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Reading the OP I was pretty sure the author wasn't building websites in 1997.

Not mentioning the GUI tools was a pretty poor omission: Frontpage was everywhere back then. I personally hand-coded but had to use it in my first professional role in '98.

Even the books were wrong. I had (it might still be in a box at my parents) a 1st Ed. copy of HTML: The Definitive Guide, later followed by other O'Reilly books: CSS Def. Guide and one I wore to death as it was the MDN of the day: the DHTML Def. Guide.

That site is awesome; I had to look and yep, allcaps!

> 1) Read the source. Websites were simple. There was no JavaScript or CSS.

Yes, but also in the following years, js and css were simple too. I learned js and css (well html as well I guess, but that took like... a day) initally by reading website source, before minification and obfuscation, webpack, SASS, etc.

It's a beautiful thing to use a web application where all the internals are visible and tweakable. These days I try to develop with as little obfuscation as possible, but it sure is going against the grain. See https://dev.to/open-wc/developing-without-a-build-1-introduc... and Snowpack.

The old Netscape Communicator/Mozilla suite from back then had some sort of build in website designer too, didn't it?

Yeah here we are, Netscape Composer, released in 1997 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer

I think I built my first web page with that... LOL. Long time ago now :)

SeaMonkey still includes Composer IIRC

Came here to say that. Most people in my circle were starting like that, playing around in Netscape, finding Composer and be like: Wow, I can make web pages myself.

Soon the even bigger revelation came: It's all just plain text!

Also: I don't remember anyone using books. The web was much smaller back than, but if it has had anything in abundance it was resources for learning how to make websites.

> 1) Read the source.

That's why I included right-click-protection scripts on all my pages! Couldn't have my friends steal my cool gifs (that I'd shamelessly stolen somewhere else) or copy my cool menu hover effect or whatever!

Of course all this was futile, but we weren't knowledgeable enough to know better, heh. At some point, I also had a script that would "encrypt" my HTML. Looking back, it was just base64 encoding the source, and then through JS converting that string to html and inserting into the body dom element.

In the early days

  telnet your.host.domain 80

  GET / HTTP/1.0

and copy and paste from the scrollback buffer of the terminal. Chances were that the code was handcrafted and easily readable.

That would work unless you were in the vast unlucky majority with Windows and no telnet or no access to a Linux / Unix server.

Anyway, I did it plenty of times. Then wget and curl.

Hehe, yeah, exactly! But none of us knew the underlying technologies, or even that there existed other OSes than Windows or other browsers than IE. Still, we had lots of fun!

I ran windows, we had Telnet. Right-click and view source was the main way I learned things.

Telnet was only dropped by default from Windows 7 onwards. Earlier versions of Windows had it installed.

And if you want to be really specific, Hyperterminal could to telnet.

> Here's a live example of a 1995 website: http://www.os2ezine.com/v1n1/

Almost 30 years have passed and this website still works and renders perfectly in modern browsers! Will we be able to say the same about current websites 20 years from now?

I would asume yes? Is there any html/css/js feature that you think would be either deleted or changed in a breaking way?

Maybe some browser specific features but only very few websites use those.

Many websites nowadays use various APIs, external services, assets from CDNs (Google Fonts, JS delivery CDNs, Firebase, etc.) that might get turned off or break compatibility in a decade or two, breaking the whole thing.

Some major companies can't even make a website that works in _today's_ browsers. Just visit my local Nespresso site in Firefox and click any link to another page:

https://www.nespresso.com/il/he/

Works for me, but I get your point.

You didn't get the browser popup asking if you to confirm that you want to leave? Were you on Firefox? Maybe you were redirected to another national site.

Looks good (or is it just nostalgia?):

- familiar font on grey background is quite readable

- blue underlined link tell you what to click on

- link turning violet to indicate you've visited it already? Genius!

No need for a dark and light mode if you default to a mid grey background. Early browsers were onto something.

The first websites I remember - this would have been around '93 I think - were the Smithsonian one that showed gemstones, and the original IMDB that was still then hosted at the University of Cardiff in Wales.

Isn't it funny how these early sites managed to be completely functional and useful in their plain and unpretentious way without pulling down gigabytes of cruft designed primarily to make it look like you aren't looking at a website. Given the choice between the 2022 and 1993 presentations of IMDB, I'd take the earlier one in a heartbeat.

As an counter example - Last year I dug up my old PC from around 2000, which had not been booted up since 2006 or so. I think I had 512 megs of ram on than one.

Fired up opera, which still had cached websites in the tabs - most of them long gone. Funny to see 2006-era Facebook in the flesh.

Tried to fire up a some news websites, and ended up with BSOD rather quickly. Chewed right through the paltry memory.

edit: I guess it is possible to browse some modern websites by disabling javascript, media downloads, and what not. But it's probably going to be a limited experience as far as functionality goes.

68k.news will work on that Opera :)

The early websites were RWD out of the box.

I personally think it could be getting better (at least in the realm of Government websites)

The UK Gov Design System for example:

https://design-system.service.gov.uk/

Clean, accessible and functional first.

Those GUI tools spat out AWFUL AWFUL AWFUL HTML.

Yes they did! But if you were learning - you could drag and drop and then see what tags were created. And when you realized that what it was creating was awful, that meant that you finally understood HTML!

> GUI tools. There was Frontpage and HoTMetaL and some others. These were actually pretty decent because there wasn't so much you could do with HTML. You could drag'n'drop your content, then clean up manually if you wanted.

This really helped me power up my HTML skills. I initially hosted my site on Geocities, and later my university's home directory based hosting. I first created documents by hand using a basic text editor for Macintosh (often: view source on another site to copy something nice over), but I later found GUI tools like Frontpage with some basic templating features built in.

Once I figured out what the GUI tools were doing, I could more easily understand how to create documents manually or - eventually - generate them dynamically from perl cgi.

It's easy to look to the past with rose colored glasses, and while the technologies then were much simpler, they were also terribly hard to discover and much more limited. I certainly don't think my path to learning web development (at the time I would have said: learning how to be a webmaster) was straightforward!

I also taught myself HTML around 95 or 96. I think I even used one of the books the OP mentioned and used Notepad to write my source.

I knew one dude who ran a local ISP and connected to it using a 14.4 baud modem (he might have ran the isp through his house). He also had a small web server where I can host my website.

I had all sorts of fancy stuff like marquees and blinking tags. I think I even used a table to lay out certain graphics and text. Those were good times.

Yep. In 1995 the main lesson of the web seemed to be "you can be an author." (Good luck finding bus schedules...) So I cobbled together a Pavoni espresso website in raw HTML, most of my efforts going into the drawings, and for a time it was most of the traffic on our department web server:

https://www.math.columbia.edu/~bayer/coffee/

One wondered then as much as ever about things one read on the web. For example, Kopi Luwak was a legendary coffee fished out of paradoxurus marsupial feces. All references on the web could be traced to a single source, yet apparently this is true.

> Read the source.

Yes! This was the big one. I got to college in late ‘95 and almost immediately someone in my dorm showed me how to both code HTML tags and look at page source in Netscape. That began an iterative feedback loop of learning how to make things based on what I saw already out there — and looking at personal home pages (at my school or not) was a great creative playground. By ‘97 I was hand-coding pages for small businesses in the school incubator, several departments, and my own page. I don’t remember getting a hold of many books for a couple more years. And the only GUI tool I remember in use around then was FrontPage, but it spit out so much redundant code and I never took to it.

I was a big fan of the Mac semi-WYSIWYG tool PageSpinner, which would show you the raw source but style the tags more subtly, style the text accordingly (size and bold/italic), and had wizards to insert whatever tag you needed and resolve the relative hierarchical image paths required https://i.imgur.com/QIrXhyj.jpg

>Read the source.

An artifact of its time. If the Web was designed today it would certainly not have viewable source.

I think I designed my first website using HoTMetaL. The WYSIWYG interface was basic but worked but once you hit the limitations of it then at least you could edit the HTML directly.

Frontpage Express was getting so slow when you edited large tables... what a time to be alive.

Ah yes, Frontpage Express. That was how I built my first website, which still exists: http://cm.thran.uk/archive/really4theweb/ (feat. <BODY BGSOUND="something.mid"> for those of you who still rock IE). There are also some embedded java applets fumbling in the dark for the JRE plugin that was hoisted by a long deprecated API.

Also I once found this humble getting started guide for FPE, miraculously still online with screenshots: http://www.iwaynet.net/support/Web/FrontPage/fpe_create.html

Amazing! My webpages are all gone afaik.

yep. I also started writing HTML professionally in 1997. Me and Notepad and FTP. Toughest part was making sure updates cascaded across all the pages.

Webmonkey & Castro's book = everything you need.

Ahh. the good old days.