[HN Gopher] 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage a...
___________________________________________________________________
18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still
updated
Author : fbn79
Score : 407 points
Date : 2020-02-14 13:35 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fmboschetto.it)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fmboschetto.it)
| webscalist wrote:
| https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
| 100 Points. Mobile First. Better than React Native.
| stabbles wrote:
| This is hilarious! Turns out 18 year old websites were mobile
| friendly after all
| jsaldes wrote:
| Have you actually tried the site on a mobile device? It's
| impossible to read the text and navigation is hell. Wouldn't
| classify that as "mobile friendly".
| dahart wrote:
| Just tried on iPad, the site works great. Did you mean
| 'phone' and not 'mobile device'?
| jaypeg25 wrote:
| ohhh so pedantic. Love it.
| dahart wrote:
| I am sorry, you're totally right, is it pretty
| unreasonably nit picky to differentiate between 10 inch
| screens and 3 inch screens when it comes to web UX. Smart
| phones do count as all mobile devices and the only thing
| that matters when determining if a site is mobile
| friendly. And of course it's usually a good idea to
| broaden the argument categorically to something larger
| than your personal experience to make the stronger point
| that most people would agree with you and the other
| person is obviously up in the night.
| joegahona wrote:
| Would you also consider a laptop to be a "device" that is
| "mobile"?
| dahart wrote:
| You say that as if it's weird to call an iPad a mobile
| device. Would you say that a tablet is not a mobile
| device? What do you define as mobile device, and what
| devices would you use to determine if a web site is
| "mobile friendly"?
|
| The common definition of mobile device is phone or
| tablet. The common definition of laptop is computer.
| These despite the fact that phones and tablets are
| computers and despite the fact that laptops and even
| desktops can be moved. It's pretty easy to find lots of
| examples of the common definitions. Here's a good one:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_device
| lccarrasco wrote:
| Does that definition matter if tablets are probably less
| than 1% of all mobile devices?
| dahart wrote:
| Why Google something for two seconds when you can just
| speculate wildly? Tablets are almost 10% of mobile sales
| via my first search hit
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/smartphone-market-a-mess-
| but-a...
|
| The question of whether definitions matter when one sub-
| category or subset is a minority or majority... I'm not
| sure how to answer that. Why would a definition stop
| mattering just because something different is a small
| subset? I must assume that a categorical term includes
| everything in the category. If you don't mean everything
| in the category, then don't use the term that refers to
| the category. If you mean phone, then say phone. ??
| Right? I'm confused why you would argue anything else.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Depends on your audience. One of my healthcare web sites
| is almost 60% iPad, because doctors love them.
| rchaud wrote:
| A landscape iPad has the same 4:3 aspect ratio as most PC
| monitors during that time (800px x 600px or 1024px x
| 768px)
| vesinisa wrote:
| It's not so bad if your mobile browser supports pinch to
| zoom.
| rchaud wrote:
| Most mobile browsers support it out of the box. If the
| site designer set "user-scalable=no" in the meta viewport
| property, than that will prevent zooming. It's an
| accessibility issue and should be avoided.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| iOS has ignored that meta tag for a while now.
| Mirioron wrote:
| What do you mean? The text isn't much smaller than on HN on
| my 5.5" phone. It's entirely readable.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| HN is hardly a good example. It's terrible on mobile.
| Mirioron wrote:
| I find HN to be one of the best mobile websites. It's
| fast and text isn't massively oversized. You can actually
| fit information on screen. Many mobile websites I've seen
| are horrible to use, because they have very poor
| information density and the sites seem to be designed for
| 4" or smaller screens.
| matsemann wrote:
| I tried to upvote you about HNs great mobile design, but
| the buttons are so small I accidentally downvoted ;)
| SilasX wrote:
| Then zoom in, which most "mobile optimized" sites
| prohibit.
|
| My further comments:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22328505
| SilasX wrote:
| What do you mean? It has reasonable column width so you can
| zoom in and out as necessary, often with a double tap. That
| is, it leaves it up to the client to adjust as necessary --
| in contrast with the typical mobile site, which:
|
| 1) Forces a particular size/resolution, locking out zoom
| capabilities
|
| 2) Has a floating header with a constant size relative to
| your device screen, blotting out the same real estate no
| matter how much you zoom. And, of course, using the same
| header pixel height for portrait vs landscape, making the
| latter practically unusable.
|
| Yes, this site is better than 99% of mobile sites out
| there.
|
| Edit: Some further comments: It's generally better to have
| a site that obeys the standards and thus plays nice with
| any client, than one that locks you into the hip designer's
| meth-addled decision. This site in particular works well
| with my extensions like VimFX for clicking links from the
| keyboard.
| Y-Bopinator wrote:
| Works fine for me. Might be time to see the doctor and get
| your eyes checked.
| dchest wrote:
| I just tried, it works well (Chrome/Android on a
| 5.5"-something screen).
| ozim wrote:
| In 2002, 1024x768 and 800x600 were mostly used resolutions
| for computer screens so yes, those were mobile friendly...
| pmlnr wrote:
| Pre frames and table-layout designs are pretty good, because
| they are dead simple HTML - and thus, they allow reflow,
| being responsive as a result.
|
| This is not one of those.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| The first wysiwyg editors (front page, golive, dreamweaver,
| etc..) were heavy abusers of tables.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Almost all of the performance-unfriendliness has been
| designed in. Especially for monetisation.
| sakarisson wrote:
| More like 18 year old websites are so rare that page rating
| services don't even work for them.
| achairapart wrote:
| Sure they work! It's very easy to get 100/100 when you
| don't use any blocking CSS or JavaScript and all images are
| optimized for 56k modems.
| gorbachev wrote:
| Back when Netscape 0.9 was new I had daily arguments with
| some of the "web designers" who insisted on using HTML
| targeting browser bugs and other invalid HTML tricks to
| optimize the aesthetics of their sites.
|
| All you needed to do then, and today, is make sure your HTML
| is valid and that you don't break things on purpose ("this
| site optimized for MSIE1.0" type of stuff) and your site will
| forever be mobile and any-other-html-rendering device
| friendly.
| mister_hn wrote:
| Just because mobile phones got same (or better) screen
| resolution than in 1990s/2000s desktop PCs
| [deleted]
| pmlnr wrote:
| 100 points on pagespeed is not that hard with static sites.
|
| - drop 99% of the JS (PWA, lazy-loading, infinite scroll,
| jquery, you don't need any of them for a webpage), convert the
| remaining for 1% to vanilla js and use it as progressive
| enhancement.
|
| - use EM or % as layout width/height
|
| - inline css, js, and svg
|
| EDIT
|
| - no webfonts!
|
| The only thing that'll remain as an issue are tables wider,
| than viewport, on mobile.
|
| My site:
| https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Gee, maybe that's sort of an indication on how far backwards
| the user experience on web has fallen.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Don't know about PWA. Service workers are pretty lightweight
| and help with caching.
|
| But yeah, lazy-loading, infinite scroll, etc., are all
| designed to cover up design flaws that impact performance. I
| think lazy-loading can be potentially done right, but almost
| none of us do anything right.
|
| > use EM or % as layout width/height
|
| Why? EM/REM is good for handling font sizes, but for anything
| else it may not make sense and a custom font setting in the
| browser can break layouts if the size of boxes are based on
| font sizes. PX is perfectly adequate for layout, and is
| actually a relative unit(PX !== hardware pixel). Same for
| borders, padding, margin, etc. Even REM is better than EM for
| most cases. People who adjust the font size in their browser
| don't necessarily want their layout to change and potentially
| degrade as a result.
|
| > inline css, js, and svg
|
| Can be a good idea, especially if you can somehow identify
| the CSS used on page load and discard anything nonessential.
| Though maybe HTTP/2 makes inlining obsolete. IDK
|
| > no webfonts!
|
| Thank you! Web fonts are perfectly sufficient in 99% of
| cases.
| pmlnr wrote:
| > Why? EM/REM is good for handling font sizes, but for
| anything else it may not make sense and a custom font
| setting in the browser can break layouts if the size of
| boxes are based on font sizes. PX is perfectly adequate for
| layout, and is actually a relative unit(PX !== hardware
| pixel). Same for borders, padding, margin, etc. Even REM is
| better than EM for most cases. People who adjust the font
| size in their browser don't necessarily want their layout
| to change and potentially degrade as a result.
|
| I had a lot of bad experience with px, but it is true that
| for borders it's the only reasonable choice.
|
| REM is not that well supported, especially in awkward
| browsers (Dillo, for example).
|
| Imo EM is nicer for padding/margin; it keeps the
| text/layout ratio even if the font is resized, unlike px.
|
| But point taken, it cannot be used as the only unit.
| [deleted]
| nyuszika7h wrote:
| > Unable to process request. Please wait a while and try again.
| throwaway_fbnet wrote:
| Here is a life-saver maintained by a 77 year young lawyer for a
| lot of public good: http://www.drtsolutions.com/. Case laws
| against SARFAESI, an Indian law that expedites bank recovery for
| non-performing assets. He updates it manually in FrontPage even
| today!
| jannes wrote:
| Wow, that page is amazing!
|
| I hadn't seen the old Google logo in years:
| http://www.drtsolutions.com/drtqueries.htm The search widget
| doesn't even use an <iframe>. Just a plain <form>.
| ta999999171 wrote:
| Page colors are ugly as shit, but so readable - modern web
| devs/people who make them do "modern" stuff, you suck
| compared to these sites in this thread.
|
| Sorry, not sorry.
| geocrasher wrote:
| My favorite "Retro awful": Site:
|
| https://www.lingscars.com/
| cosmodisk wrote:
| I remember how she was ridiculed on Dragon's Den,yet she's the
| one employing a bunch of people and having a successful
| business. I remember reading that she's even hired someone to
| do some maintenance in the town,because the local council
| couldn't afford it anymore.
| ahmetkun wrote:
| this one looks very retro but the code is actually quite
| modern. it has custom fonts, css animations, gradients, etc.
| and no tables.
| reaperducer wrote:
| It's like the visual equivalent of chiptunes.
| notahacker wrote:
| Also, beneath the intentional craziness, it's very clever
| marketing.
| cwoolfe wrote:
| Only 520 lines of HTML. And readable! view-
| source:http://www.fmboschetto.it/
| lucasjans wrote:
| I'm surprised no one mentioned it here: before Front Page was a
| Microsoft product it was created by an independent comment,
| Vermeer. But as many pointed out it produced horrible code.
|
| My favorite editor of the day was a "hand coder" called Home Site
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia_HomeSite
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| "UFO's don't exist" - untrustworthy site.
| nimajneb wrote:
| I love the old style of (personal) website like this. It's seems
| both nostalgic and maybe a bit more authentic.
| cptskippy wrote:
| One of my favorite pieces of software, that I still use to this
| day, is 20 years old version of SpaceMonger.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/XMwNRR3.png
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I made a lot of sites in Frontpage in high school.
|
| My favorite bit was the rollover buttons that used a Java applet
| to do so.
| randogogogo wrote:
| Wow that loaded quickly! I wonder what she's doing to optimize
| it.
| netule wrote:
| She? http://www.fmboschetto.it/autore/autore.htm
| mattkevan wrote:
| Once worked on an enormous, very popular site built by hand in
| Frontpage.
|
| It had millions of pageviews, made over 6 figures a month in
| AdSense and been updated so often and for so long that the owner
| didn't actually know how many pages there were. Had to hire
| someone just to index it.
|
| Not bad for plain old html and css.
| rchaud wrote:
| Ah, the old days of the web, when it was possible to make money
| via AdSense. Users would actually bookmark sites those days, so
| there was no need to throw an email signup popup in their face
| when the page loaded. The comments would have real people
| conversing, and not filled with spambots pushing fake Guccis
| and Air Jordans.
| faramarz wrote:
| I made my first web site with Frontpage and the big leap for me
| was learning about nested tabled within tables. game changer.
| Kunix wrote:
| One made with Word and still updated:
| http://villemin.gerard.free.fr/
| SonnyWortzik wrote:
| Frontpage wow, that was my go to back in the days. Then I saw the
| markup it was making, yikes!!
| Nowyouknow wrote:
| Check out my Dad's from 2002. He's still using it as an
| e-commerce site, regularly getting orders and directing customers
| to it.
|
| Deleted URL thanks to friendly advice
| tsukurimashou wrote:
| hmm you might not want people to know about your dad's
| e-commerce site built in 2002...
|
| EDIT: checked the website, "add to cart" sends you directly to
| paypal and there doesn't seem to be any account system.
|
| Still you should be careful with which communities you share
| this kind of information, hint: think of the H of HN
| [deleted]
| Nowyouknow wrote:
| Good point. Appreciate it
| tsukurimashou wrote:
| No problem, I know how it is to just want to talk about a
| personal story without thinking about the information
| you're letting out for the "public" to see :D
| [deleted]
| davnicwil wrote:
| I visited this on mobile expecting it to be a laugh, but was
| surprised to find that it's actually amazing!
|
| You can see the whole page in a single column, and just pinch
| zoom to the bit you're interested in to read/interact. Scrolling
| downwards and sideways to pan around works fine, super intuitive.
| The UX of this is so great, feels just like that original iPhone
| demo [1].
|
| ...why don't we do this again?
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/vN4U5FqrOdQ?t=2530
| dmuhs wrote:
| This is dedication in content creation and maintenance. We can
| all learn something here!
| dmje wrote:
| As I spent half a day trying to wrangle my way through some sass
| grunt compiler frontend bullshit just trying to update the colour
| of some links on a client website, I find myself nodding sagely
| again. In the early days you could view source, see what was
| going on, copy and recreate someone else's site, learn a whole
| bunch of new stuff and actually get shit done. Now, it's all
| JavaScript bullshit and 100k lines of css. It'll last about a
| month before it's out of date and replaced by the Next Big Thing.
| HTML, css, a sprinkle of JavaScript. That's what's proven to
| last.
| zladuric wrote:
| I'm not sure a FrontPage site would be much better. It's also a
| big mess of generated markup you'd have to go through manually,
| if you didn't have the proper FP version.
| arm64future wrote:
| Where can I find more sites like this
| rchaud wrote:
| NeoCities has a collection of sites with that old-school
| Geocities styling.
| owlninja wrote:
| Try here https://wiby.me/ Hit the 'surprise me' link
| bobowzki wrote:
| I had forgotten all about Frontpage!
| benibela wrote:
| My personal website is also around 18-year-old. I actually do not
| remember how old it is. I did not have a domain at first and
| hosted it on AOL or something.
|
| Here it was:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20030908174016/http://www.benibe...
|
| But in 2005, I made a complete redesign:
| http://www.benibela.de/index_en.html
|
| The backend went through a few reimplementations. Individually
| made html files (with front page express or something), a
| template tool written in Delphi, another template tool written in
| Java, a complete XQuery interpreter written in FreePascal
| djsumdog wrote:
| I recently did a history of my old websites:
|
| https://battlepenguin.com/tech/a-history-of-personal-and-pro...
|
| Most of the content is still there, but it's been shifted between
| static pages, Rails, Wordpress and now Jekyll.
|
| It's neat to see one of these gems still out there; a picture of
| the 90s web that's still functional and being used. Too many of
| these sites are lost; only available in the Internet Archives.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I took a similar journey over the years from static pages to
| custom static generators to PHP to Drupal to a custom Django-
| based blog engine to Jekyll/static pages.
|
| It's interesting because I'm sometimes sad I lost the code for
| some of those old versions. Those old early PHP and custom
| static generator codebases would be interesting to revisit with
| today's ideas, even if just to laugh about. (But also because I
| know there's probably not-great blog content lost to them.) One
| of the "custom static generators" I recall was actually a
| _really_ early not-quite-SPA JS app. I remember it ran really
| slowly in browsers at the time and worse got slower with each
| new content added, but these days I wonder if it would seem
| fine on modern JS engines. (I 've got a feeling about the only
| thing I'd need to change would be to swap
| `document.write(stuff)` for `element.innerHtml = stuff` and
| it'd perform quite well today.)
| jk7f wrote:
| Another gem: http://www.tyrrell.de/startseite.htm
| mhandley wrote:
| But is it still running on Cern/3.0, installed circa 1993. Ours
| is: $ nc www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk 80 HEAD
| /staff/m.handley/ HTTP/1.0
| HTTP/1.0 200 Document follows MIME-Version: 1.0
| Server: CERN/3.0 Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2020 17:02:59 GMT
| Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 9185 Last-
| Modified: Sun, 16 Jun 2019 15:27:37 GMT
|
| It's running on Sun Sparc hardware from the same era, and has
| been in active use for all of those 27 years.
| nonamenoslogan wrote:
| I used to have a bunch of Sparc's circa-early 2000's. Sold
| some, recycled some, wish I'd have kept at least one. The price
| of a SparcstationLX that works is silly now-a-days.
| timonoko wrote:
| My personal web-page is from 1992 and updated occasionally. This
| page is preserved as it was in 1994:
| http://timonoko.github.io/alaska . It started as Gopher-page in
| 1992 and I just moved those associated pictures into it, without
| truly understanding formatting and all that shit. Some dudes in
| Usenet told me about <p> and <img> tags.
| generationP wrote:
| I sympathize with the author. I have built my maths site just 2
| years after this one, when I was in high school. Ever since I've
| only been adding material, and occasionally moving old stuff into
| subdirectories; other than that, it's the same old geocities
| website made with FPE, except it's now hosted on a university
| server and has my academic title and office and no more colored
| background. Oh, and I now edit it with notepad++ and track it
| with git.
|
| I've had plans to rebuild it for the last 8 years or so, to make
| it better and slicker and easier to navigate (as it stands, my
| new papers are mixed together with my scribe notes from
| undergrad). But I never figured out how to achieve this without
| also requiring javascript or relying on tools that may not
| survive the next decade and that I cannot tweak to my needs
| without learning a new programming language (hello Jekyll, hi
| Hugo). Nor did I ever find the Right Way how it should be
| structured; move one thing to the front and something else gets
| harder to find. I guess it will survive me.
|
| Makes me a lot less judgmental when I see another academic
| website that can trace its lineage back to geocities and
| angelfire.
| jeena wrote:
| A company in Germany called Arcor had the front page website of
| my band from 2001 which used frontpage serverside extensions
| still online about 4 years ago. I couldn't find the FTP password
| to download the source code so it died when they finally pulled
| the plug.
| elwell wrote:
| Here's a real gem: https://bible.ca/
| abruzzi wrote:
| My father still updates his website with Frontpage (he had a
| recent 6 month outage because he inadvertently deleted the
| Windows XP vmdk on his system, but I recovered that for him
| recently.) He's 75, and isn't interested in converting or
| learning anything new at this stage.
|
| The funny thing is for years his home-made site was the top
| google hit if you searched for "hill's criteria" (See Hill's
| criteria of causation). His site is http://drabruzzi.com/
| Santosh83 wrote:
| Hmm, how do you manage to acquire a legal of copy of Frontpage
| (even Express) these days for your dad?
| nonamenoslogan wrote:
| The later versions "Sharepoint Designer" are free from
| Microsoft and still available on their downloads page.
|
| Frontpage may be old enough to consider it 'abandonware,' a
| quick Google for "free frontpage" has a lot of downloads
| including one from Kean.edu with an embedded key.
| ta999999171 wrote:
| Most don't (shouldn't?) care about the legality of 20+ year
| old software that's no longer being sold.
| Macha wrote:
| Was FrontPage ever sold digitally? I wouldn't be surprised if
| my parents still had their disc copies of Office 95-XP (some
| even legal thanks to PC bundle deals).
| abruzzi wrote:
| He still has the install disk! Though my repair was to pull
| the vmdk off his old, broken laptop to get him working again.
| matteuan wrote:
| It's impressive the amount of content inside! There are countless
| pages about literature, religion and physics. It's a good
| reminder of the original goal of WWW: share information.
| codegeek wrote:
| But thats so not web 2.0/3.0. You gotta add more padding so we
| can create smooth scrolling. /s. I am a culprit of this too now
| btw.
| rlv-dan wrote:
| > It's a good reminder of the original goal of WWW: share
| information.
|
| That is what I miss the most about the old web. We wanted to
| build something better by sharing knowledge. And for a while we
| did. Then mainstream came and corporates took over.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Well, to be honest the corporations were always there. It's
| just when the marketers discovered "cyberspace" that
| everything went to hell.
| dpcan wrote:
| In my ~17 year career as a professional web developer and
| consultant, I'm not sure that any technology has made me more
| frustrated and miserable than the days when I had to help people
| who insisted on using Frontpage to build their websites.
| fjfaase wrote:
| Mine, in plain HTML, is almost 25 years old. I have to admit that
| I did change the layout a little, through the years, but it has
| been rather constant, because updating 974 HTML files, is not
| something that is easily done.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| It's pretty easily done? Strip out everything but body, make a
| wrapper to include the pages? Any static bits you can search-
| replace, that's what I used to do before discovering server-
| side includes.
| mk89 wrote:
| We are talking about a God given website. Of course it's old and
| still ongoing :P
|
| Jokes aside, the first thing I read was the sentence "here there
| is a java applet, sorry your browser doesn't support it" :D Which
| is funny, after all.
| shaneprrlt wrote:
| You're telling me their site still works in 2020 _without_
| needing to serve the client as a server-side rendered react app
| with the data being provided by several node.js microservices
| containerized and deployed to a kubernetes cluster and accessed
| through a GraphQL interface? IMPOSSIBLE!
| [deleted]
| dhosek wrote:
| My personal site, http://don.dream-in-color.net has been at that
| URL (and with this design) for over 20 years. The reading list
| (http://don.dream-in-color.net/books/ ) dates back to a page that
| was originally served over FTP and will turn 25 years old in May.
| blakesterz wrote:
| Anyone else still sad over the demise of FrontPage Express? It
| did everything I needed at the time, it was free, and really easy
| to use. The HTML wasn't as bad as FrontPage either.
| gtk40 wrote:
| I got my start with web dev using Netscape Composer, which was
| a similar enough tool. Seamonkey, the successor of Netscape and
| Mozilla Suite, still includes it to this day and it works well!
|
| https://www.seamonkey-project.org/
| tdstein wrote:
| It loads so fast!
| masswerk wrote:
| My website is still as of 1999, but it received some design
| updates (and a blog section) two years ago. However, there's
| still some original content, some even older than the particular
| website. E.g., see this 1998 demo for what we may now call a
| single page app, entirely rendered in JS from central data files
| (but using frames - well, it was the 1990s):
|
| https://www.masswerk.at/demospace/relayWeb_en/welcome.htm
|
| Slogan: "Microsoft keeps talking about Active Server Pages -
| We're offering Active Client Pages"
|
| Mind the charts section, rendering graphs by outputting tables
| with tiny images using `document.write()`, since the canvas
| element wasn't even dreamt of. (Displaying charts was a tricky
| business, then. Usually these were rendered server side as GIFs,
| where they caused heavy load. The alternative were Java applets,
| which had an enormous effect on the client load and delayed page
| display quite considerably, while the JRE was starting up. Enter
| JS to the rescue...) Also, note the period design, including
| marquee tickers, custom fonts from GIFs, etc...
| Lagogarda wrote:
| This site is best viewed with Netscape Navigator
| criddell wrote:
| I was looking for the web ring links.
| cat199 wrote:
| Not to forget the geocitiesizer:
|
| https://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/
|
| "Make Any Webpage Look Like It Was Made By A 13 Year-Old In 1996"
| 3dprintscanner wrote:
| Another mention of this fantastic cycling website:
| https://www.sheldonbrown.com/harris/
| dwheeler wrote:
| My personal site was posted on September 12, 1999, is still
| updated, and has no problems. It;s a static site that mostly uses
| straight HTML/CSS. There are a few scripts that generate pages,
| but generating HTML/CSS pretty easy. https://dwheeler.com.
|
| Geocrasher said:
|
| > I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to build a site to
| last 25 years without numerous redesigns, build a static HTML
| page.
|
| Yes. I don't get paid to maintain my personal site, so simplicity
| and longevity are most important. If I have to rewrite things
| because of incompatible changes in the infrastructure components
| (e.g., Python2 to Python3), or because proprietary company C has
| decided to stop supporting product P that I depend on, then I
| have to spend time that doesn't actually provide any new value.
| Keeping things simple, and minimizing dependencies, can be
| useful. Like everything else, there's a trade-off.
| chipperyman573 wrote:
| Pbatengf, lbh'ir qrpbqrq zl frperg zrffntr. Fbeel, ab cevmrf. ?
| Arnavion wrote:
| Answering your question will unfortunately defeat the purpose
| of that text being what it is.
| nostromo wrote:
| _spoiler alert_
|
| rot13
| smush wrote:
| No kidding. Already, I've found some interesting articles to
| read.
|
| I'm taking a look at https://dwheeler.com/essays/easy-cross-
| platform-gui.html, which has references to XULRunner etc. which
| since 2009 have fallen out of favor.
|
| Would you continue to recommend those wanting to invest in (for
| the 80% of use cases) wxWidgets for FLOSS cross-platform GUI
| apps? BoaConstructor et. al look interesting.
|
| Thanks for taking the time to look at this comment. If it helps
| give you some context, I'll throw in that I currently am most
| familiar with WinForms .NET apps or very small Win32 native
| applications, and have avoided JS successfully so far.
| dwheeler wrote:
| A lot of that stuff is overtaken by events, but I clearly say
| that the essay was written in 2009. Nevertheless, if you
| wanted to see what I wrote in 2009, there it is. It hasn't
| disappeared from The Ether, there's a disturbingly large
| amount of information that was written only a few years ago
| and has totally disappeared. One of the reasons that much
| information has disappeared is because the website can no
| longer stay running. If your website is designed to last,
| then the information is more likely to stay available. Yes, I
| know it's more complicated than that. But it's a start.
| dmalvarado wrote:
| https://wiki.mozilla.org/Spreadfirefox
| [deleted]
| jvanderbot wrote:
| You might say your website was designed to last[1]
|
| 1. https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/
| sidarape wrote:
| You could use a static website generator such as Jekyll or
| Hugo. Then, if the tools stop working for any reason, you
| always have the generated HTML than you can update.
| iamaelephant wrote:
| Or you could not do that. Did he not just show that his way
| works just fine?
| syntheticnature wrote:
| They already are, hand-rolled: "There are a few scripts that
| generate pages"
| 1_player wrote:
| I'm surprised to see <marquee> still exists and works in modern
| browsers. And saddened to see it updates at ~20fps, at least on
| Safari.
|
| Time for a smooth, GPU accelerated 60+fps marquee implementation?
| seisvelas wrote:
| While <marquee> support is near universal, I was sad to find
| out that <blink> has not fared so well.
|
| I'm sure a lot of you already know this easter egg, but if you
| search "blink tag" in Google, Google makes all the blink tags
| actually work (using JS of course but still)
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=blink+tag
| reaperducer wrote:
| I simulate the <blink> tag on a 404 page I maintain.
|
| But I use CSS, not JS.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Wait, how do the rest of you test if a field accepts or rejects
| html?
| geocrasher wrote:
| These simple sites show us something profound: If you want
| something to last, don't base it on something that won't last.
| There are a some technologies that will never allow somebody to
| build a site and leave it unchanged for 20 or 25 years. Cold
| Fusion comes to mind. Almost nobody hosts it anymore for one. Can
| you imagine running the same WordPress version for 25 years? The
| version of PHP it runs on will be EOL long before.
|
| I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to build a site to
| last 25 years without numerous redesigns, build a static HTML
| page.
|
| Looks like Web 1.0 got something right after all :)
| angrygoat wrote:
| Back in 2001 I redid the UWA computer club website
| (https://ucc.asn.au/) using XSLT with a custom doctype
| ('grahame').
|
| In the early 2000s XML was the cool shiny thing. They're still
| using it, in fact I found out recently that someone wrote a
| Markdown to 'doctype grahame' converter to 'modernise' the
| site.
|
| I guess what I actually built back then was an early static
| site generator, but it's still kind of cool they're using it 19
| years later, hacky as it was / is :)
| bjoli wrote:
| I still use my old XML doctype with xslt to produce some
| websites I maintain. Whenever, if ever, xslt is removed from
| browsers, converting it to a static site generator will be
| easy.
|
| I regret nothing. Editing simple xml using Emacs is a breeze.
| tcgv wrote:
| Last time I worked with XSLT was in 2014, redesigning a major
| Brazilian airline reservation and ticketing system. At the
| time their passenger service system (Navitaire New Skies [1])
| had already switched their white label front-end app from a
| home grown XSLT web framework to ASP .NET MVC 5, but the
| company I was working for wasn't particularly interested in
| paying the (higher) fee for using the "new" front-end
| framework.
|
| [1] https://www.navitaire.com/new-skies-reservation-system
| [deleted]
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't think this is really unique to Web 1.0; certainly
| something that still works from the Web 1.0 days seems
| "impressive" just because of the passage of time, but there's
| probably some element of survivorship bias there. You mention
| ColdFusion as an example, but this guy's site is made using
| FrontPage. He didn't _know_ in 2001 that he 'd still be able to
| run FrontPage in 2020. He made a bet, and it paid off. Other
| people made similar bets, on other technologies, and
| unfortunately got it wrong.
|
| My personal website uses Jekyll, and while there's always the
| possibility it would become abandoned and stop working (I've
| definitely found someupgrades to be a pain, and ruby tooling in
| general doesn't help either), I'll always have the simple,
| readable markdown files the site is based on. While this
| wouldn't be an option for a non-technical website author, if
| _I_ really had to, I 'm sure I could write a simple
| markdown->html renderer over a weekend (or a converter to
| transform it into the future format-du-jour).
| Florin_Andrei wrote:
| > _If you want something to last, don 't base it on something
| that won't last._
|
| The ancient Egyptians knew something about this.
| Someone wrote:
| Or use free/open software, preferably popular free/open
| software that runs on a popular OS.
|
| Even if the OS and software effectively die, you still would be
| able to run the latest version in a VM or in emulation.
| rwbt wrote:
| > If you want something to last, don't base it on something
| that won't last.
|
| Sounds similar to the Lindy Effect.[0]
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
| geocrasher wrote:
| I think I should have said "don't base it on something that
| _CAN 'T_ last". This requires no future knowledge. We _know_
| that a WordPress version and its supported PHP will be
| obsolete.
| tasuki wrote:
| I've been running a WordPress blog since early 2006 with very
| little maintenance. I'm sure it's all outdated again, but
| still appears to work.
| giantrobot wrote:
| If you haven't been keeping the WP back end up to date it's
| not functionality that's a problem it is security.
| Unpatched WordPress installs account for a huge portion of
| malware distribution. There's a number of exploits that
| allow attackers to upload files to your server. So they
| upload malicious payloads that exploits then download to
| infected systems.
| jimhi wrote:
| Most of those exploits are from plugins. If they aren't
| using those they can also change the default login url.
| Also Wordpress lets you export and reimport to current
| versions without coding. I think it's one the best future
| proof platforms, most of the web still runs on it.
| boublepop wrote:
| > build a static HTML page.
|
| No way in hell today's HTML will survive 25 years now that
| google owns it, browsers will literally crash due to lack of
| user tracking. Best just host a static txt file.
| paganel wrote:
| It also helps if you self-host, I have personally self-hosted a
| subversion repository with my own projects using Trac [1] for
| 10 years now.
|
| [1] https://trac.edgewall.org/
| user5994461 wrote:
| Trac has been end of life for some time. It doesn't run on
| python 3. There are open bug tickets about it that have been
| stale for years.
|
| Maybe it will be upgraded now that python 2 is officially
| dead, but given it wasn't so far and there was no effort in
| that direction, I wouldn't bet on it.
| jahlove wrote:
| Is "EOL" the right term? They released a new version 2 days
| ago:
|
| https://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracChangeLog
| user5994461 wrote:
| I find it odd too that they did some minor releases, yet
| python 3 was not on the radar.
|
| End of life is correct. It is end of life since it
| doesn't run on current platforms.
|
| I am not sure if the latest distributions (Ubuntu,
| Debian, RedHat) have all removed python 2 packages. If
| not, it will be gone with the next major release. You're
| going to be in trouble to run software with no available
| interpreter, plus all the libraries in use are
| effectively abandoned.
| jahlove wrote:
| > I am not sure if the latest distributions (Ubuntu,
| Debian, RedHat) have all removed python 2 packages. If
| not, it will be gone with the next major release
|
| Red Hat has not. Ubuntu has not in its most recent stable
| release. Debian "unstable" is still using Python 2, so I
| don't think your statement holds up.
|
| https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=redhat
|
| https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=ubuntu
|
| https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=debian
|
| Also, Trac developers ave been making progress on Python3
| as recently as 8 days ago:
|
| https://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/12130
| paganel wrote:
| Most probably it is EOL, but it still works for me, I only
| need it to browse the code from time to time and to look at
| some past commits.
| scarface74 wrote:
| You realize that you're talking about a _FrontPage_ site. The
| very definition of building something on a technology that
| won't last.
| kome wrote:
| but look at the code... are modern website really better? i
| think that FrontPage did an awesome job there.
| scarface74 wrote:
| There were all sorts of FrontPage server side extensions to
| IIS that you could use to support your site if I am not
| mistaken.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| > Looks like Web 1.0 got something right after all :)
|
| The secret is creating a standard early on that thousands of
| different pieces of software depend on, so that changing it
| would expensive and require a phenomenal amount of
| decentralized coordination.
|
| Don't worry about making it good -- just make it good enough
| that people won't want to tear their hair out and unanimously
| agree to never touch it again. Make the short term cost of
| applying hacks on top of it low, and the cost of throwing
| everything out high.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > Can you imagine running the same WordPress version for 25
| years?
|
| If you keep active on your Wordpress install, the regular
| updates will be no issue for you and will (almost) never break
| your website. Not sure why you would expect a regular Wordpress
| user to run the initial install without recommended/mandatory
| upgrades over a long period of time.
| throwaway286 wrote:
| Hmm, I wonder if certain javascript based site generators will
| still be around in 20 years..
| typescriptfan1 wrote:
| My olde PHP sites are still running just fine.
| solinent wrote:
| Static HTML is also very secure. My personal sites are always
| static, it keeps server costs low and everything gets cached.
| grecy wrote:
| I've been using my Wordpress site for 12 years now. Sure I
| upgrade versions from time to time, but the original post is
| still there and works perfectly.
|
| It's had around 8 million page views in that time.
| ath92 wrote:
| While this website still works fine, the actual HTML that
| Frontpage generated isn't exactly easy to maintain if Frontpage
| stops working for whatever reason.
|
| The author of this website is basically stuck using whatever
| version of Frontpage supports the markup of his website. And I
| bet there have been plenty of people who used <some other
| WYSIWYG webpage editor> who are no longer able to maintain
| their website because their editor no longer runs on their
| system.
| YourMatt wrote:
| Also note that a Java Applet is included in there, which has
| likely not worked since 2015.
| randogogogo wrote:
| Looking at the page source it looks dead simple to modify. I
| know it isn't WYSIWYG but it's just HTML.
| alxlaz wrote:
| > The author of this website is basically stuck using
| whatever version of Frontpage supports the markup of his
| website.
|
| But at least getting it done largely depends only on them,
| and it's not too hard. I have friends who swear by ProTracker
| and still use it, even though it's thirty years old and the
| platform it's running on has been dead for more than twenty.
| They don't have an Amiga but it's trivial to get it running
| in an emulator today.
|
| You can run Windows 98 in a browser, and your web editor in
| it. It's certainly less complicated than hosting a WebObjects
| application today.
| bjornjajajaja wrote:
| Microsoft has been fairly good at allowing older binaries to
| run on newer systems.
|
| Apple is pretty annoying in this regard. There's a lot of
| software that doesn't work on versions maybe only 5 years
| old.
|
| A lot of software doesn't need to change to be honest.
| Microsoft word for example. Word processing: you sit down and
| type stuff, maybe change the font once or twice. I guess the
| collaborative features are nice being able to edit the same
| document with others.
|
| It would be fun to use an older machine and see how
| productive you can be with the old software too !
| joking wrote:
| Been hit with that, I needed to run chromium v49 to be able
| to remote debug some TVs with old opera tv sdks, the
| version I had stoped working, and several versions that I
| tried crashed when using the chromium devtools. I ended
| having to use a windows virtual machine
| scarface74 wrote:
| You haven't tried to run 16 bit software on 64 bit Windows
| have you?
| usrusr wrote:
| And so the mystery of why a 32bit version of Windows 10
| still exists is solved.
|
| What's mildly annoying is that much of the early 32bit
| Windows software came packaged in 16 bit installers.
| Office 97 would be such a breeze on modern hardware.
| quink wrote:
| > https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| au/windows/win32/winprog64/app...
| dmz73 wrote:
| Office 97 can be installed on 64 bit windows 10 with
| original installer. I have done it just last month and it
| runs without any problems... and it is fast.
| cptskippy wrote:
| You're drawing an equivalence between 5 and 25 year old
| software?
|
| Microsoft Windows 10 is able to run software that
| predates all of Apple's supported platforms.
| zamalek wrote:
| There's always a person who is happy to explain how Apple
| bests any competitor you could mention at any metric you
| could imagine.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| That is fair, though, because it is equally likely to
| find someone that will never give Apple credit for a
| single thing.
| scarface74 wrote:
| So if Apple kept "25 years" of backwards compatibility,
| should they have been better off bundling a 68K and PPC
| emulator? Why stop there? They should have kept
| compatibility with the Apple //e and also bundled a 68K
| emulator?
|
| Someone else was complaining that they didn't keep
| FireWire. Should modern Macs come with ADB ports?
| Ahwleung wrote:
| Obviously not, but that doesn't prove that there isn't
| value to having backwards compatibility. Sometimes you
| just want something to run and not have to touch or
| change it for a long time.
|
| A 20-year old machine that's critical to a factory can
| run off a serial cable plugged in to an expansion card
| running software written in the 90's that will still run
| on Windows 10. Nobody in their right mind would decide to
| write that same software on a Mac.
| ajross wrote:
| True enough. Though to be fair the last new version of a
| Win16 OS shipped 26 years ago, and Win32 became the
| standard API in consumer products 24 years ago. There are
| degrees of worry here. Software of the vintage you're
| talking about was contemporary with System 7, and the
| closest ancestor to current OS X was called "NextStep
| 3.3".
|
| The point upthread was that genuinely useful stuff gets
| retired just a few years after release in the Apple
| world, and I think that's broadly true. It's true with
| hardware too -- professional audio people are stuck with
| truckloads of firewire hardware that they can't use with
| their new laptops, for example.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Apple shipped the last 32 bit Mac in 2006 over 10 years
| before 32 bit software wasn't supported. There were
| plenty of FireWire to Thunderbolt adapters.
|
| No the closest ancestor to MacOS X is System 7. There
| were Carbon APIs until last year. A poster up thread said
| they could use an emulator. There are 68K Mac emulators
| available too.
|
| AppleScript for instance is a System 7 technology - not a
| NextStep technology.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > the closest ancestor to MacOS X is System 7.
|
| How do you figure?
|
| System 7 was part of the Classic Mac OS line, the last of
| that line was System 9 (Mac OS 9). This was a proprietary
| kernel developed by Apple.
|
| Mac OS X is a Unix based OS derived from technologies
| they acquired from NeXT.
|
| To say MacOS X is an ancestor of System 7 seems
| completely nonsensical.
| scarface74 wrote:
| No MacOS X when it was originally released had parts from
| NextStep and parts ported from Classic MacOS including
| QuickDraw, AppleScript, QuickTime, some audio frameworks
| etc.
|
| The entire Carbon API was a port of classic MacOS APIs to
| make porting from classic MacOS to OS X easier.
|
| MacOS X was a combination of both. That was the whole
| brouhaha of why Apple ported Carbon APIS to OS X because
| major developers like Adobe and Microsoft insisted on it.
|
| That's not to mention that the first 5 versions of MacOS
| had an entire OS 9 emulator built in.
|
| To take the analogy to the extreme. MacOS had two parents
| - Classic MacOS and NextStep.
| cptskippy wrote:
| I would disagree, most of what was brought from Classic
| OS was ported, adapted, out of necessity and short lived.
| OSX was an entirely new operating system that ported some
| frameworks and software but wasn't backward compatible.
| Were it so, they wouldn't have provided an emulator.
|
| I think you're just supporting the original assertion
| that Apple does not support things for very long. Does
| Software written for OS X v10.1 run on Catalina today
| without using 3rd party tools or emulators? Software
| written for Windows 95 still runs on Windows 10.
| scarface74 wrote:
| You call the Carbon API that existed from 2001-2018
| "short lived"? The entire Carbon API was used to port
| software like PhotoShop and Office.
|
| Carbon was a port of enough of the Classic API to port
| major important programs.
|
| AppleScript is still built into the current version of OS
| X. It was introduced in 1993-94
|
| And seeing that 10.1 was PPC only, do you expect them to
| keep a PPC emulator around?
|
| Can you run PPC based Windows NT software today on an x86
| PC?
| virtue3 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API)
|
| "Carbon was an important part of Apple's strategy for
| bringing Mac OS X to market, offering a path for quick
| porting of existing software applications, as well as a
| means of shipping applications that would run on either
| Mac OS X or the classic Mac OS. As the market has
| increasingly moved to the Cocoa-based frameworks,
| especially after the release of iOS, the need for a
| porting library was diluted. Apple did not create a
| 64-bit version of Carbon while updating their other
| frameworks in the 2007 time-frame, and eventually
| deprecated the entire API in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion,
| which was released on July 24, 2012. Carbon was
| officially discontinued and removed entirely with the
| release of macOS 10.15 Catalina."
|
| I think you are confusing "supported" with EoL. Adobe was
| pissed because there was originally talk of doing a
| carbon64bit and they never supported it so they had to
| move their entire app over.
|
| The main point is, that Windows would never stop that api
| from "existing" In some manner. Unlike Apple.
|
| This is just a difference in how both companies view
| themselves. While Apple claims "it just works". That
| isn't quite true in some of the cases we have seen.
| Microsoft has actually done a far better job of this.
|
| I know someone that worked on the visual studio team.
| They literally had 100-200 servers that would run
| overnight with each build guaranteeing that the software
| would install and run on every single permutation of
| windows on an array of hardware.
| scarface74 wrote:
| So, what exactly did you say they refuted anything I
| said?
|
| The Carbon API was 32 bit only and was supported until
| the latest release of MacOS.
|
| Do you realize how many deprecated end of life frameworks
| that Microsoft has been lugging around for decades?
|
| So should Apple have kept support for 68K software in
| 2019?
|
| Also, do you realize that for all intents and purposes
| the _entire_ .Net Framework is deprecated and EOL except
| for minor compatibility updates?
|
| There are plenty of "pissed" .Net Framework developers
| who feel abandoned by MS.
| jsgo wrote:
| I've only heard complaints from Silverlight and Windows
| Phone/Mobile developers anecdotally.
|
| From a web perspective (and my experience), .NET
| Framework 2/4 -> Core is actually not a big changeover
| outside of the views (probably better if you switched to
| MVC).
|
| The Windows Phone apps I built are dead now, but that
| isn't a matter of APIs no longer being supported, but an
| entire platform going under.
|
| As a macOS user, I had one operating system update kill
| external GPU w/ Nvidia cards (that sucked) and another
| update kill 32 bit apps (that one isn't a big one for me
| personally). All on the same computer.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The entire ASP.Net Core and Entity Framework architecture
| was changed and is not compatible. Not to mention all of
| the legacy third party .Net Framework only third party
| packages that don't work.
|
| Microsoft also completely abandoned Windows CE/Compact
| Framework while there were plenty of companies that had
| deployed thousands of $1200-$2000 ruggedized devices for
| field services work.
| dahauns wrote:
| Sounds to me more like the ported programs were short
| lived - and IMO, in that they are not entirely wrong.
|
| Sure, Carbon and Rosetta certainly were no mean feat, and
| the drastic PPC/x86 break is something Microsoft never
| really had to deal with (heh, the biggest problem trying
| to run a PPC/MIPS/Alpha based NT application today is
| actually finding one :) ).
|
| But Apple never went to the same lengths as Microsoft
| regarding backwards compatibility, and while Carbon and
| Rosetta immensely eased the transition, the continuity
| definitely wasn't comparable and it was never transparent
| to the developers (and in Apple's defense, this was never
| their intention and they always were quite open about
| it.)
|
| For one, Rosetta (and thus PPC compatibility) was dropped
| with Lion in 2011, so no amount of Carbon would help 10.1
| applications after that.
|
| And even with Rosetta, each release, especially after
| Tiger, came with quite a list of API changes and
| deprecations (with the whole of Carbon declared obsolete
| in 2012) - and and increasingly longer list of high-
| profile software that would not run anymore and require
| an update or upgrade. And while Microsoft did a lot even
| to prevent and/or work around issues with notorious
| software (hello Adobe! :) ), Apple was far less willing
| to do so.
|
| I mean, just as an example - I can run Photoshop 6.0
| (from 2000) on Windows 10 (certainly no thanks to Adobe),
| but no chance for PS 7.0 even on Leopard...
| scarface74 wrote:
| Carbon was declared obsolete in 2012 but wasn't
| discontinued until 2019.
|
| Porting from PPC to x86 was relatively easy. But you're
| also forgetting about the first transition - from 68K to
| PPC.
|
| Can you run the PPC version of any Windows NT apps?
| ygjb wrote:
| Not to be snarky, but if there is a need to do this, it's
| pretty easy. If there is a real need, it is pretty
| trivial to do with VirtualBox or DosBox.
|
| Those applications from 20 years ago running in emulators
| will work far better in 20 more years than Apps from
| today that stop working due to remote service
| dependencies to force vendor lock-in.
|
| It is endlessly amusing to me that the more tightly
| integrated the cloud services get to conventional
| computing tasks, the more likely we will end up with
| Vernor Vinge style programmer archaeologists from A
| Deepness in the Sky...
| scarface74 wrote:
| So if emulation or a VM is your go to. How is that any
| different than what yuh can do with older versions of
| MacOS?
| criley2 wrote:
| Virtualizating Windows isn't very hard, even back to
| something like Windows 95.
|
| On the other hand, only OSX 10.7+ are really easy to run
| in a VM, and .5 and .6 only work for servers, and
| anything before 10.5 isn't really going to be compatible
| with virtualization. That's 2007, so OSX lets you
| virtualize back about 13 years, and Windows you can go
| back almost 30 years. People even have Win 3.1 running in
| VMware.
|
| This is probably due to the fact that there isn't powerpc
| virtualization software, but if you need to run osx
| software from before 2007, you're basically out of luck.
|
| You can also virtualize windows from just about any OS
| you can imagine, Mac, Linux, Windows etc, while OSX
| virtualization has a hard requirement for running on Mac
| hardware.
| scarface74 wrote:
| A quick Google search for running PPC Mac software under
| emulation.
|
| https://www.thefreecountry.com/emulators/macintosh.shtml#
| pow...
|
| For the most part yes. If you want to run Mac software
| you need to own Mac.
|
| As far as going back 30 years. Now you're in the Classic
| Mac era. There are plenty of cross platform emulators
| that run Mac software that old.
|
| If you want to go back 40 years. Apple // emulators are a
| dime a dozen.
| criley2 wrote:
| That's fair, but this was about virtualization not
| emulation. Similar but different, but that's certainly a
| solution too.
| scarface74 wrote:
| If the current version of OS X was backwards compatible
| with 10.0 - 10.4. It would still need both a PPC emulator
| and a 68K emulator since iOS 9 still had 68K code.
| klodolph wrote:
| > There are plenty of cross platform emulators that run
| Mac software that old.
|
| What, Basilisk II and Sheep Shaver? PCE and Mini vMac if
| you want a Mac Plus. For a large array of apps only one
| of these options will actually work.
| MarioMan wrote:
| >OSX virtualization has a hard requirement for running on
| Mac hardware.
|
| If you aren't a stickler for Apple's terms of service (if
| you're doing this for business purposes, I suggest you
| should be), you can use a tool called macOS unlocker to
| patch VMWare Workstation to run macOS VMs. Runs great,
| though all VMWare products can only render display output
| for macOS in software mode.
| cptaj wrote:
| I cant upvote this enough. The Vernor really captured
| this. As a programmer you can clearly see this happening
| right now.
|
| I shudder to think of the massive house of cards we will
| have in 50 years.
| Moru wrote:
| I wish I could find the movie on youtube again, a
| demonstration of collaborative text editor from 1960-ish.
| Been looking for it a number of times just this year.
| danShumway wrote:
| Please post back if you find it, I'd be curious to see.
| tech-no-logical wrote:
| from the mother of all demos (1968)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-
| zdhzMY&feature=youtu.be...
|
| I suppose you mean this video ?
| Scarbutt wrote:
| VMs solve this problem.
| znpy wrote:
| OTOH, I guess that maintaining a windows VM for use with
| frontpage would be a lot simpler and safer than maintaining
| an old software stack server side.
| geekrax wrote:
| (OTOH = On the other hand)
| randomdude402 wrote:
| I know a person who is maintaining a few sites she built in
| like 2005 with a version of Dreamweaver a little older than
| that, so never dares to upgrade the Dreamweaver version.
|
| The whole thing is terrifying and horrific to me, but they
| keep paying her to do the work so she's fine with it.
| bpfrh wrote:
| Dreamweaver 2003?
|
| I know a website that is still maintained regulary and
| built with dreamweaver 2003
| wolco wrote:
| You would just edit the html pages lol. I still use
| dreamweaver for the visual editor if I need to copy and
| paste from a pdf and want perfect html. No one has made
| anything like it. No current editor has a quick sftp that
| allows you to connect/edit move on.
| vraivroo wrote:
| Coda does.
| cptskippy wrote:
| Early versions of Dreamweaver were pretty slick. I used
| it as my primary IDE for developing ASP pages in early
| 2000.
| djsumdog wrote:
| I mean .. it's just a static HTML editor at that point
| (maybe it does some includes/builds to simplify things). If
| you're just pushing out static content, you don't have to
| worry too much about outdated libraries and security
| issues, so long as the web server it's being served from is
| maintained and up to date.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| "Dreamweaver Templates" was basically an early static
| site generator that made it really easy to design and
| include site-wide or section-wide elements.
|
| Yeah you could always edit the individual files that it
| outputted, but in some cases people were using this
| system to manage sites with hundreds or thousands of
| pages. As recently as a couple years ago it was how the
| natural history museum in DC managed their site content.
| nonamenoslogan wrote:
| I actually just finished redesigning my site with static
| HTML using Dreamweaver 2004 on an iBook G4. Why? Why not?
| My little brother passed away a couple years ago and I
| inherited his iBook, and I have decided its going to be my
| personal laptop from here out even if all I use it for is
| VNC to one of my other computers. Plus, as mentioned above
| it can still run all that delicious old Mac stuff from
| System 7 through OSX 10.4.xx and its all "abandonware" now,
| yet in many cases still VERY usable.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| I properly own several versions of Office all the way back to
| 95 so I can say this as I am covered :)
|
| Years ago I found a "Portable Frontpage" which of course I
| downloaded and still have somewhere zipped. I know that MS
| wouldn't like this much, but life is life and Portable
| Frontpage exists. So as long as there are Windows, Frontpage
| will work!
| generationP wrote:
| Can't you just keep editing the html in a text editor?
| Frontpage's generated html isn't that unreadable.
| Santosh83 wrote:
| Presumably the author used a WYSIWYG editor in the first
| place because he is not a technical person, so for him/her
| to now not only learn enough HTML/CSS/javascript to turn to
| hand editing but to also understand Frontpage's noisy
| output would probably take enough effort that they might
| rather decide to shut down the site if they're not able to
| continue using Frontpage. Hiring a dev to redo the site is
| another option but that presumes they have enough money to
| invest in a hobby site...
| generationP wrote:
| Nah, I don't think this is such a big deal. Adding a row
| to a table is much easier than creating a table from
| scratch. And Frontpage's output isn't that noisy -- I had
| to go through that experience myself. That said, my old
| Frontpage from 2005 (which I copied from Win XP probably)
| still works fine except for a warning it throws at start
| about not finding some registry value. I wouldn't want to
| use it any more (it doesn't understand CSS and screws it
| up), but if I wanted, I could.
| olyjohn wrote:
| I ended up learning more HTML by having FrontPage,
| because it would regularly fuck everything up and I'd
| have to go fix it by hand.
| woodrowbarlow wrote:
| ironically, i bet the author has learned more technical
| skills by maintaining a system that can continue to run
| their version of frontpage than they would have if they
| had just taught themselves HTML from the start.
| est31 wrote:
| Fortunately there are plenty of static site generators.
| Frontpage is out of support and likely the currently popular
| generators will meet their end one day as well. But even then
| you can still run them in the future, and their output should
| not have any major issues (unlike a CMS which might get hacked
| if it's not kept up to date).
| GuyPostington wrote:
| This is the internet as I remember it.
| m3andros wrote:
| Alas, we're not spring chickens anymore... But isn't
| nostalgia a great feeling? (Frontpage was my very first
| introduction to a WYSIWYG editor.)
| OpticalTransmit wrote:
| There is an obscure search engine called wiby.me that only
| indexes pages like what is posted here. I used to design
| websites in the late 90's, and very much miss the simple HTML
| pages of yore.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Thanks for that suggestion. I'm glad it's a three-day
| weekend!
| every wrote:
| Followed to its logical if not very practical conclusion, we
| all wind up on gopher...
| khana wrote:
| Yeah now to tell the Chrome devs to put their coding hands
| behind their back.
| danielbarla wrote:
| > If you want something to last, don't base it on something
| that won't last.
|
| and
|
| > I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to build a site
| to last 25 years without numerous redesigns, build a static
| HTML page.
|
| While simplicity is a great way to future proof things, I'm not
| convinced that this argument in general would work nearly as
| well without the benefit of hindsight. One could be forgiven
| for confusing it with "guess the future correctly". Plenty of
| relatively safe bets from 10, 20, 30 years ago haven't panned
| out that well. It's an interesting line of thinking though:
| exactly what properties of HTML make it so long lived?
| _jal wrote:
| It is exactly the "guess the future" problem that static
| sites avoid.
|
| The vast bulk of software goes unsupported in less than 25
| years. If you want to depend on something that long, you can
| guess which package will survive that long, or you can store
| your data in formats that the widest array of tooling
| supports.
|
| If you drop into a coma after uploading your static HTML and
| wake up in 25 years, you might have to use whatever fills the
| text-manipulation-scripting niche then to beat it into the
| right shape to import into whatever kids these days are
| using.
|
| If you used Wordpress, well, maybe it takes over the world,
| maybe it ends up a Wikipedia entry. (Putting aside, of
| course, that your site began hosting cryptominers a week
| after you slipped into that coma because you missed an
| update.)
| untog wrote:
| I think you can generalise the advice: remove as many
| processing steps as you can.
|
| It's not so much that you needed to guess that HTML was going
| to be as long-lived as it is, it's that HTML is the final
| product that actually loads on the users computer, and those
| tend to stick around for a long time (or at least be
| emulated). The code that lives on a backend server somewhere,
| not so much.
|
| For what it's worth, I don't think this example is
| necessarily bulletproof: it requires a working copy of
| Frontpage. If Microsoft behaved more like Apple it might have
| been deprecated away long ago!
| btrettel wrote:
| This is one reason why the static site generator I use for
| my personal website uses HTML rather than something like
| Markdown.
|
| I don't think Markdown is going anyway, incidentally, or
| that it would be hard to process on my own if I needed to.
| But the HTML I use is simple enough and Markdown only
| decreases the probability the site will last a long time.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Markdown and/or markdown processors are known to change.
|
| Since there's no single Markdown spec, determining just
| how a page will render, or what will break, is a bit of a
| crapshoot. And since Markdown treats nonparsable markup
| as ... plain text, you don't even get errors or other
| indicators of failure. You've got to view and validate
| the output manually or by some other means.
|
| With formal tag-based markup languages (HTML, SGML,
| LaTeX, DocBook, etc.) you've at least got 1) an actual
| markup spec and 2) something that will or won't validate
| (though whether or not the processor actually gives a
| damn about that is another question, hello, HTML, I'm
| looking at your "The Web is an error condition":
| https://deirdre.net/programming-sucks-why-i-quit/)
|
| I can't find the post at the moment, but someone recently
| wrote a cogent rant on the fact that a change in their
| hosting provider (GitHub via a static site generator
| IIRC) had swapped out markdown processors, with changed
| behaviours, rendering (literally) all their previously-
| authored content broken.
|
| Which is indead a pain.
|
| I personally _like_ Markdown, and find it hugely
| convenient. For major projects though, I suspect what I
| 'll end up doing is starting in Markdown, and eventually
| switching to a more stable markup format, which probably
| means LaTeX (HTML has ... proved less robustly stable
| over the 25+ years I've worked with it).
|
| Though for simple-to-modestly-complex documents, Markdown
| is _generally_ satisfactory, stable, and close enough to
| unadorned ASCII that fixing what breaks is not a horribly
| complicated task.
|
| Up to modest levels of scale, at least.
| btrettel wrote:
| I appreciate your reply. Seems Markdown is more complex
| than I recognized and this just makes me want to avoid it
| more. If you do find the rant you mentioned, let me know.
|
| > HTML has ... proved less robustly stable over the 25+
| years I've worked with it
|
| The first website I made in 2002 still views fine in a
| modern browser. I didn't do anything fancy, though. I
| would be interested in what has been unstable as it might
| give me ideas on what to avoid in HTML.
|
| I don't find HTML to be that much harder than plain text
| or Markdown so I think I'll keep using it for smaller
| projects. LaTeX is worth considering as well,
| particularly given that I will have math on some of my
| webpages. One issue is that the stability of LaTeX
| depends strongly on which packages you use. I need to
| take a closer look at the health of every package I use.
| I think avoiding external dependencies is easier with
| HTML.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| My sense is that Markdown is _probably_ pretty safe for
| most uses, particularly if you control the processing. If
| not, then yes, it can bite. For me that means pandoc to
| generate endpoints such as HTML, PDF, etc. I 'm fairly
| confident that most of that toolchain should continue to
| work (provided computers and electricity exist) for
| another 2-4 decades.
|
| For certain more complex formatting, Markdown has
| limitations and features are more likely to change. But
| I've used Markdown to format novel-length works (from
| ASCII sources, for my own use) with very modest
| formatting needs (chapters, some italic or bold text,
| possibly blockquotes or lists), and it excels at that.
|
| For HTML, it's a combination of factors:
|
| - Previous features which have been dropped, most to
| thunderous applause. (<blink>, <marquee>, etc.)
|
| - Previous _conventions_ which have largely been
| supersceded: table layouts most especially. CSS really
| has been ... in some respects ... a blessing.
|
| - Nagging omissions. The fact that there's no HTML-native
| footnoting / endnoting convention ... bothers me. You can
| _tool_ that into a page. But you can 't simply do
| something like: <p>Lorem ipsum dolor
| sit amet. <note>Consectetur adipiscing
| elit</note> Nulla malesuada, mauris ac
| tincidunt faucibus</p>
|
| ... and have the contents of <note> then appear by some
| mechanism in the rendered text. A numbered note, a
| typographical mark ( * + ++ ...), a sidenote, a callout,
| a hovercard, say.
|
| In Markdown you accomplish this by:
| Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.[^consectetur] Nulla
| malesuada, mauris ac tincidunt faucibus
| [^consectetur]: Consectetur adipiscing elit.
|
| Which then generates the HTML to create a superscript
| reference, and a numbered note (when generating HTML). Or
| footnotes according to other conventions (e.g., LaTeX /
| PDF) for other document formats.
|
| - Similarly, no native equation support.
|
| Maybe I'm just overly fond of footnotes and equations....
|
| But HTML and WWW originated, literally, from the world's
| leading particle physics laboratory. You'd think it might
| include such capabilities.
|
| - Scripting and preprocessors. I remember server-side
| includes, there's PHP, and JS. Some browsers supported
| other languages -- I believe Tcl and Lua are among those
| that have been used. Interactivity and dependency on
| other moving parts reduces reliability.
|
| The expression "complexity is the enemy of reliabilty"
| dates to an _Economist_ article in 1958. It remains very,
| very true.
|
| HTML is for me more fiddly than Markdown (though I've
| coded massive amounts of both by hand), so on balance, I
| prefer writing Markdown (it's become very nearly
| completely natural to me). OTOH, LaTeX isn't _much_ more
| complex than HTML, and in many cases (simple paragraphs)
| far _simpler_ , so if I had to make a switch, that's the
| direction I'd more likely go.
| btrettel wrote:
| I agree with you entirely on the abandoning of
| conventions with HTML. I haven't paid much attention to
| multi-column layouts in CSS over the years but my
| impression is that it's gone from tables to CSS floats to
| whatever CSS does now that I'm not familiar with.
| Browsers are typically backwards compatible so this isn't
| that big of a deal to me. But I have no idea if what's
| regarded as the best practice today will be seen as
| primitive in 15 years.
|
| > The fact that there's no HTML-native footnoting /
| endnoting convention ... bothers me.
|
| I've seen people use the HTML5 <aside> element for
| sidenotes, styled with CSS. Some even make them
| responsive, folding neatly into the text as the viewport
| shrinks. I'm not sure if this is the intended use for
| <aside> but the result is reasonable and I intend to do
| the same. If you're set on footnotes, though, yes, I
| don't know a native implementation.
|
| Equation support with MathML is okay in principle but not
| practice. I'd like to have equations without external
| dependencies (MathJax's JS alone is like 750 kB!), but
| that's not possible until Chrome decides to catch up with
| Firefox and Sarafi on MathML. I've been thinking about
| just using MathML as-is (no external math renderer), and
| if Chrome users complain, I'll tell them to get a better
| browser. ;-) Maybe that'll help some Chrome users
| understand why they should test their websites in other
| browsers.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| CSS columns are actually ... mostly ... pretty useful:
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Columns...
|
| My preference is to use them with @media queries to
| create more or fewer columns _within auxiliary elements_
| (headers, footers, asides), usually to pretty good
| effect.
|
| Multi-column body text is largely an abombination.
|
| For images, I'm still largely sticking to floats.
|
| I've done some sidenote styling that I ... think I like.
| I don't remember how responsive this CodePen is or isn't
| though I've created some pretty responsive layouts based
| on it:
|
| https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/OVmKZX
|
| I consider equation support a lost cause.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Semi-relatedly, I think even the linear form of
| UnicodeMath [1] is _very_ readable, and it would be great
| if there was more support for building it up into nicer
| presentation forms in the browser wild (MathJax has had
| it on the backlog since at least 2015, for instance), as
| that seems to me to be a better "fallback" situation
| than raw MathML given its readability when not built up.
|
| [1] http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath
| -v3.pdf
|
| > I haven't paid much attention to multi-column layouts
| in CSS over the years but my impression is that it's gone
| from tables to CSS floats to whatever CSS does now that
| I'm not familiar with.
|
| CSS Grid [2] is the happiest path today. It's a really
| happy path (I want these columns, this wide, done). CSS
| Flexbox [3] is a bit older and nearly as happy a path.
| Some really powerful things can be used with the
| combination of both, especially in responsive design (a
| dense two dimensional grid on large widescreen displays
| collapsing to a simple flexbox "one dimensional" flow,
| for example).
|
| Flexbox may be seen as primitive in a few years, but Grid
| finally seems exactly where things should have always
| been (and what people were trying to accomplish way back
| when with tables or worse framesets). Even then, Flexbox
| may be mostly seen as primitive from the sense of "simple
| lego/duplo tool" compared to Grid's more
| precise/powerful/capable tools.
|
| [2] https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-grid
|
| [3] https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox
| btrettel wrote:
| Thanks for mentioning UnicodeMath. That does seems like a
| better fallback solution than raw MathML. It appears
| there's a newer version of the document you linked to
| that was posted on HN, by the way:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14687936
|
| I'll also look more closely at CSS Grid.
| derefr wrote:
| I feel like the difference with Markdown is that it's not
| meant to be a hidden source format. It's meant to take an
| _existing_ WYSIWYG styled-text format--the one people use
| when trying to style text in plaintext e-mail or IM
| systems--and to give it a secondary rendering semantics
| corresponding to what people conventionally think their
| ASCII-art styling "means."
|
| If a Markdown parser breaks down, it's quite correct for
| it to just spit out the raw source document--because the
| raw document is _already_ a readable document with clear
| (cultural /conventional) semantics. All a Markdown parser
| does is make a Markdown-styled text _prettier_ ; it was
| already a _readable final document_.
| bluGill wrote:
| Google controls the major web engine. I don't trust google
| to not deprecate parts of html over time because the new
| shiny is "better". I would rather maintain markdown
| generators which I can update to change the markup to
| whatever the latest google insists needs to work instead of
| rewriting all my documents.
|
| I'm currently tasked with writing a UI for a machine that
| has a 25 year expected lifespan before wear means it is
| replaced. This is a real concern - think about where
| computers were 25 years ago and try to find something you
| are sure will work and look nice.
| rubidium wrote:
| I sure hope the UI is buttons and not screens :)
| untog wrote:
| Even if Google did do that (which they've shown no signs
| of, and they are still far from a browser monopoly when
| you look at iPhone etc) it wouldn't stop HTML from being
| read. Translating from HTML -> GoogleHTML wouldn't be
| meaningfully different to translating it from Markdown.
| trilliumbaker wrote:
| It could be argued that AMP was that attempt, and the
| only reason AMP gained tractions was Google started using
| it in the carousel of their SERPs.
|
| While Safari, when mobile is included, has ~17% of the
| market, that's not enough when you combine Google's
| browser share along with their search engine share.
| trilliumbaker wrote:
| Google wields too much power. To an extent, they can
| dictate to website owners what HTML is allowed and not
| allowed thanks to their dominance in search. This is
| compounded by the fact that their browser marketshare via
| Chrome and now Microsoft Edge basically allows them to do
| what they want with HTML.
|
| Matters are even worse. Last year, the W3C became the
| "yes-man" of Google. They decided to stop developing the
| HTML standards and just start rubber stamping whatever
| WHATWG produces. WHATWG is run by Apple, Google,
| Microsoft, and Mozilla. And who has the most power in
| that relationship? Yep, Google.
| 8lall0 wrote:
| I think that the right way to rephrase that is "use the right
| tool for the right job".
|
| How many blogs are powered by wordpress? How many of them can
| be replaced with a static gen?
|
| HTML has a lot of garbage, but at least it's very hard to
| break it.
| stevenicr wrote:
| Your comment merges well with one slightly above from
| TheFlyingFish, It's that browsers pretty good at displaying
| stuff even when html is not to spec.
|
| and really it's that everyone uses browsers that still
| display text and such on the screen even if it's broken in
| several places.
|
| This could change if google decided to stop showing pages
| with broken html - like them killing flash big cuts at a
| time.
|
| I have turned several worpress based sites into static html
| with one of the static html making plugins - and that
| turned those tools into the right ones for those jobs. I
| think most WP sites can be converted and be just fine, most
| people don't add new posts to them regularly from what I've
| seen.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| > It's an interesting line of thinking though: exactly what
| properties of HTML make it so long lived?
|
| I've thought about this on and off for a few years. Here's
| what I've come up with:
|
| 1. Popularity. You can't really display anything in a web
| browser without it, blank pages with one AJAX script
| notwithstanding.
|
| 2. Ease of use. Open a text editor, type some markup, save
| the file with .html, and open in a browser. When you're done,
| transfer to a server to show the world. That's a pretty
| straightforward process.
|
| 3. Well-defined, open standard. Every important piece of the
| web is defined, from the markup to the protocol to transfer
| it. I think that reasonably bug-free implementations of those
| standards help.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'd argue your #3 is wide of the mark.
|
| It's not that there's a well-defined open standard.
|
| It's that browsers will eat any old crap that's thrown at
| them and turn it into something plausible, if not precisely
| what the author intended or reader really wants.
|
| Yes, there's a standard, and yes it's open. It's observed
| far more in the breach, as a few minutes with a validator
| on well-known sites will demonstrate.
|
| Your comment alone (prior to my response to it) returns:
| Tidy found 21 warnings and 0 errors!
| benibela wrote:
| Even worse, the browsers could not handle standard html.
|
| HTML was based on SGML and it has all the nice SGML
| features. Something like <title/Hello World/ was valid
| HTML afair.
|
| But then the browser never implemented it properly, so
| html5 just describes the behaviour of the browsers.
| TheFlyingFish wrote:
| >It's that browsers will eat any old crap that's thrown
| at them and turn it into something plausible, if not
| precisely what the author intended or reader really
| wants.
|
| Reminds me of the fairly prescient "In Praise of
| Evolvable Systems" essay from 1996: https://web.archive.o
| rg/web/20190409041249/http://www.shirky...
| bitexploder wrote:
| My text files still work. I have MUD design documents from
| when I was in high school (mid to late 90s). Org mode and
| Markdown are kind of eternal formats. Even if all the tooling
| dies, they still look decent. Basic HTML still works well
| enough as well. You can write a parser for XML pretty easily.
| HTML can also be processed and rendered trivially. I think we
| could collectively find some other technologies that are
| likely to be around in another 20 years. The simpler the file
| format the more likely it is to be around :)
|
| edit: A few more popped into my head. CSV. SQL schema + Data
| dumps (text format). The common theme to everything here is
| plain text. SQLite, although binary, is probably close to
| eternal. Git is eternal enough (recent HN post showed even
| POSIX shell is good enough to write a basic git client). JSON
| is easy to write a parser for as well. YAML.
| bentcorner wrote:
| > _exactly what properties of HTML make it so long lived?_
|
| I think we're thinking about this backwards. It's not
| anything inherent to HTML that make it long lived, it's that
| the code to parse static HTML is simple, it's more or less
| standardized and has stuck around for a long time.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Use static HTML and javascript, I don't think they'll break js
| compatibility in a long long time, ES3 is still well supported
| and it's out in 1999.
| wolco wrote:
| I have been running an older wordpress that I hacked up nicely.
| If you keep php below 5.5 no problems. Even the old mysql vs
| sqli still works great.
| achairapart wrote:
| Good Practice: Use the least powerful language suitable for
| expressing information, constraints or programs on the World
| Wide Web.[0]
|
| [0]: https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/leastPower.html
| LeftCorner wrote:
| I been using ColdFusion for over 20 years. The HTML it creates
| can be as simple or complex as the developer intends. The
| output can last decades without updating, I don't understand
| your comparison.
| nonamenoslogan wrote:
| I recently changed jobs to a shop with 15-20 year old
| ColdFusion+SQL instances that were originally HP3000 Image
| Databases and COBOL screens. At first I laughed, now after a
| couple years, I agree ColdFusion is pretty robust and its
| HTML isn't bad at all. Its easy to do fairly complex forms,
| file operations, email generation, document generation,
| database in-out things, and it just keeps running and
| running. Its easy to read and understand and even though
| we're using MX-era code, the server still installs and runs
| on recent (Ubuntu 16.04LTS) Linux with no issues.
| mi100hael wrote:
| The issue isn't the HTML it renders, it's finding a hosting
| provider that supports running it server-side.
|
| Of course you could run it yourself, but maintaining a server
| for a basic blog or personal site arguably exits the realm of
| "simple."
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| For a blog or personal site (that didn't have any
| functionality that really needed a back end) I suppose you
| could just scrape the generated pages and push them up to
| any host, but CF seems like a fairly awkward static site
| generator compared to the usual suspects like Jekyll, Hugo,
| etc.
| bdcravens wrote:
| They weren't talking about the output. They were talking
| about availability of hosting.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| Dude's gonna wonder why he had a sudden 6500% jump in traffic.
| jamesjyu wrote:
| Frontpage: the original no code software.
| mygo wrote:
| does anyone know what year the <marquee> tag became depreciated?
| I'm surprised my iPhone renders it
| hieudang9 wrote:
| I missed the tools like FrontPage/DreamWaver and gorgeous Flash
| websites.
| rickyc091 wrote:
| Agreed. The modern-day version of those would be Scratch
| (https://scratch.mit.edu/) which kids use to start exploring
| coding, but it's not the same.
| rchaud wrote:
| You're right, it's not the same. Scratch is too Computer
| Science-y for something that can be as simple as a website.
| Text, images and video, plus hyperlinks that link one page to
| another. That's enough for the majority of people to share
| information.
|
| I really hope something comes along that reinvigorates the
| public's interest in creating content that resides on their
| own website, rather than a walled-garden social media
| account.
| juskrey wrote:
| Never missed FrontPage/DreamWaver..
| pixelrevision wrote:
| DreamWaver is an appropriate name...
| jannyfer wrote:
| Here's an archive link in case this gets hugged to death:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200214134509/http://www.fmbosc...
| pmlnr wrote:
| It's actually quite hard to hug static HTML pages to death,
| unless on purpose, with things like slowloris.
| sabas_ge wrote:
| 2251 Mb size! "Qui c'e una applet Java. Mi spiace che il tuo
| browser non le supporti" = Here's a Java applet, I'm sorry your
| browser doesn't support it Marquee still gets animated :O "Questa
| pagina e ottimizzata per un formato 1024 x 768 pixel a 16,8
| milioni di colori, carattere medio" = This page is optimized for
| a 1024x768 pixel format, 16.8 million colors, medium sized font
| Still apart from the ancient tooling, it's an example of a
| personal wiki as periodically come on HN, there's a lot of
| content!
| sabas_ge wrote:
| I just wrote to the gentleman pointing him to this discussion
| :)
| anacoluthe wrote:
| Reminds me of http://villemin.gerard.free.fr/
| ssijak wrote:
| I have a 'personal' website which is also about 18years old. It
| was the first website I built while in elementary school, also in
| Frontpage. I uploaded it to I think Geocities or something like
| that, I think it was Yahoo related hosting, can't remember
| exactly, but it was free hosting.
|
| Some 'fancy' JS effects do not work on the page now, but it is
| still up. I forgot about and remembered it few years ago and
| checked it to find it still up. But I can't remember where could
| I login to see the files and what are the credentials so it makes
| me giggle that it will stay up for who knows how much longer as a
| small part of my past :)
|
| http://dzigi.itgo.com
|
| http://dzigi.itgo.com/o_autoru.htm "about author page" with a bio
| and pic haha
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Geocities got taken over by Yahoo, I think there was an
| intermediate step, and they added a JS widget to free pages,
| there was a hack to hide it. IIRC they started allowing PHP and
| not just SSI at/around that stage.
| Lucadg wrote:
| I learned Frontpage in 2000 in a King's Cross (Sydney) internet
| cafe where you paid 2 AUD for unlimited time...but you couldn't
| leave, not even to go to the toilet.
|
| That html went straight to Geocities.
|
| The feeling of power part of a minority of people who could
| actually publish something on the net was amazing.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Another classic from an electronic music pioneer, author of the
| original TRON score: http://www.wendycarlos.com/
| marai2 wrote:
| What is the oldest website still standing?
| retube wrote:
| http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
| marc_io wrote:
| Now that's a responsive layout.
| ainiriand wrote:
| CERN lab site.
| modernerd wrote:
| http://info.cern.ch/
| thekaleb wrote:
| This one is mobile friendly as well.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| Anything not text based is problematic. But beyond that it is
| hard.
| aloukissas wrote:
| I just love the footer "optimized for 1024x768 @ 16M colors" :)
| retube wrote:
| and it loads at light speed
| jagger27 wrote:
| Hosted in Italy too!
| galacticdessert wrote:
| Which makes the speed even more surprising!!
| peteretep wrote:
| The mass of the Alps cause a dilation in space time
| afwaller wrote:
| The content is super wholesome as well.
| hypertexthero wrote:
| Simple and useful.
|
| https://s3.amazonaws.com/simpleuseful/index.html
| goshx wrote:
| I love that you kept the style too. This brings back good
| memories. I've learned HTML using Frontpage and gifs were a must
| in my geocities hosted websites.
| rlv-dan wrote:
| My personal/hobby business web site (https://www.rlvision.com) is
| based on code 22 years ago. It's built with tables, because
| that's how you did things back then. The age shows. But I haven't
| found reason to rebuild it yet. Simply put, it works. It may not
| be mobile friendly, but the goal is to make available my Windows
| software, so my aim is desktop users.
| alvarezo wrote:
| This website looks extremely familiar. I think I visited it
| about 15 years ago and I am not completely sure but didn't you
| have a nice drawing and photo editing software there? I can't
| remember the name of it but it was the best ever, until it was
| disappointingly discontinued because of lack of buying
| customers :(
| rlv-dan wrote:
| Yes, ArtGem (https://rlvision.com/artgem_about.php). We were
| a couple of guys that tried at making shareware, but sadly
| failed. I continued running the site to host my own
| utilities, some of which eventually turned into shareware. I
| don't earn much money from it, but I enjoy making software
| and it makes me happy when other people find them useful as
| well!
| alvarezo wrote:
| So nice to hear from the developer of some software I very
| much liked and used as a kid. I especially liked the smudge
| feature. You definitely made me happy and I thank you for
| that.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| Replace Genius looks great - I will be trying it out soon!
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| It's funny to me that one reason why people said to stop using
| tables was because of file size. Now we have everyone download
| almost a megabyte (or more) of javascript to render a few kb of
| html.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I don't recall page size being a reason. I recall TABLE
| layouts being a lot smaller than most of their alternatives
| at the time (FRAMESETs in particular come to mind, because we
| knew HTTP connection overhead was a thing even back then and
| needing separate files for each individual website "part"
| felt like a huge bandwidth waste back then).
|
| The big problem was always Accessibility-related semantics.
| Websites laid out in TABLEs were often quite confusing to
| screen readers, as TABLE has a lot of supposedly important
| semantics in how it should be read/engaged with and using a
| TABLE for layout follows none of them. (What does a table
| header mean in a layout? Most layouts wouldn't have good
| headers. How do you describe what a table column is supposed
| to be for without a column header?) It's a shame that
| narrative was never clear enough that Accessibility was
| always the big reason TABLEs were considered a Bad Idea for
| layout.
|
| (Speaking of downloading a megabyte of data, I recall how
| long I felt that a 1.44 MB floppy was the best restriction
| for the size of an entire website. If it was bigger than a
| floppy you were probably doing something wrong. I stopped
| counting floppies a long time ago; that person might be
| ashamed at how many floppies a typical website downloads
| these days.)
| tbdr wrote:
| happy user of RLVision Artgem - thank you !
| alvarezo wrote:
| Holy, that was it - ArtGem! Perfect middle ground between
| Photoshop and Paint. Great features, pleasant feel to use.
| nalesnik3000 wrote:
| The spinning e-mail symbol GIF evokes pure nostalgia, bro. Came
| here to laugh, not to feel.
| goshx wrote:
| I'm looking for the little dude with a shovel "in
| construction".
| xxs wrote:
| ..."under construction"
| neosat wrote:
| I had this perception that those spinning gifs and moving text
| made pages crazy hard to parse but I was pleasantly surprised
| that this site seemed simpler and easier to parse than half the
| sites today with pop ups, notifications, and blocking modals. Is
| it just me, or are these notifications and modals that are
| getting so prevalent really degrading a lot of the web browsing
| experience today.
| reaperducer wrote:
| It used to be fun to load the Hamster Dance page on different
| machines and see how much it would slow each one. And that was
| just from a bunch of animated .GIFs.
|
| Taboola, Facebook thumbs, Twitter counters, and the like are
| the Hamster Dances of the 21st century.
| dmalvarado wrote:
| Also of note, this website is still running despite the HN hug of
| death.
| drops wrote:
| One of the most prolific and well-known music reviewers - Pierro
| Scaruffi - has a website built in 1995 with a design not updated
| much, or at all, since: https://www.scaruffi.com
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's a great website, thank you.
| rchaud wrote:
| I've come across this site many times when looking up different
| bands...the breadth and diversity of bands and genres covered
| here is truly amazing!
| attil-io wrote:
| > This website does NOT use cookies. Period.
|
| Love it!
| ctruelson wrote:
| Similar to Robert Christgau! https://robertchristgau.com/
| alexmorenodev wrote:
| He even reviewed one of my favorites albums launched recently:
| https://www.scaruffi.com/vol8/bentknee.html
| dep_b wrote:
| I really have a soft spot for these kind of sites. Often people
| have pretty interesting and unique content on this kind of
| websites. I always try to help by keeping things very simple to
| maintain but just a bit better, like making a PHP include of the
| menu and then replacing the top part on every page once.
| devalnor wrote:
| <bgsound src="ue.mid" loop="-1"> is princeless
| oftenwrong wrote:
| There is a search engine dedicated to finding "classic" websites:
|
| https://wiby.me/
|
| Click the "surprise me..." link to see a random one.
| calrueb wrote:
| This is a fantastic site. I'm a little worried about using the
| "surprise me" feature at work, but I will return to this in my
| free time. I wonder what website attributes it looks for when
| it indexes.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| That could eat up some hours. I landed on a model airplane site
| and started getting sucked in before realizing I have work to
| do.
| batirch wrote:
| With the surprise me button I found Berkshire Hathaway
| website.
|
| https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/
|
| This is really cool search engine :D
| 72deluxe wrote:
| This guy has a Frontpage-generated site too, and it's full of
| useful Win32 programming tips; he replies if you email him too!
|
| http://flounder.com
|
| Nothing wrong with readable content, regardless of the generator.
| In fact, I like reading his site precisely because it is speedy
| to load and render, and because it has content (unlike, for
| example, Apple's developer documentation).
| [deleted]
| jeremyswank wrote:
| My first site is still live. It went live in 1997, hand coded
| (using tables). Went through a few redesigns but the 2000 version
| has been left online as a fixed digital artifact from the time:
| http://pwp.detritus.net/
| mmmBacon wrote:
| Seriously very nice design for 2000.
| Phait wrote:
| As an Italian, reading this is site is absolute bliss. There's
| just so much to discover. I really suggest non-Italian speakers
| to automatically translate it with Google and dive into it.
| melq wrote:
| I can't believe how well google translates this. Is there
| something about Italian that lends itself to english
| translation or is translate getting this good with other
| languages too I wonder?
| Santosh83 wrote:
| The biggest drawback of sites from this era is they don't reflow
| on mobile screens. On a desktop they still work as well as they
| ever did. I'm still searching for a good WYSIWYG HTML composer
| that can generate clean, responsive pages. Seems like this is a
| problem where there isn't sufficient incentive for the big tech
| companies to tackle, and the only s/w that seems to come close is
| BlueGriffon.
| thanatropism wrote:
| > I'm still searching for a good WYSIWYG HTML composer that
|
| You need a dev team implementing Agile for react-native-ux with
| CI/CD capabilities and devops.
| verytrivial wrote:
| Well, I'm not so sure -- have you tried viewing that site via a
| WAP proxy? That's the _2002_ way to solve the problem.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's a client side problem, not a server side problem. The
| rendering and presentation of a webpage are entirely up to the
| client, absolutely nothing dictates that a page should look a
| certain way on a certain client.
| lultimouomo wrote:
| Then again, the whole page is laid out in a table element, so
| I could see why mobile browsers won't reflow it perfectly.
| onion2k wrote:
| There are a ton of attributes in the HTML that dictates how
| the website should render - it has a bgcolor and a margin on
| the body tag, a width and height on the main table, center
| tags all over the place, etc. Suggesting that a browser
| should ignore the HTML spec and do something else would
| completely destroy the web.
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| User agents already can ignore css and have user defined
| stylesheets and even JavaScript. None if this is new and
| it's a failure of our profession that that is abnormal and
| produces spectacularly poor results for users.
| onion2k wrote:
| Users should be able to override the default behaviour of
| their browser if they want to, but the default behaviour
| should still be defined by the HTML spec rather than the
| browser vendor.
|
| It's _really_ frustrating when two browsers implement
| important parts the spec differently and push website
| developers to work around the behaviour one browser or
| the other with browser-specific code. It doesn 't lead to
| sites being rendered differently as developers embrace
| the variety of user agents. It leads to people adding
| "This site is best viewed in Netscape Navigator" gif or
| "This application requires Chrome" on log in pages. Those
| are bad things.
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| Maybe the solution is to let go of this notion that every
| device needs to render exactly the way the designers want
| and embrace that difference.
|
| I've been on the internet since the mid 90s. I'm well
| aware of what was, andit was that way because people then
| as now wanted things to look and act exactly like they
| wanted and not embrace that not everyone wants or needs
| your carefully crafted graphical design.
| onion2k wrote:
| I don't have any notion that sites should be _exactly_
| the same in every browser, but they should be
| approximately the same. Having two browsers render the
| same HTML in completely different ways would be very odd.
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| >Having two browsers render the same HTML in completely
| different ways would be very odd
|
| Or completely normal? Why shouldn't I bump up my minimum
| don't size to help read text and reduce eyestrain? Ditto
| for fixing low contrast text.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| On the other hand, reader mode suggests that sometimes
| ignoring the way the site wants to be presented is a good
| thing.
| onion2k wrote:
| That's a user derived choice. I'm not saying user's
| shouldn't be able to change the way a site is laid out if
| they want to. I'm saying that _by default_ it should use
| the HTML spec.
| utahsaint365 wrote:
| http://explorermag.com/
|
| My 21 year old site focuses on Windows NT and the upcoming
| Windows 2000 release. Back when MSFt focused on operating
| systems. Billg still in charge!
| chaoticmass wrote:
| This really takes me back, in a good/nostalgic way. That 3
| column layout with a header on top was the go-to layout for
| content heavy sites.
| callesgg wrote:
| Personal websites... is something that screems mental ilness also
| writing youtube comments...
| raghavtoshniwal wrote:
| This is pretty cool. I had to look Frontpage up! Logic dictates
| that there must have been a point in time where the prevailing
| opinion shifted from "Uses ancient UI" to "Has a cool retro
| feel". Probably all technologies go through this? Like vinyl
| becoming cool a few years back. Has happened with Flash games
| recently. Is there a name for this?
| thechao wrote:
| "Nostalgia".
| jannes wrote:
| I think they meant a name for the process of something
| becoming the matter of nostalgia.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| My 23 year old web site: https://jgc.org/ It's still updated from
| a Perl script that generates static HTML.
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| Imagine stumbling upon an old-fashioned website, reading it is
| maintained by the CTO of Cloudflare, of all people.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| I think from time to time that I should completely change it
| and update it. But I can't really be bothered, Cloudflare
| takes a lot of my time.
| gerdesj wrote:
| I shouldn't bother mate. It is fast and the content is
| easily accessible. I've just spent a happy half hour
| browsing your blog. It looks like you'll be "needing" a 3D
| printer soon to really waste time on building IoT stuff.
|
| I have five different models of ESP8266 and ESP32s
| scattered across my desk along with Dupont wires, assorted
| sensors and a soldering iron, breadboards etc. Its a great
| way of taking your mind off the daily grind - my job title
| is MD.
| jenshk wrote:
| Haha that's pretty awesome. I have dedicated this year to
| simplicity and building my company's new website in Hugo with
| plain vanilla javascript.
| azimuth11 wrote:
| I guess you have some sort of "classic car" feelings towards
| it? How often does the perl script get updated?
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Whenever I need to update the site.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| My oldest content is from 96 or 97, but the page only exists
| offline. Hand written, of course, in pico - back then I didn't
| really know the web existed we just had www/ directories on our
| Uni's Unix accounts. Around '97 I updated to have frames, then
| '98 I think was SSI.
| nonamenoslogan wrote:
| Ahh pico! Good times, Good times.
| staz wrote:
| https://imgur.com/a/DCum3Ur here is how it render on my 14"
| screen :/
| StavrosK wrote:
| So I wanted to link _my_ 23 year old website, but precisely
| _because_ it 's still updated, it looks like this:
| https://www.stavros.io/
|
| It's gone through many renames and redesigns, but, in true
| Japanese style, it's still the same website. I do have an old
| snapshot, though: https://anonymoussoftware.stavros.io/
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Similarly, I feel a continuity in how old my website is, but
| in Ship of Theseus fashion lots of little parts changed over
| the years (and pieces were lost to storms, etc). I was really
| excited at one point to find an old time capsule of a
| snapshot from a particular redesign I recall being fond of
| around 1999: http://worldmaker.net/wmo99/
|
| Amusing to myself and contributing to overall Ship of Theseus
| analogy, the current design is a responsive, flexbox-based
| recreation of sorts of the original goals for that 1999 site.
| I'd like to think the 1999 version of myself would very much
| appreciate it (especially after all the work in making corner
| GIFs versus the magic of CSS border-radius, and fighting
| TABLEs for layous).
| readhn wrote:
| >> Greek. Amateur F1 driver. Technology enthusiast. Single
| parent. Liar.
|
| thats quite a conversation starter...
| StavrosK wrote:
| Yes, everyone always has lots of fun trying to spot the
| lies.
|
| Hint: "Liar" is the lie.
| ta999999171 wrote:
| Long time listener, first time caller: You're into auto
| racing?! Link some stuff?
| StavrosK wrote:
| No, it's a joke! Because it says "liar" afterwards. And
| the previous post was also a joke, ie that I was lying
| about being a liar, which is a paradox.
|
| I am a below average driver, alas. I am Greek, though,
| and some would say that's _more_ exciting!
| mobilio wrote:
| I'm going to SSG after playing enough with WordPress and other
| CMSes...
| dbalatero wrote:
| My favorite like this site is http://www.burger.com - this dude
| has a hilarious array of hobbies and awesome beveled button
| links.
| mtm7 wrote:
| I went from a page that said:
|
| > My charge for typical business or civil work is $450.00 per
| hour.
|
| To one that said:
|
| > I am a relative newcomer to the world of turtles.
|
| ...in two clicks. I love this site.
|
| Also learned a recipe for a quick and easy blackberry
| cobbler[0].
|
| [0]: http://www.burger.com/bcobbler.htm
| cgh wrote:
| He is a member of the Cherokee Nation with interests ranging
| from model railroading to fireflies. And he puts it all out
| there on his personal webpage, updated regularly since 1996.
| There was a time when it was normal to stumble upon pages like
| this one.
| cameronbrown wrote:
| "Webmaster" - I miss that term..
| znpy wrote:
| Ah, the time when you could actually "master" all the web
| technologies to keep a website up and running...
| weka wrote:
| There's no reason why you can't slap some CSS (flexbox,
| cssgrid!) with some ES6 JavaScript linked on an index.html
| on a Netlify server...
|
| Loads super fast.
| jimhi wrote:
| You still can. We sure make things more complicated than
| they have to be sometimes.
| retbull wrote:
| Ah papyrus oh how I missed you from high school.
| swyx wrote:
| that is the best last name in the history of the internet
| LukeBMM wrote:
| 24 years of weekly quotes is actually really impressive.
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| Have to wonder how much that domain name is worth...?
| cameronbrown wrote:
| Probably expensive, but I doubt it's actually worth anything.
| I reckon it's much harder to build a brand when you start
| with a generic word.
| tyrust wrote:
| You're probably right, but Burger Records is a moderately
| successful independent record label.
| genidoi wrote:
| Burger.com would be the brand
| tdons wrote:
| USD 25.000 according to GoDaddy
|
| https://godaddy.com/domain-value-
| appraisal/appraisal/?checkA...
| notaplumber wrote:
| They mean USD $25,000 and not $25.
| rchaud wrote:
| Knowing GoDaddy, $25 is closer to what they'd offer the
| domain owner for it. $25k would be the re-sale price.
| [deleted]
| lhopki01 wrote:
| Much of the world uses . for a number separator.
|
| https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/806-0169/overview-9/
| ind...
| Faaak wrote:
| However they should use the non-breakable space separator
| ' ' less error-prone
| [deleted]
| notaplumber wrote:
| I sorta knew that. But it still feels weird for dollar
| amounts. As 25.000 looks a lot like 25.00 ($25 dollars, 0
| cents).
| ta999999171 wrote:
| Doesn't make it smart.
| tzs wrote:
| From that document:> and some countries separate
| thousands groups with a thin space
|
| Thin space (U+2009) is also how you are supposed to do it
| when using the SI unit system, according to the SI spec.
| For the decimal separator, the SI standard is to use
| which of '.' or ',' is customary.
| gerardes wrote:
| If you like this? Check this one: https://www.gratiz.nl/ Updated
| every day :-)
| DannyB2 wrote:
| Remember the Front Page license.
|
| Originally, Front Page had a four page license. It specified that
| if you use Front Page to create a web site, you cannot disparage
| Microsoft, Expedia and a list of several other Microsoft owned
| properties.
|
| So with a license like that, I can't assume that any site created
| with Front Page is unbiased when it comes to a list of various
| Microsoft owned properties.
|
| After the slashdot effect (long ago) Microsoft removed this from
| the license.
| rhblake wrote:
| My personal favorite, which is in a similar vein - an Italian,
| although the site is in English; Frontpage; still updated - is
| https://www.luigicases.com/. He makes leather straps and cases
| for cameras. Famous in the classic camera community. Only active
| site that I can think of that still uses frames.
| toyg wrote:
| Those pics tell a glamorous story worth of a movie.
| jmnicolas wrote:
| Only someone with unwavering faith would maintain a Frontpage
| website in 2020 :)
| 0xferruccio wrote:
| There's so many italian old italian sites with this design
|
| My favorite in High Scool was http://ripmat.it
|
| That site is the only reason I managed to learn Math school
| [deleted]
| acomjean wrote:
| Those backgrounds are fantastic. Just right arrowing through
| them... is a trip. http://ripmat.it/mate/a/ac/ac5.html
| barbarbar wrote:
| This site is very fast.
| gjs278 wrote:
| my site has been online since 2005 and this view has worked out
| pretty well
|
| https://www.garyshood.com/
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Its.So.Quick.
|
| I love the speed of the page! And seemingly nobody is
| eavesdropping me.
| pmlnr wrote:
| I started with FrontPage 98 in '99. Moved to a self-written PHP
| CMS, then WordPress, then back to static HTML.
|
| Had I stayed with FrontPage, my life might have been simpler -
| porting 20 years of content is not simple - but I would have
| missed out on learning a lot of HTML, CSS, PHP, Python, MySQL,
| character set conversion, MySQL vs UTF-8, etc.
| theklub wrote:
| I love it
| kome wrote:
| ahahah from Lonate Pozzolo!! I am from Bellinzago and this is
| just mind-blowing.
|
| great website!
| skc wrote:
| The source is refreshingly sparse and tidy which was kind of
| jolting for a second.
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