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Comment by don-code | Hacker News Reader

I did the same, except with Netscape Composer. That was a time where the output of the WYSIWYG editor - really, the source of any page - was pretty digestible, even to me as a middle school student.

I've noticed recently that the JavaScript debugger in Firefox can "un-Webpack" (and in some cases un-minify, if I've read the inputs and outputs correctly) the code behind many sites. It's certainly not as approachable as declarative HTML, but I suspect to some enterprising person, that route is still open.

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I think it was Microsoft FrontPage that had the most undigestible output at the time. A mess of tables, inline styles, Internet Explorer-specific tricks, plus a reliance on FrontPage Server Extensions for full functionality.

Adobe still had GoLive at the time, which was basically what Dreamweaver is now, and it didn't mangle the output as much, neither did Netscape Composer (which was way more limited). Many of the simpler WYSIWYG editors (Netscape Composer, that thing AOL had, etc.) were not nearly as bad as FrontPage.

FrontPage is what I made my first sites on as a child. That was such a fun experience.

I forgot if FrontPage had the automatic FTP upload or if it's a fantasy in my mind.

Dreamweaver had FTP uploads. Frontpage only uploaded to servers that supported their protocol.

FrontPage was indeed terrible, it caused me to make an even worse decision in the 1990’s—-make websites almost entirely out of image maps, and then eventually that terrible idea evolved into the classic terrible approach to early ‘00’s web frontends (bum bum bum): Macromedia Flash and Actionscript (the latter of which I actually remember fondly, although I may just be remembering it with rose-tinted glasses).

Edit: clarification of bad writing

Oh man that reminds me of customizing people Neopets personal pages as kid. Image maps and tables everywhere.

Yeah, arguably that was the mindset out of which David Siegel's book _Killer Web Sites_:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/567790.Creating_Killer_W...

grew out of.

Note the follow-up article: "The Web is Ruined and I Ruined It"

https://www.xml.com/pub/a/w3j/s1.people.html

I forgot all about: <SPACER> <MULTICOL> and <LAYER>

Last time I checked (10 years ago), Microsoft Share Point was still producing a nightmare of nested tables.

> I think it was Microsoft FrontPage that had the most undigestible output at the time.

Nah, I would argue that was Microsoft Word's (Office?) Save as Web Page feature. Which is what I built my first few websites in as a kid haha before learning about FrontPage and pirating that (back in 2003). FrontPage was a dream in comparison. Then I learned that FrontPage was also not as good, and learnt Dreamweaver is the better option so pirated and tried to use that shortly after, but the WYSIWYG of FrontPage was leagues better to my little child brain. Ah, nostalgia :')

> I think it was Microsoft FrontPage that had the most undigestible output at the time.

I remember, a bit over 20 years ago, designing a rather complex web app using Microsoft FrontPage – I used it to mock up all the HTML forms, which I then took screenshots of and showed them to the business analyst and got her to approve them.

Then I implemented the whole thing in PHP 4.x (I think PHP 5.0 had just come out around that time but we weren't using it yet.)

So I never really used the HTML of FrontPage, I just used it for what people use Figma for nowadays.

> I've noticed recently that the JavaScript debugger in Firefox can "un-Webpack" (and in some cases un-minify, if I've read the inputs and outputs correctly) the code behind many sites. It's certainly not as approachable as declarative HTML, but I suspect to some enterprising person, that route is still open.

That's just sourcemaps I think. Pretty standard stuff, but the site have to provide the maps.

Composer survives to this day as part of the Seamonkey suite. I still use it for nice, simple static sites: https://www.seamonkey-project.org/doc/features

Code cannot be unminified, minification is a non-reversible process. You're definitely just running into sites with source maps.

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