Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThinkingGuy | Hacker News Reader

Pretty accurate, except for one major thing: all the pages load instantly. In 1999 you pretty much expected each web page to take at least 10 seconds to load, mostly for the images to gradually...fade...into.....view.

View on HN

I remember a very specific rastering effect with loading images, probably around 1994-1996? The image would load every nth line and then iteratively nth line + i until i==n. Compared to what I would see later (just loading in every line from top to bottom), you could get a sense of the whole image sooner, just in an increasing fraction of the vertical resolution. I can't recall which image type this was or whether it was Mosaic or Navigator, but the effect was very distinct; at the time I assumed it was the way the image data was streamed in, but now I'm wondering whether it was just the way the image codec built the viewable bitmap.

I think this was progressive JPEGs

https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/website/improving-websit...

Nice demo: https://pooyak.com/p/progjpeg/

Interlaced GIFs. Early browsers only rendered the single lines as they came in (leaving the unloaded parts blank), but eventually browsers started doubling the lines so the image seemed to increase in resolution as it loaded. I think MSIE started the latter behavior, and that's what modern browsers do.

Progressive JPEGs are somewhat similar, but IIRC didn't gain traction until 2000 or so.

GIF supports this too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Interlacing

That was interlaced GIF, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Interlacing (the demo image in the article is from Chrome which tries to approximate the image with rectangular regions, the 1990s browsers showed not yet received lines as blank which made interlacing effect)

Progressive PNGs added a 2d variant of this, but almost nobody ever used it, because it made the image take longer to load.

For me, the “https” in the Netscape URL is sort of an anachronism. I mean, yes, technically it was available in Netscape in 1999, but very few sites used it (even among e-commerce sites).

I remember the first ProLiant server we flipped to support SSL had to have an add-in card to accelerate the encryption based on the traffic we handled. It was something like this: https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/c04283920.PDF?jumpid=in_pb-psn...

In terms of load speed, the period between introduction of broadband and the rise of SPA was heaven.

Absolutely--I'd click a link, and it would feel like the page had already been in memory.

SPA?

It's what people who didn't understand the separation of concerns with HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and server side were did by deciding to jam it all into JavaScript and entangle it in code complete and gang of four constructs and then call it superior, easy, efficient, well designed, robust ... It's ... It's simply wild.

HTML content? In the javascript. Style information? In the javascript. A way to negotiate network loading and resources, document structure? You guessed it. Want the back button to work again? More JavaScript. URLs to be universal? Even more!

Eventually you'll get the page to be almost as functional as it would have been by default had you not used any of it.

Read the mdn and w3c documentation guys, I promise you 99.9% of what you want is in there without reinventing it from base principles. It's not 2010 anymore

It's like a bad cook who is trying to fix a poorly made meal by making more mistakes, covering it in salt and oil, smearing honey over it, and calling it delicious.

Single Page Applications. The spaghetti mess of JavaScript-heavy monstrosities that replaced the web.

Single-page application. SPAs became popular once JS had matured enough to generate all the HTML for the page.

Hear hear

I'm thought the Netscape logo only animated when the page was loading? I found myself instinctively hitting the stop button to try and make the logo stop looping.

Overall, it's really great though. I love the stuff popping up on Neocities.

Quite a while ago, someone (jwz?) brought back the original Netscape home page circa 1994, complete with dialup-level speed throttling. It "feels" like 56K to me, but I believe 9600-14.4K would have been more common at the time.

http://home.mcom.com/home/welcome.html

I first used the net at work in the mid 90s, where we had a T1 and pages were light by modern standards. It was peppy with a Mac IIci.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com