good idea.)

what this site got wrong is just "remember jquery ?", this was a modern thing back then and almost nobody used. Would make more sense "remember tables for everything ?"

Yep, and 1x1 gifs for sizing certain unsize-able elements.

I'm building a web site currently, after a looong break from web development. It's almost unbelievable how much cleaner HTML, DOM and JS have gotten. It's more of a pleasure (only relatively to the previous eras) building pages and you actually don't need frameworks.

http://www.savewalterwhite.com/

I was a little sad that the inspirational websites portion was empty, other than that, good clean fun...I suppose?

If you need some inspiration: https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

What drove us away from making fun shit? Was it our inferior need to make money? I used to think I was the greatest computer guy around until a guy in his dorm room, one year older than me, suddenly became a millionaire and then a billionaire. He made me feel so inferior, I lost the plot. It wasn't like being good at art as a kid, feeling valued, and then later on in life, realizing art isn't my thing, in a moment of disappointment, and then dismissing it as a career option. It was more like, seeing what he did, being greedy to want to copy it, and then seeking to be like a lesser version of zuckerberg, and to make an inferior facebook, while completely losing what I was doing in the first place, like the ultimate distraction.

OOOF... W3C HTML validation fails

https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fmakefrontends...

Oh shit, you disabled right click?

And a rather modern approach for doing it:

  <script>
  export default {
    mounted() {
      document.addEventListener("contextmenu", event => {
        event.preventDefault()
        alert("Right click is disabled!!!")
      })
    }
  }
  </script>

https://github.com/SaraVieira/make-frontend-shit-again/blob/...

Maybe you know, but it might help someone else. Hold shift when right clicking and it works :D

Interesting, I did not know about shift + right click. It appears to be a browser feature in Firefox to avoid abuse of the contextmenu event. The same trick did not work in Chrome or Safari.

I'm all for it (well not making it "shit", but fun and personal).

My nostalgia filtered memories are that people spent more time creating stuff (however "shit" it was) than consuming. Your feed was a curated list of bookmarks (could be something else today, hello Fraidycat). People had infinitely more freedom (it's my corner with any type content/media), instead of mandated formats ({text, pic, link}, 140 chars max, etc).

Not saying this is the only way. I wish it could co-exist successfully with modern social media.

It's easy to make this kind of one pager, when you don't need to include complex user flows. No registration, no account, no search, no products, no modal, no navigation, not even a form. There's literally just text, images and one embedded HTML5 audio component. When you do, design tends to be attracted to the conventional side.

However, I do miss the concept of websites taking the lighter approach, not trying to imitate enterprise design by fully optimizing every part of the website, and just thinking what's fun.

People do, but your not a kid anymore and don't do it yourself and you don't browse such things anymore either. The tools are bit different this time, the pieces of art different too, but they are still being made. One example I like is CYOAs: https://www.reddit.com/r/makeyourchoice/ or twine games.

Roblox games and minecraft creations are another example.

The good ol' days. When people had limited resources, infinite imagination and they made compromises in there design choices. Now we have infinite resources but we have design and standards and guidelines and boxes and structures and grids and SEO and accessibility....

I think if you are building things on the daily we have to go through a resource limitation sabbatical.

I highly recommend folks play Hypnospace Outlaw, an Internet and OS simulation game, complete with a page builder[1] to achieve a similar aesthetic. (It's hard to describe this game without giving it away so I won't try.)

I stand with gooper.

[1] https://www.hypnospace.net/create.html

Geocities-style pages never had that kind of super long and scrollable pages. iframes and menus on both top and left sides FTW.

One of my favorite sites in terms of aesthetics is http://linkdot.link. I don't know anything particularly about the content, and I do have trouble actually reading it, but boy does it feel good to have it enter my eyes.

Drop the annoying music and it's perfect. Beats the "modern" gibberish which requires server grade hardware to be semi-useful(and that is coming from someone who's main computer hasw a dual-socket motherboard with two 14-core xeons filling those sockets).

The music is actually straight to the point.

Every geocities site back in the day had a MIDI file autoplaying on view. This is exactly on point.

The opt- in nostalgic music and the broken "____citis was d___" on mobile kills me.

There s nothing "old" about jquery, quite the opposite. the github projects based on jquery actually work, while almost everything made for the "post jquery" world is abandoned, totally not working, or impossible to develop on.

In case anyone needs the best GIFs for their website, you can peruse GifCities! https://gifcities.org/

You know you need that Netscape spinning-cube GIF.

It looks like shit but it loads faster than Medium and a lot of similar sites that stare at you with a blank page until JS finally shows the text/img content HTML was designed to display since the early 90s.

Medium usually tries to make me sign in or sign up, which is even worse.

I wish every site worked like this. Meanwhile I wait for my expensive company notebook to barely handle the 30+ MB of JavaScript Jira downloaded to render a text form which is also completely and utterly broken.

> We need to make dumb shit! Make useless stuff;

That's what we mostly are doing nowadays. Over 80% of the information on the web could be communicated much more efficiently without 80% of the "modern" bullshit.

The nostalgia is so overwhelming I'm super sad now. Such good times!!!!

One of the funny things that pulls me to web3 is that their websites already kinda look like this and I don’t have to do a lot of design work. Plus most of those apps don’t support mobile so no app dev!

This is useful to know (wrt it being written in Vue/Nuxt):

> It's complicated on purpose btw, I wanted to do it in ReasonML and GraphQL but I didn't have time as this was done in an afternoon hackathon

It's been such a long time since I've seen a <marquee>

Related: https://www.cameronsworld.net/

A great mural of old internet gifs, and autoplaying MIDI music.

Old thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17060303

This just reminded me of the timeless, legendary https://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/

Another classic site to show in this regard is this Norwegian online store.

https://arngren.net/

Blocked by my corporate firewall:

> Elevated Exposure Sites that camouflage their true nature or identity, or that include elements suggesting latent malign intent.

Mission accepted. I will be on that inspiration list. I never thought I would have to use my hamburger backpack again...

Loads of fun web here: https://theuselessweb.com

It missing the rotation @ logo for email us.

Oh also I did not see a table with border=2

I feel like I had a literal flashback seeing the little Netscape gif at the bottom. Wow, what a trip.

It's missing links to other dumb shit so that I can surf but otherwise, it's on point.

Reminds of od days when GeoCities were around. Except there was no jQuery at that time :)

jquery (2006ish) with the 90s web (blink tag) is historical anachronism.

The front-end style depicted predated jQuery by a long shot!

Sorry mate can i get light mode, it’s too dark for my eyes

Still use JQuery all the time as a WP dev. And ftp too.

this is much better than the standard: cookie accept menu,adds, playing video blasting full force, affiliate links with watered down content

awww come on where's the html4 DTD?

I also think the site is severely lacking in terms of light blue characters against a yellow background xD

also: table layout missing?

And still you needed Vue.js to make this (shit)?

a shittier version is https://bitfission.com/

Remember jQuery, hahah

Is the author young or he mixed up his timeline?

DHTML4lyf

Obligatory link to a modern Geocities-esque collection of mini-sites, Neocities: https://marijn.uk/linkroll/

Neocities FTW!

This faked nostalgia is becoming irritating.

Websites which were like that didn't last long, and mostly were hosted on free webservers.

If you want to get rid of nostalgia please spend 60 whole minutes making sense of HTML+PHP5.6+jQuery copy pasted code. And make it IE6 compatible. And use tables for layout. And don't use stackoverflow, caniuse, or an IDE. You'll soon understand how we reached the current state of things.

t. Boomer that spends 8+ hours straightening PHP5.6 sghettis for a living, who still swears by FTPZilla and jQuery scripts.

Vanilla JS is quite nice these days, the only advantages jQuery has now is the fact that it's somewhat less verbose for DOM things and has support for old browsers.

  // For example, instead of
  $("#somebutton").click(() => alert("Hello"))

  // You would  do
  document.querySelector("#somebutton").addEventListener("click", () => alert("Hello"));
  
  
  // Instead of
  $("#message").text("Important Message")

  // You would  do
  document.querySelector("#message").textContent = "Important Message";
  
  
  // Instead of
  $("#things .thing").css("color", "red")

  // You would  do
  for(let e of document.querySelectorAll("#things .thing")) e.style.color = "red";
  
  
  // Instead of
  await $.ajax("https://httpbin.org/get").then((_1, _2, {responseJSON}) => responseJSON)

  // You would  do
  await fetch("https://httpbin.org/get").then(e => e.json())

Those W3C badges made my day

Love that scroll effect

Where’s the guestbook?

No guestbook, but the number of signatures keeps going up somehow

Aw I memba.

Yeah, but it looked shit.

yo its the UFO mouse that got me

photosofben.com

smile.rip

My eyes hurt. No thank you.

Wait until you see this:

https://www.lingscars.com/

This is a bit heavy but it's creative. And the info is not hidden after dark patterns or hamburgers. One can see where the menu is and can easily navigate to rent a car.

It's designed incredibly well and the aesthetic makes it stand out from just about everyone while still being accessible and usable. The designers and devs must know their stuff to pull it off. Kind of like Les Dawson playing the piano.

Wow it’s truly amazing. I want to lease Ling a car but I don’t live in the UK.

I also love the content: fun but still really clear about everything you may need to know, with a lot of useful details just there.

Really cool.

This is one of my favorite sites from a design pov. Oddly enough i initially found it by searching for 'the worst sites on the internet'. In an earlier incarnation it also handled sales and had individual listings in the same style. Awesome stuff whoever you are.

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