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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

A few weeks ago I realized that my personal website from 1999 is still up and unchanged, just copied from one host to another:

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!)

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I like this layout, which is really how I remember the late-1990s web:

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.

It's so much harder to pull it off with the huge range in screen sizes and resolutions. Back then you could make an 800x600 (or maybe even up to 960 width) design and it would work on 99% of the monitors (rarely did anyone have more than 1024x768).

That's solvable with vw/vx-units in CSS.

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.

Sure, very solvable nowadays with media queries, flex box, grid, screen width and height units, etc. These features didn't exist in 90s CSS.

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).

I have a 4K monitor on my desk with 100% scaling, and one of the things that always gives me a chuckle is maximizing a browser window.

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.

The typical thing was a fixed width container table wrapped with <CENTER> tags. Then you set textalign on that table. Voilá your table fit all your content with a fixed size/aspect but would float center on the page of someone with larger than 800x600 or whatever minimum you designed for.

While numerous websites settled for a fixed width indeed (I think, this was mostly a US school of thinking), responsive designs were somewhat doable with table layouts. What you couldn't do was a general change of element order etc. (However, you could respond in JS using `document.write()` on first render.)

E.g. (this was a demo installation for a brandable horoscope service, not exactly 1999, but from 2000): https://www.masswerk.at/demo/easyphone/

You know it's funny, those demo scene photos would probably be thought of as AI generated these days. Maybe it's the 'dreaminess'?

Dare post them on Artstation? xd

I had the same thought earlier this year when I saw what Midjourney is capable of. The style that I’d spent many years in my youth trying to master was now available at a push of a button.

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.

really love both the site and the work on the site

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