Building a website like it's 1999
localghost.dev
localghost.dev
The click-and-drag tools and absolutely garbage code generators were integral to the experience, because they brought in the weirdos who didn't know we were doing it wrong. We learned, but lost something along the way.
What’s old is new again.
https://anioni.com/pauli/site1999/
I made this when I was 19, before I changed career ambitions to programming. Maybe it’s moderately interesting as an actual 1999 website time capsule.
There’s no CSS because IIRC it didn’t work very well in Netscape 4. Layout was done with tables and frames. The front page looks oddly tiny now, but I guess it was the correct size on a 1024*768 screen. I remember being happy about coming up with a frame trick for vertically centering that menu box. (A classic web design conundrum!)
https://anioni.com/pauli/site1999/work/nurminen1-01.html
A well considered arrangement of structure, content and design. Something we do not get to see that much anymore.
I think the range in aspect ratios is the bigger problem. It's hard to get around without resulting in a nasty reactive design where everything keeps shuffling around as you resize the window.
But even though the tools exist today, it is still challenging to do well. Agreed that aspect ratio variability is a bigger problem (we can no longer count on 4:3 as the standard).
Most websites just stop getting wider after a certain point, which is fine because you wouldn't want to read a line of text that long anyway. It's usually a column in the middle maybe 1/3rd of the screen.
E.g. (this was a demo installation for a brandable horoscope service, not exactly 1999, but from 2000): https://www.masswerk.at/demo/easyphone/
Dare post them on Artstation? xd
It felt like I had dodged a bullet by switching to programming instead of pursuing an art career. That happened primarily because I realized fairly quickly that my talent was quite limited and there were thousands of better artists in this space, everyone competing over the Internet. Specializing on a programming niche felt like a better long-term plan.
Go out in the world. There is marquee and blinking text everywhere, on billboards, ads, and marquees. Put real life things on the web isn’t a crime.
Great feature for muted tv waiting rooms, for example.
Not sure if this is widely known. But Scott Forstall co-created [1] WordArt during internship at Microsoft.
Coding up simple WordArt-like effects for the web can be fun - making sure the results are responsive and accessible, of course. Making them interactive just adds to the joy!
https://codepen.io/kaliedarik/project/full/AzWnNa (note: will probably make your device's fan cry)
I would love to be still able to discover low-ranging websites like this. I remember somebody shared some alternative search engine?
Well you had visitor counters and guestbooks. There was obviously no expectation to go "viral" and have millions of visitors, but it felt social in a different way. More like a small cozy neighborhood, less like a train station.
That's not quite true. Your friends would see it. As would anybody browsing any directory you signed up for - your ISP, college, etc.
Nobody cared about shouting at the world back then.
I'm not necessarily nostalgic for the design from the '90's web, but the openness and sometimes weirdness of personal sites/blogs is something that I miss (and can really appreciate if I do find it).
I see this website does not have width and height in all of its images. For example, in the image below, the author clearly knows the dimensions of the image are 1000px x 743px. However, they didn't include the dimensions and the CLS is green under 0.1 (0.087 mobile and 0.045 desktop in my test [pagespeed]).
I opened developer tools in my firefox nightly browser, set throttling to GPRS, and disabled cache in my network tab and I reloaded the page.
I clearly see text push down as screenshots appear. So do width and height / aspect ratio not matter any more (did they ever)? I absolutely hate feeling like an idiot because I can't keep up with what matters and what does not.
<pre> <figure> <picture> <source srcset="/img/blog/build-1999/geocities1.webp" type="image/webp"> <img src="/img/blog/build-1999/geocities1.png" alt="A brightly coloured website that says 'Welcome to Tom & Sherry's Proud Grandparents page. The Proud Grandparents page was created to show pictures of our grandchildren to family and friends, and an occasional Web surfer. The grandkids, our pride and joy, and their parents have made us very proud. Okay, let's see the pictures!'"> </picture> <figcaption><a href="https://geocities.restorativland.org/Heartland/Ridge/1217/">... Proud Grandparents Page</a> </figcaption></figure> </pre>
[pagespeed] https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Flocalghos...
<img src="whatever.jpg" width="400" height="300" style="width: 400px; max-width: 100%; height: auto; aspect-ratio: 4/3;" alt="yet another image" />During this time, if you had broadband and a moderately fast computer, browsing the web lightning fast.
Then came the frameworks and, especially after smartphones, the adaptive web for small mobile-first(ish, or second or whatever) screen sizes and the bloat began. Previously you only had to worry about pages that dumped flash ads or used flash for every UI element, they were still slow. Then everything became about as slow as before.
I still think browsing is a bit faster than the dialup days, but not as fast as the golden age from '97-'04. It seems now that page loads sizes & javascript CPU load expand at roughly the pave of computing power & bandwidth availability.
Which means it's a pretty awful experience for anyone on a low end computer w/ broadband that barely meets the definition.
This fetishization of the "old web" initially works when you're just browsing some terse blog or personal web page from people you don't even know, but the moment you want to actually search for information on the web this style of websites immediately becomes annoying. There's a reason why Wikipedia has kept basically the same layout since forever, because it works. If I want to know about medieval history I can navigate Wikipedia in a matter of seconds. On the other hand, good luck navigating through the same information from the personal blog of some retired medieval professor. And what if you want to switch topic and read stuff from another blog with a completely different layout? God help you.
This. I see a lot of people being angry at UI changes on bug platforms with the reason that "they all look the same", but unless the platform is a blog or a personal site, having some standardised look helps reading and avoid being distracted. I totally agree with you.
I don’t think that what we miss the most is the old 90’s patchwork of gif style. Not that I’m not nostalgic of it, of course I am.
But what I miss is the fact that back in the day, owning a little part of the internet was the normal thing and, contrary to nowadays profiles on social media, this space was really yours. It was as awful as what people’s tastes and minds are but it had, well, personality. And you really owned it. It was awful because you were awful but that was ok because everybody is awful. If it was nice, that was because you took the time to make it nice.
It’s not the style I miss, but the fact that it was the result of a real person’s hobby.
In the early days you really had no choice. There was no WordPress, no MySpace and no Github Pages. It was the norm because it was the easiest thing to do if you wanted a presence on the web. If something like Facebook existed in 1993 let me assure you a whole lot of people would have been contempt with just creating a profile there and calling it quits.
There are more personal websites today than there ever were, people who want to be creative on the web always find a way.
Web pages were quirky not because of gifs but because someone lovingly collected a bunch of Dragonball Z images or wrote summaries of X-Files episodes and put those up for others to enjoy. Some people put up recipes or stories or whatever. Most amateur homepages weren't a monetized side hustle, just content about the creators' interests.
Unfortunately today a lot of passion content lives in social media silos. Some still survives on the web, though now on Wikis rather than homepages.
I don't miss the GeoCities aesthetic of the 90s web, I suffered through the design to get to the interesting content. The design wasn't the important part.
First of all, people post extremely niche and personal content on their social media feeds. Heck, my own Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram feeds are mostly comprised of stuff on the same level of quirky ingenuity of the early web. So if your issue is with the presence of this type of "content", then I really don't see it.
Secondly you might argue, like many others, that the true problem is not that the content is here, but it's not the norm. It's not the norm to have a website, it's not the norm to be fragile and personal and quirky online. But even if that were the case, why do you care? There is more "90s-style" content today that there were in the 90s. You don't have enough time to live on this earth to read it all. Do you care if "in proportion" they don't make up the same share of the total webpages like they once did? Doesn't the sheer number of them not satisfy you enough?
In the old internet you could be reasonably certain that people where sharing because they wanted to share. There was no ulterior motive of profit, growing a large following, etc. It felt more genuine. Today, most people who actively post seem to be trying to build a following to become an "influencer".
It could be that this is a product of lack of discoverability of differently motivated content, but that lack of discoverability is still directly caused by what the modern internet is (its incentives and what is promoted by the giants in the space: engagement).
Gemini[1] and other small nets seem to capture some of that old share-with-no-ulterior-motive vibe, but we will see how long it lasts.
This is exactly a problem I mentioned. You've got content on three social networks only one of which is readily crawlable by search engines. Twitter and Instagram are silos that really only want registered users to have access to content in their silo.
As to your second point you're ascribing to me an argument I did not make. I was pointing out that the amateur web of the 90s wasn't quirky because of garish colors or animated gifs. It was quirky because people put up passion projects. Seeing some "90s style" page that just puts animated gifs and garish colors is completely missing what made the web incredibly interesting.
As for the modern web and amateur content, does a post in some infinite-scroll content compilation really compare that favorably?
I wish other designers and developers internalised this. The constant treadmill of redesigns common with seemingly all modern software development undervalues the users' mental model and muscle memory for how the site works.
I guess it would be shit for job security though.
Language standardization is not typography and we have figured out typography for the most part before language standardization. Look at the American English 'argument' vs the British English 'arguement' or 'color' vs 'colour'.
I also just so happen to have a collection of German children's books - the font family each uses is different, but it's still German.
I liken web sites to digital magazines and newspapers. These have an artistic quality to them in terms of content, structure, pictures, etc.
Would you not think it bland if every newspaper or magazine on the planet used the same structure, font-face, and voice?
There was a three pass rendering system, and I was writing with CSS, but in the final filter I was string replacing font-face in in place of the classes because or poor support in browsers.
"Cool" - You guys weren't getting bullied like me?
Do you not think the author is one of the "99 percent of users" of HN?