## 26 My first website

During my test and tries with a new CSS on the French website, I had souvenirs of the first try to build a web site. It was in 1999, I think and I don't remember where it was hosted. But I wrote it without many help, not using tools like Dreamweaver or something like that. It was made with some HTML pages, anchors and links and something ugly for the background. It was also with frames, you know that way to divide a website in several parts with a menu on the left, a banner on top and the page in the center. It was a time when CSS was only an idea in the head of someone in the W3C. Now, it seems ugly but it was fun to do.

The first work, after writing the index and how to place the frames, was to do a beautiful banner. It was not responsive at all and the resolution of the page was very important to work with Netscape Navigator, Mosaic or the young Internet Explorer and the poor resolutions we had on the 15" screens. The frame had the advantage no to load a whole page each time but only what changed from page to page…because with a 56K modem, it was very long, sometimes. The HTML and the network have evolved, ha, ha. After the banner, it was important to make a beautiful menu with buttons. Don't laugh...I made some beautiful buttons and it was not so easy to define where to click on this f.....g images. Ah, the image mapping was another sport when HTML was in the 3.2 version. But with no CSS or java script, it was very easy to test the code locally with a browser. But it was only working for a very small site, not big sites with database. I didn't know what PHP was, or SQL or something like that. Flash was not important and
 hadn't ruined the websites with animations to load. It was a time without HTTPS, without plugins...and when I see what Gemini is now, it seems more simple than what HTML/HTTP sites were. 

I'm going back to simplicity with my website today but it's far more easy now with CSS and styles to do something simple and more beautiful than the web of the end of the 90s. It was also expensive to host it correctly. The alternative was only with the free pages of your ISP, very limited in France. I don't remember what tool I used to do a ftp transfer but it was not so different from filezilla now. I remember the beautiful dog in the Lycos ads. A private joke in the 2000s...For rookies, it seemed very complex. Tools and softwares like WYSIWYG editors were useful. I know some people that used MS Word to create pages. The code was awful, and working only on Internet Explorer of course. But you had something that could work in only a few seconds. Despite all that, the web of the 2000s was working with 56k modem and was light to use. No script, no videos but sometimes a small midi song or gadgets like that. Text, text, text...And you know why I'm very text-centric now. Pictures were so long to load that you h
ad to limit their size or the colors. The GIF format was not for animated picture but to limit the size and colors. A good practice but now, bandwidth is so large that you don't care about your reader. 

All was not so extraordinary and many websites were ugly, difficult to use and the first animated menu came suddenly. It's sad to have lost that work and internet archive has nothing about what I've done during my first year on the web. Then came my first posts on a website about BeOS that some fans of this OS had done. This is lost now like many BEOS ressources. It's only 25 years old, half my age. It's with that kind of souvenirs that I realize that Internet and the web is something very young, with very ephemeral things, fashions for languages or styles. I'm generally out of fashion and it's another good example here. Tim Berners Lee said recently that the Internet was going to be divided or cut into pieces. I'm not sure that his Solid is going to change this «cyberworld» but to have known the beginning could be a great help for today's content creators, not to do bullshits.

And then came the CMS...and it seems to me a good idea to manage a website. Now there's a come back to the initial way of doing that. I don't want a CMS and dependancies, and imagine if I had known gopher....Now there's gemini and it has never been simpler to do a website or a ...gemsite now.

2Dɛ

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