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Browsers back then only understood GIF and JPG as formats with the best compression and simplest to load. PNG was around, but wasn't common on the web until the mid-00s when alpha channels vindicated its purpose to make pages prettier (And as an excuse to drop IE6 in a rebellious manner as it didn't do png alphas)

One big difference of GIFs in the 90s opposed to much later, is that there was a "web safe colors" palette standard for consistent colors between platforms and targeting computers running in 8-bit color. Browsers would typically dither JPEGs.

Early versions of Mosaic only supported GIF. Which is probably the best choice anyway.

My page will only run in IE 5 and 6

Rikintosh wrote on 2022-05-26, 03:24:

Older computers = Computers from the mid 90's, between 486 dx2 66 and pentium 166

..
In '96, my father had a 386DX-40 with Win95 and Netscape 2.01! And data/fax modem with ~28k8! :smiling_face_with_tear:

Please let's don't forget Macintoshs.
You may not like them, but they were authentic, period-correct internet terminals in the 1990s.
Years before the PCs, even. They were in popular culture, too. "The Net", the not-so real "Hackers" movie, various TV shows..

Edit: I recall that the Claris Homepage Editor or FimeMaker were popular HTML editors in the mid-90s.
Ran on Windows and System..

By the way, that was a common online experience in my place in '96.:
No internet, nope. We just got that brand new "KIT" system for Datex-J (aka BTX).
- The BTX central computer was stationed in Ulm, I think.
Software in '96 was T-Online 1.2 on Windows 3.1/95 or Mac.
If you clicked on that globe, the connection would switch from X.25 (?) to TCP/IP and Netscape 2.01 would be executed.

Of course, there also were other online services at the time, like CompuServe and AOL.
They had their own proprietary networks independent of the internet.
Back then, internet was new and mysterious. Like cell phones.
Mortals rather had pagers, Mailboxes/BBSes and BTX, maybe. Ah yes, the InterNet.. 😃

Edit: Sending E-Mails or Messages didn't require a dial into internet yet.
The online software would take care of that.
It was possible to send/receive e-mails from the native network of each online-service.

Edit: Just checked. In 1996, it seems to have been T-Online 1.2, rather than 1.02.. Sorry! 😅

Edit: The KIT Decoder was made to fit 640x480 screens of the time.
The default colours used were carefully choosen, too.

However, the old BTX system from the 70s wasn't exactly satisfied with just 16 colors.
Official requirement for the CEPT standard were 32 colours on screen from a palette of 4096.
So on Windows, 256c colour drivers were really needed for a proper setup without dithering.

Ah, sorry for being a little bit off-topic.. The nostalgia is just so strong..
Here's some picture too of the pager I had in ~'96. Everyone wanted a fancy Skyper so badly, but all I got at the time was a numeric model. 😢

Rikintosh wrote on 2022-05-26, 03:24:

I wanted to load a lot of images in an HTML page, they are small 64x128 images, but as there are a lot of images at the same time, I realized that I can have a big difference in performance if I choose the ideal format.

CompuServe used interlaced GIF to solve this issue, I think.
So you could see the pictures during loading; as time advanced, more and more lines were drawn and the pictures became more clear.

JPEG had something similar, I suppose. Never used it, though.

Here's an example video from my channel that simulated that line-by-line decoding of GIF:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W3NowrOd9g

Edit: Oh, and please don't use 256c! Use 236. Or less. Use web-safe colours etc.
Windows 3.x reserves 20c for itself. Windows 95 maybe, too.
They're static colours, system colours.

If a user's browsing with a 256c driver, the 256c pictures may force Windows to use full palette.
That causes the web browser and the Windows desktop to show up in funny colours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_palettes

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#Web-safe_colors

Edit: It seems to me that leileilol's "web-safe colors" are the most practical approach.
216 colours should be doing fine, they all fit within GIF and other palette based formats, too.
Windows PCs of the 90s with their ISA VGAs and 256c RAMDACs should be flexible enough to display those.

Oops. I just learned that the internet/online services just had started as late as 1995 in some places, while in inner parts of Europe (France) it started in 1992-94, with the WWW being around circa ~1993/1994 with the advent of early browsers like Mosaic..
New Zealand even started in 1989, interesting.
That would explain certain cultural differences and the different nostalgia, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_France

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_Kingdom

https://www.rnp.br/en/news/history-behind-20- … internet-brazil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_New_Zealand

Actually I forgot to mention: I'm not making a page for the web, I'm writing HTML, but it will run in software with an embedded IE. I'm developing something like launchbox for win9x.

I chose to use HTML for most of the code (even knowing the huge limitations that IE 5 and 6 will give me) because it's a lightweight format, and easy to port (yes, I plan to port it to mac)

There was also that exotic XBM format from the Unix world.

Rikintosh wrote on 2022-05-26, 14:39:

Actually I forgot to mention: I'm not making a page for the web, I'm writing HTML, but it will run in software with an embedded IE. I'm developing something like launchbox for win9x.

I chose to use HTML for most of the code (even knowing the huge limitations that IE 5 and 6 will give me) because it's a lightweight format, and easy to port (yes, I plan to port it to mac)

I've seen this done before. IIRC the NetWare SDK CD-ROMs have Netscape on the CD with some plugin that lets it start programs (like an install program) from HTML documents. Kind of neat. But I don't know HTML has ever really been a light-weight format. IE5 works OK on my DX4-100 under Windows 3.11 but I wouldn't call it quick. I expect something built in C++/Visual Basic/Object Pascal/Delphi would start up a lot faster and run a lot better on a DX2-66.

davidrg wrote on 2022-05-26, 22:36:

Rikintosh wrote on 2022-05-26, 14:39:

Actually I forgot to mention: I'm not making a page for the web, I'm writing HTML, but it will run in software with an embedded IE. I'm developing something like launchbox for win9x.

I chose to use HTML for most of the code (even knowing the huge limitations that IE 5 and 6 will give me) because it's a lightweight format, and easy to port (yes, I plan to port it to mac)

I've seen this done before. IIRC the NetWare SDK CD-ROMs have Netscape on the CD with some plugin that lets it start programs (like an install program) from HTML documents. Kind of neat. But I don't know HTML has ever really been a light-weight format. IE5 works OK on my DX4-100 under Windows 3.11 but I wouldn't call it quick. I expect something built in C++/Visual Basic/Object Pascal/Delphi would start up a lot faster and run a lot better on a DX2-66.

The sum of small details such as the right choice of image format, is what results in a good performance on older machines. HTML is an uncompiled language, so I keep the pages as simple as possible (fewer instructions), and use javascript only for essentials. Of course, I have a "configuration" section that allows to disable things like the background, and use of fonts, and other things of the interface via css and editing of the html pages by the program. I've been very careful with resources so that the page loads quickly. The page itself that will show the covers of 64x128 games, I will decide if it will be available in configurations below 90mhz. It's all trial and error, I have some experience in HTML development from the 90's, as I learned this in the late 90's, but a lot of things I don't remember anymore. But everything I do, I test it several times on several real machines that I have here at home. It was precisely because of these tests that I decided to use HTML (before the whole interface was in the program, but everything was too slow for older computers, especially without a 2D accelerator card).

Ah, I see. Now I understand.

Hm. That reminds me of the menus of shareware CDs from the late 90s/early 2000s.
They had their catalogue in HTML format, so they weren't bound to a single platform.
Maybe some of them can be found on archive.org for further analysis.
Edit: Or was it XHTML, CHTML?

In the early 90s, shareware CDs had DOS and Windows 3.1 specific catalogues.
Two separate executables for each platform, respectively.
OS/2 had gotten none usually, because it could run either of the others.
The Mac's shareware CDs also got a catalogue, if memory serves.
Not sure what it used, though. Macromedia Flash/Shockwave? HyperCard?

Hm. Another idea would be use Windows Scripting Host, VBScript (VBS), JScript (Microsoft's old Java implementation), ActiveX, VBA..
Using Windows Help (*.hlp, *.chm) is an alternative, too. But it's Windows-only.

Rikintosh wrote on 2022-05-27, 00:28:

It was precisely because of these tests that I decided to use HTML (before the whole interface was in the program, but everything was too slow for older computers, especially without a 2D accelerator card).

I find that extremely surprising, since web browsers are very general purpose tools which as you mentioned must interpret HTML and JavaScript, whereas your software only has to do a very limited number of things, and I assume it was written in some compiled language rather than an interpreted one. Perhaps if your non-HTML-based version looked as nice as your screenshot - with gradients behind everything - it just happened to implement drawing of some of those things in an inefficient manner, but whatever the issue, it could probably be identified by profiling and then fixed.

Jo22 wrote on 2022-05-27, 05:07:

Ah, I see. Now I understand. […]
Show full quote

Ah, I see. Now I understand.

Hm. That reminds me of the menus of shareware CDs from the late 90s/early 2000s.
They had their catalogue in HTML format, so they weren't bound to a single platform.
Maybe some of them can be found on archive.org for further analysis.
Edit: Or was it XHTML, CHTML?

In the early 90s, shareware CDs had DOS and Windows 3.1 specific catalogues.
Two separate executables for each platform, respectively.
OS/2 had gotten none usually, because it could run either of the others.
The Mac's shareware CDs also got a catalogue, if memory serves.
Not sure what it used, though. Macromedia Flash/Shockwave? HyperCard?

Hm. Another idea would be use Windows Scripting Host, VBScript (VBS), JScript (Microsoft's old Java implementation), ActiveX, VBA..
Using Windows Help (*.hlp, *.chm) is an alternative, too. But it's Windows-only.

Yes, on mac and win 3.1 Macromedia Director was used massively, and also on windows 9x. It was even a good tool, I thought of developing on it, but that would require a long learning process that would delay development a lot.

The DOS Menus were usually Turbo Pascal and Delphi, they had those cool buttons and graphical interface.

doshea wrote on 2022-05-27, 08:42:

Rikintosh wrote on 2022-05-27, 00:28:

It was precisely because of these tests that I decided to use HTML (before the whole interface was in the program, but everything was too slow for older computers, especially without a 2D accelerator card).

I find that extremely surprising, since web browsers are very general purpose tools which as you mentioned must interpret HTML and JavaScript, whereas your software only has to do a very limited number of things, and I assume it was written in some compiled language rather than an interpreted one. Perhaps if your non-HTML-based version looked as nice as your screenshot - with gradients behind everything - it just happened to implement drawing of some of those things in an inefficient manner, but whatever the issue, it could probably be identified by profiling and then fixed.

Yes, you are absolutely right. I'm not coding properly in C++ or anything like that, because my skills aren't good enough yet, and I didn't want to invest too much time in learning so as not to delay the project further. I was using an authoring tool similar to Macromedia Director. I have the project behind schedule, I started to develop it exactly 1 year ago, but I got sick a few times and it affected my personal and financial life a lot. Now I'm determined to finish it, I've sliced ​​my ambitions towards the project, to produce it in stages, and release alpha versions for the community to test and provide me with feedback. I also decided that it was more feasible to use launchbox's XML database structure, than to develop a new one in SQL containing the same data, I did this to try to maintain a uniformity/standard, since there are several managers, and each one uses a type of database storage, with identical and sometimes similar data, and this causes a decentralization of information that is not good for the whole community.

I'm currently happy with the performance I've achieved with (D)HTML. In this step that I call Mark 1, I'll just focus on making a simple program that works with the database (with manual registration, without autodetection), and from that, I'll add new features.

edit: Everything in the screenshots is in Brazilian Portuguese, because it is my main language, and that makes development easier for me, however, all texts are strings, and are loaded from an external txt. All my builds will be released with English and Portuguese languages

Rikintosh wrote on 2022-05-27, 15:39:

I'm not coding properly in C++ or anything like that, because my skills aren't good enough yet, and I didn't want to invest too much time in learning so as not to delay the project further. I was using an authoring tool similar to Macromedia Director.

Oh, I see! Director certainly made things look nice but I can imagine tools like that not performing that well.

Sticking to HTML for now so you can get the project back on schedule sounds like a good idea, good luck!

Errius wrote on 2022-05-26, 20:25:

There was also that exotic XBM format from the Unix world.

XBM is monochrome. XPM is colour raster.