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Comment by jdpage | Hacker News Reader

Not so much. While a lot of these websites use classic approaches (handcrafted HTML/CSS, server-side includes, etc.) and aesthetics, the actual versions of those technologies used are often rather modern. For example, TFA looks like a page I'd have browsed in IE5 as a kid, but if you look at the markup, it's using HTML5 tags and Flexbox (which became a W3C WR in 2017), while a period site would have used an HTML table to get the same effect. Of course, you wouldn't want to do it that way nowadays, because it wouldn't be responsive or mobile-friendly.

(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.)

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A couple years ago I made this https://bootstra386.com/ ... it's for a project. This is genuinely 1994 style with 1994 code that will load on 1994 browsers. It doesn't force SSL, this does work. I made sure of 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.

> This is genuinely 1994 style with 1994 code that will load on 1994 browsers.

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.

Using the IP address is a tricky one for something that is supposed to be Internet facing in the 2020s.

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.

I ran ns2 on this in testing it two years ago. I'll check again this week.

> For example, TFA looks like a page I'd have browsed in IE5 as a kid, but if you look at the markup, it's using HTML5 tags and Flexbox (which became a W3C WR in 2017), while a period site would have used an HTML table to get the same effect.

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?

I think it’s the former. Many of these retro layouts are pretty terrible. They existed because they were the best at the time, but using modern HTML features to recreate bad layouts from the last is just missing the point completely.

They’re making their own point. This is a document as a piece of expression and communication, not pure utility.

I'm happy they didn't choose to go full authentic with quirks mode and table-based layouts, because Firefox has some truly ancient bugs in nested table rendering... that'll never get fixed, because... no one uses them anymore!

I think the layout as such (the grid of categories) isn't particularly dated, though a modern site would style them as tiles. The centered text can feel a little dated, but the biggest thing making it feel old is that it uses the default browser styles for a lot of page elements, particularly the font.

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