I Used Netscape Composer in 2024
plbrault.com
plbrault.com
The dirty secret of web apps is that we’ve mostly gone backwards in usability compared to native desktop apps from 25 years ago.
Web apps are a mishmash of paradigms. Pieces of desktop UI are reproduced using a woefully limited framework inside a static request-based page navigation model. The user never quite knows whether an action will trigger a multi-second page refresh, whether the back button does anything useful, etc.
Desktop UIs had professionally designed human interface guidelines based on decades of actual research. On the web, designers are primarily graphics artists who pick fonts and pride on making buttons look like nobody else’s buttons. Icons are nowadays tiny monochrome line scribbles without labels. Just pray there are tooltips so you can figure out what happens if you press one of these icon buttons in a web app. (Or maybe it’s just an icon and not a button? No way of knowing, since the conventions that made buttons obvious have been thrown away.)
The web is the worst application delivery platform of the past 30 years, so of course it’s the one we got stuck with. Worse often wins by its simplicity and ubiquity. Everybody could author a HTML page and some gradually built their skills towards apps. This review of old Netscape Composer reminds of how important that was.
Yes, yes I am.
Maybe it’ll work if I turn it off and on again.
The audience of apps since smartphones came up (let's say 20 years ago) has vastly diversified, from previously mostly professionals and enthusiasts, to a far more general audience. That adds new requirements, and shifts priorities - it's more important now that simple things are simple, and it's less important that difficult things are possible at all. And from an inclusion pov, that's a good thing!
I'm not saying that everything has strictly improved, nothing ever does. But it certainly hasn't gotten strictly worse, nothing ever does either. It's just the tradeoffs that are different, and no longer target as specifically those folks who tend to yell at clouds on HN these days.
I’m also hard-pressed to come up with anything that has improved on the desktop.
I thought you were referring to the Ubiquiti web app.
It almost works in that sentence.
* Professional opinions drawn in higher ranked stakeholders whims * It drown visibility and attention to other processes of software development such as infrastructure, integrations, etc.
However, that also gives some nice things: Stakeholders and designers can fight in their own corner.
This is nothing new. Amateurs going pro. DTP saw something similar, video as well.. lots of things.
What's new however is in mobile age, what are you even designing for? It's a moving target between device aspect ratio and screen sizes.
No wonder it's all a giant galleria abominate.
I wasn't aware it was a secret! Though it certainly isn't just web apps: the desktop has taken steps backwards too, and not just where bad web apps are hosted in simple desktop wrappers.
Back in the 90s and 00s I remember a strong push for consistency and discoverability, where now that often takes a back seat to aesthetic matters and shiny new things. And it isn't just the apps: whole OS UIs have fallen apart, with levels of inconsistency well beyond that which Mac and Windows people used to poke fun at the Unix world for. It is amazing how hard it can be sometimes to see at a glance which app currently has input focus on a Windows desktop, particularly with multiple screens.
There are several parts to the consistency problem, and the overall UX-is-more-shite-these-days problem, including:
1. The conflicting priorities of the range of devices (trying to make something work on a small touch-based mobile and a large desktop environment, often creating something that is imperfect on both).
2. The desire to be subtle and pretty, even where this makes things less obvious (some flat designs are particularly bad for this: little indication of what is actionable, scrollbars becoming single lines of pixels or invisible entirely, title bar text being slightly-whiter-than-mid-grey when active and slightly-darker-than-mid-grey otherwise and sometimes the reverse).
3. The desire to have an app that is easier to monetise where a plain web-app would be better (so you get something that is trying to optimise for four distinct UX arenas: web, mobile web, mobile app, desktop app).
4. The desire for everything to be online-first, so you can more easily justify charging for a subscription (and so you don't have to worry about sync issues inherent in offline-first design) even in cases where entirely offline would be the better choice for the user.
5. The desire to be hip and new with UI design completely overriding years of earlier UX research because form sells better than function. Yes, some of those research results may have been questionable, and some that weren't are less relevant to today's environments, but they all seem to have been thrown away in many places.
It isn't all bad though, some things are still well-designed from a UX standpoint, or if not well-designed at least not brain-dead. I live in hope that people will learn from the few good examples, and we'll have a swing back towards caring about properly optimising for UX instead of just looks & monetisation.
Lazy, inaccurate, and offensive.
How is this limited to the web? 'The Desktop' suffers significantly more from not having a single, understandable paradigm. Is this UI modal? If I click this will it 'pop' me to another view? Or will it open a new window? Is that window represented in task bar/switcher/dock/whatever? How do I get back to where I was before?
Not to mention the issue that both macOS and Windows suffers from being in the middle of a UI-kit transition, with a bunch of half-and-half apps across the system, with the new system being of... dubious quality (I'm staring at you, new macOS Settings)
I think overall, I think there is a positive trend for usability of software on both the web and 'desktop' (whatever that means). But still, just like 20 years ago, people can still make bad software.
Edit: lol - just now as I'm trying to uninstall some AMD drivers, I get a dialogue box asking me to visit a long Microsoft Store URL, and it's neither clickable nor copyable. Desktop is perfect!
To take one example, 99% of monitors in 1997 were 1024x768 CRT with single pixel density, which freed designers to assume that's what their end user was on. No such standard exists today.
My bet it that, if computing doesn't evaporate in the next decade, there will be a middle-ground solution.
When I fully switched into the web dev world around Y2K, it felt so liberating. Never regretted it for the second...
Well, at least nowadays we can use ridiculous solutions such as normcap (taking a screenshot and OCRing it) to get such a basic feature.
It can also be used to ensure a whole block of text is selected and copied as a unit. That is helpful for things like a an error message or an identifier like ABC-123.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/user-select
A general facility to select labels should use an additional modifier key, since otherwise unsophisticated users will tend to select labels by mistake and get confused. Labels are already actionable elements, in that clicking on them focuses the associated control, or even changes its state as in the case of check boxes and radio buttons. Another example are the labels of menu items and buttons. Adding selection when you move the mouse a bit while hitting a label is too finicky IMO. If the UI is also a touch interface, it would only get worse.
From what this website says (https://weblogs.asp.net/chuckop/110153), this behavior started on Windows 2000, which might explain why it didn't work on my emulated Windows 98...
First versions of OSX were fine too.
I was flabbergasted when I first saw the flat toolbars in MS Office, oh, whatever version that was.
And speaking of flat surfaces instead of buttons with depth: Laptop keyboards these days :-(
[1] https://jdan.github.io/98.css/
Interestingly, the 7.css fixes this by showing them as expander links instead.
I always stick with whatever pc I get at work until they require me to hand it back after so many years then I spend some headache to get it looking and working like a pc of yesteryear...
If you want to test it out, make sure you install https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock-for-firefox-legacy/release... from there, because it won't show up in the extensions search.
+1 to that. I still use SeaMonkey every time I need to edit HTML docs directly. Works great, haven't found anything better. (Admittedly haven't looked too hard for anything better because SeaMonkey works just fine.)
And I use it regularly.
I quite often need to update some of our static web pages. Not only does SeaMonkey do the job well, I'm not aware of anything else remotely similar that is still maintained (admittedly I haven't looked in a while).
Lightweight static HTML is a winner for many uses, and I'm honestly puzzled why there is so little of it remaining.
The html is simple but functional. The color choice is a bit garish. But I love it. It loads quickly, it's always up to date and tells you exactly what you need to know. When is the gym open, where is the gym, how much does it cost. Done.
I feel we've lost this kind of experience on the modern web.
that would be way cooler than a usable website
There's gotta be a better way to create web pages -- so I learnt HTML and was using notepad.exe to hand-craft my HTML pages. I would then copy them to disk (usually using ARJ.EXE to compress everything), and then go to school to use their internet connection to upload my pages to Geocities.
Bleedin' Nora: that's certainly an optimistic system configuration for that application. I'm not surprised you lost patience with it.
I remember using a real mixed bag of tools to create HTML in the late 90s/early 2000s. Started off with Notepad but stayed away from Communicator until I had a PC powerful enough to run it easily (early y2k).
I also briefly tried exporting Word documents as HTML, which I think might have been new in Office 2000. This was a bad idea: the markup was hugely bloated, and images were primarily embedded as ActiveX objects that only looked good in IE, with heavily downscaled/coloured versions available for other browsers. Similar issues with Frontpage.
But I found the markup generated by Composer to be pretty clean by the standards of the time, so developed a hybrid workflow where I'd rough out pages, along with their content, in composer, and then tweak the markup manually.
I also remember finding a really nice text editor for working with web pages. It came free on a magazine cover CD and I wish I could remember what it was called [EDIT: it might have been HoTMetaL]. For editing raw HTML and JavaScript nothing could better it. It wasn't as good as VSCode + the right extensions today but, for the time, it was literally streets ahead. So I ended up using that + Composer for at least a couple of years, up until maybe 2002.
<META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="Microsoft Word 97">
http://mc-computing.com/HTML_Examples/html_Generators.htm
reminds that there exist Microsoft's own clean-up tool (without doubt, an internal pet project which became essential), “Office 2000 HTML Filter”.
I suspect their target market with this was enterprise intranets where everybody would be forced to use IE, and therefore all the ActiveX garbage would render just fine... and given LAN bandwidth most people probably wouldn't notice the ridiculously large payload sizes (for the era) of these pages.
I didn't know about the HTML filter though because I only experimented with the export once or twice, during the evenings after lectures, which was enough to convince me I was heading down a dead-end path.
I want to say before that, back in 94, he'd had some sort of 486 variant (might have been a 486SX 33 or something along those lines - fairly run of the mill for mid-'94) with 4MB of RAM back in '94, and I want to say it got upgraded to 8MB, that we played a lot of DOOM and DOOM II on, and I think there'd maybe been a stop at a Pentium system somewhere in the middle because I remember we played Quake round at his place, and I'm sure that was earlier than '97. I'm not sure the 486 lasted that long - maybe only a year or 18 months - before it was replaced with a Pentium I system, but my memory is hazy.
I do remember the Pentium II though because, for the time, it was such a beast of a system. I do remember it seeming completely ridiculous and like you'd never need that much computing power. Oh sweet summer child, etc.
This was around 1995. I didn’t suffer too long with Composer on my 386, I got sick of the swapping pretty quickly and stuck with Notepad for a long time afterwards.
I didn’t upgrade my 386 PC until 1998 (couldn’t afford to), when I got a Cyrus 6x86, which is another story altogether. If you know about Quake and FPU performance with the 6x86, then you already know the story.
> I did not find a way to add margins or padding to the page's body in Netscape Composer.
Full page width 3-column table, with your main content in the middle column?
I literally still edit html files and upload them with ftp. What do people do these days? ahah
Heh, back then, "special characters" meant "characters you get in languages that aren't English but still use a mostly Latin alphabet". The characters in the screenshot look pretty much like the high-bit-set portion of ISO-8859-1. If you wanted the Forrest Gump smiley face, then you had to use Wingdings.
[1] https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/apple_sign_in_business@2x.w...
margin: 0 auto adds an equal amount of margin to its left and right. This often does have the effect of getting the element centered, but may or may not be what you really need; e.g. it doesn't work if you need real margins, or if you want to nest aligned boxes.
For center tags, browsers to this day use a separate vendor-prefixed property, e.g. text-align: -moz-center. It is still much easier to use than whatever margin/float/flexbox/grid hack standard CSS has come up with, but -moz-center seems to be doomed to an eternal life as a non-standard (albeit ubiquitous) property.
(I remember that not so long ago even Google would set -moz-center on their search page. Such a great opportunity to standardize existing practice, left unexploited for 27 years and counting.)
<td valign="middle"> <center>
<hr style="width: 500px; margin-bottom: 40px; margin-top: 10px;">
</center>
<hr style="max-width:500px;margin:10px auto 40px">
I wonder where all the stuff I used back then is today. The plastic and metal scrap of late 20th century e-waste. Somewhere buried deep.
I finally stopped using SeaMonkey when I felt the need to make my sites responsive. I now maintain my sites with a text editor and an FTP app, which work fine but feel like a step backward.
It was pretty easy to use for childs with zero help at all from adults. But was crashing pretty often (so where many apps in this era).
The hard part for childs was to host the website, hopefully, in France was had the free hosting association mygale.org
I'm so sad my bestie deleted our website with no backup without asking me about.
Those are fond memories that I'm pretty sure are the reason I because a developer.
Looking back at it now, the only truly difficult part (for me) was the infrastructure. I have heard stories about people just cold calling a merchant and sell a quick "home page" for $500 + hosting fees within minutes, and just generated a static page from a template with a logo, name and contact details. It was a gold rush where the right people with the right skills could make easy money.
Some of them were lucky enough to live in cities with local ISPs and hosted the sites on their personal PCs on a dial-up. People didn't expect much from the web at the time. I simply didn't have that kind of knowledge and risk taking ability at the time. My personal network did not contain any people who could have pointed me in the right direction either.
I'm kind of envious of today's youth, because they seem to have a better awareness of the business side of things and easily available technologies.
And I thought everyone knew smileys weren't part of Unicode until about a decade later.
Today the BlueGriffon Editor[1] fulfills a similar purpose. At least that is what my daughter used in class.
I wish there was a WYSIWYG editor that has CSS support and modern HTML.
Should had just threw the contents in the table.
Also, every time some idiot assumes my 43" 4k display in the landscape mode is just a strange 6" smartphone and renders the site with gigantic text with 35% of viewport width - I just really want to punch them in the face over TCP/IP.
Please, don't be an asshole to your visitors, let them (and their devices) decide how to render the information you present to the whole world to see.
This is all documented in the news feed of the site that is still needlessly online.
it works. always.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ce...