With the rise of these retro-looking websites, I feel it's possible again to start using a browser from the '90s. Someone should make a static-site social media platform for full compatibility.
(I don't think this detracts from such sites, to be clear; they're adopting new technologies where they provide practical benefits to the reader because many indieweb proponents are pushing it as a progressive, rather than reactionary, praxis.)
Are they going out of their way to recreate an aesthetic that was originally the easiest thing to create given the language specs of the past, or is there something about this look and feel that is so fundamental to the idea of making websites that basically anything that looks like any era or variety of HTML will converge on it?
The CSS on the page is only to make modern browsers behave like old ones in order to match the rendering.
The guestbook has some javascript if you notice to defeat spam: https://bootstra386.com/guestbook.html but it's the kind of javascript that netscape 2.0 can run without issue.
Unfortunately it won’t, at least not when you’re serving it with that configuration.
It uses what used to be called “name-based virtual hosting” (before it became the norm), which looks at the Host request header to determine which site to serve. Internet Explorer 3, released in 1996, was the first version of Internet Explorer to send a Host header. I think Netscape 3, also released in 1996, might’ve been the first version to support it as well. So, for instance, Internet Explorer 2.0, released in 1995, will fail to load that site at that URL. If you test locally with localhost, for instance, then this problem won’t be apparent, because you aren’t using named-based virtual hosting in that situation.
If you need to support early-1996 browsers and older, then your site needs to be available when you request it without any Host header. In most cases, you can test this by using the IP address in your browser location bar instead of the hostname.
Edit:
At one point around 1998, it wasn’t possible to directly install Internet Explorer 4 on Windows NT 4, because it shipped with Internet Explorer 2 and microsoft.com used name-based virtual hosting, or at least their downloads section did. So the method to install Internet Explorer 4 on Windows NT 4 was to use Internet Explorer 2 to download Netscape Navigator 4, and then use Netscape Navigator 4 to download Internet Explorer 4.
In the modern world, one common probe performed by attackers is to see whether a site responds with its own IP address in the Host: header, or the address-to-name lookup result of the IP address in the DNS, or the well-known defaults of some WWW servers.
What they're relying upon, of course, is people/softwares allowing IP addresses and the reverse lookup domain names, but forgetting to install security controls for those as virtual hosts.
Or, equally as bad, the fallback if no Host: header is supplied being a private/internal WWW site of some kind.
For example, I do this with my website. I receive comments via email (with the sender’s addresses hashed). Each page/comment-list/comment has its own rss feed that people can “subscribe” to. This allows you to get notified when someone responds to a comment you left, or comments on a page. But all notifications are opt-in and require no login because your rss reader is fetching the updates.
Since I’m the moderator of my site, I subscribe to the “all-comments” feed and get notified upon every submission. I then go review the comment and then the site rebuilds. There’s no logins or sign ups. Commenting is just pushing and notifications just pulling.
example https://spenc.es/updates/posts/4513EBDF/
I plan on open sourcing the commenting aspect of this (it’s called https://r3ply.com) so this doesn’t have to be reinvented for each website, but comments are just one part of the whole system:
The web is the platform. RSS provides notifications (pull). Emailing provides a way to post (push) - and moderate - content. Links are for sharing and are always static (never change or break).
The one missing thing is like a “pending comments” cache, for when you occasionally get HN like traffic and need comments to be temporarily displayed immediately. I’m building this now but it’s really optional and would be the only thing in this system that even requires JS or SSR.
I like your thinking. Beautiful website, by the way!
Do you think think this would work: a little icon that opens a pure html disclosure element with instructions and a design with text laid out sort of in the shape of an email.
“(Text only instructions) Send an email like this:
To: <site>@r3pl.com
Subject: <page_or_comment_url>
Body: <write your comment here, be careful to not accidentally leave your email signature>”
In practice, it's going to be tricky to know without measurement; and the shifting of the default at the client end to from 0.9 and 1.0 to 1.1 began back in 2010. Asking the people who run robots for statistics will not help. Almost no good actor robots are using 0.9 and 1.0 now, and 0.9 and 1.0 traffic dropped off a cliff in the 2010s falling to 0% (to apparently 1 decimal place) by 2021 as measured by the Web Almanac.
* https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2021/http
If a modern HTTP server stopped serving 0.9 and 1.0, or even just had a problem doing so to decades-old pre-1.1 client softwares, very few people would know. Almost 0% of HTTP client traffic would be affected.
And, indeed, http://url.town/ is one of the very places that has already turned 0.9 off. It does not speak it, and returns a 1.1 error response. And no-one in this thread (apart from edm0nd) knew.
https://portal.mozz.us/gopher/gopher.somnolescent.net/9/w2kr...
with these NEW values in about:config set to true:
security.ssl3.ecdhe_ecdsa_aes_128_gcm_sha256
security.ssl3.ecdhe_rsa_aes_128_gcm_sha256
security.ssl3.ecdh_ecdsa_rc4_128_sha
security.ssl3.ecdh_rsa_rc4_128_sha
security.ssl3.ecdhe_ecdsa_rc4_128_sha
security.ssl3.ecdhe_rsa_rc4_128_sha
security.ssl3.rsa_rc4_128_md5
security.ssl3.rsa_rc4_128_shaIsn't that https://subreply.com/ ?
What do you mean by that? Especially the "social" part?