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Reply 20 of 50, by soggi

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jakethompson1:

The first incarnation of my website in ~2001 (with basicly ~same design, but different content) also had a table design, because that was the way many people did it back then and also I didn't know any better...some years later in 2005/6/7 I learned that this was and is bad practice and switched to a CSS based design (with very simple CSS) and always had a look on compatibility.

leonardo:

I think roytam1's browser builds with TLS 1.3 support (K-Meleon 1.5.4, RetroZilla, RZ browser) are the latest and best you can get for Windows 95. With K-Meleon 1.5.4 and special DLLs you can even go down to i386 class CPUs, but TLS 1.3 is probably too hard for these. So every Windows since 95 is able to render HTML 4 (Strict) pages + CSS1/2 w/o problems. Embedded videos should be a don't in most cases in general, they can even blow up much newer machines.

kind regards
soggi

Vintage BIOSes, firmware, drivers, tools, manuals and (3dfx) game patches -> soggi's BIOS & Firmware Page

soggi.org on Twitter - inactive at the moment

Reply 21 of 50, by MAZter

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Anonymoose wrote on 2024-11-19, 20:35:

Sure! I’ll take it, send it my way

https://archive.org/details/coffecup_html_editor_8.9_trial

System requirements: Windows 95 - Windows 10 (run with Win98 compatibility option)

Doom is what you want (c) MAZter

Reply 22 of 50, by DaveDDS

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FWIW, What web stuff I've done, I've always done hand-written HTML. I never try to do anything fancy, I don't try and
"run stuff" on the target system and stuff like that - I've mainly done simple - more nicely formatted than plain text"
pages.

You can see examples of what I've done on my personal site as well as "Daves Old Computers" (see below).
both fairly simple sites (never claimed to be of the "artistic" type 😀

In 2019 after being laid up for months due to an injury, I lost the domain registration for my original DDS site.
and as I had decided to retire by them, I didn't want to use the same site somewhere else. But re-writing all that
HTML by had was more work that I cared to undertake.

So... I wrote TXP - a fairly powerful text file pre-processor which allowed me to enter the basic constructs with much
less work, and much less tendency for errors over the hand-written stuff.

If anyone is interested, I can share some of the pre-processor definitions etc. that I used to make it all work.

Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal

Reply 23 of 50, by Anonymoose

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Started working on the website this week, I think I’m getting the hang of it!

Some questions and thoughts I’ve had, I’ve been writing the site with 640x480x256 in mind, is that a good idea? My driver supports 800x600x16, should I take that into account? I know I can use percentages for width and height elements, but I think adding those to everything would be inefficient. Plus, how should I take image colors into mind, dither and palette wise?

The more I code, I’m thinking 3.2 is a bit limiting… I do hope to upgrade to 4.01 though once I learn the basics. Bummed that custom fonts aren’t supported until 4.01, but I’ll have to work around that. So far, making the icons and text I need in photoshop work, but only gifs support transparency, so I’m out of luck with using pngs and jpegs. Ah well, I do enjoy a tech challenge.

Reply 24 of 50, by Jo22

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I'm not sure if this helpful, but we had used Netscape Navigator 2.01 at home in 1996.
The browser did support plug-ins like QuickTime and Real Media, I think.
We've used the Windows version. Mac (1995) and *nix versions did exist, too.
Several homepages of the time did look quite sophisticated using Navigator 2.
They had a real layout already. And *.mov files could be streamt/played, I vaguely remember.

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/software/nets … tor-2-0-in-1995
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator_2

Also worth to note:
"An innovation that Netscape introduced in 1994 was the on-the-fly display of web pages, where text and graphics appeared on the screen as the web page downloaded.
Earlier web browsers would not display a page until all graphics on it had been loaded over the network connection;
this meant a user might have only a blank page for several minutes.
With Netscape, people using dial-up connections could begin reading the text of a web page within seconds of entering a web address,
even before the rest of the text and graphics had finished downloading.
This made the web much more tolerable to the average user. "

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

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 25 of 50, by gerry

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This thread gave me a wave of nostalgia. i remember using html in the late 90's for now long vanished free hosting sites. The moves from 2 to 3 to 4 in rapid succession, the early free html dev tools (some genuinely good, others more "word 97" like ). I liked the simplicity and flexibility of it. now its all served up, the scope of functionality is now huge and very impressive. Browsers are almost virtual machines. Yet within all of that, its still possible to code a simple page in html 4 (or 5) and have it run on old and / or basic browsers on older machines

Reply 26 of 50, by vetz

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Anonymoose wrote on 2024-11-22, 05:20:

The more I code, I’m thinking 3.2 is a bit limiting… I do hope to upgrade to 4.01 though once I learn the basics. Bummed that custom fonts aren’t supported until 4.01, but I’ll have to work around that. So far, making the icons and text I need in photoshop work, but only gifs support transparency, so I’m out of luck with using pngs and jpegs. Ah well, I do enjoy a tech challenge.

While the "font face" tag is not officially supported in HTML 3.2, it was supported by both Netscape 3 and IE 3.

3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)
3D Acceleration Comparison Episodes

Reply 27 of 50, by Jo22

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gerry wrote on 2024-11-22, 09:33:

This thread gave me a wave of nostalgia. i remember using html in the late 90's for now long vanished free hosting sites. The moves from 2 to 3 to 4 in rapid succession, the early free html dev tools (some genuinely good, others more "word 97" like ). I liked the simplicity and flexibility of it. now its all served up, the scope of functionality is now huge and very impressive. Browsers are almost virtual machines. Yet within all of that, its still possible to code a simple page in html 4 (or 5) and have it run on old and / or basic browsers on older machines

Speaking of VMs, what I remember from about 20 years ago:
Many web designers had kept a couple of different PC around or had multi-boot configurations. For testing purposes.

That's because the website had to be tested on various platforms.
Like for example Windows 98SE, Windows NT and MacOS 8/9/10.
Internet Explorer was already popular by late 90s, but it was slightly different on different platforms.

Especially Internet Explorer 5 had been ported to MacOS and various Unix platforms, I remember.
(Interet Explorer 3, too to some degree, but it was still sold as a commercial product initially, I believe.)

There were differences in browser engine (IE had used Trident) but also the host OS.
Factors such as character encoding (Unicode vs ANSI/Windows CodePages vs Mac OS Roman etc) or text fonts and drawing of GUI elements (radio button, scroll bar, forms etc).

IE5.x had been the default browser in Mac OS 9 and 10.0/10.1, still, I vaguely remember.
That was important insofar, because at turn of century Macs had been popular at advertising agencies, in desktop publishing etc.

vetz wrote on 2024-11-22, 09:34:
Anonymoose wrote on 2024-11-22, 05:20:

The more I code, I’m thinking 3.2 is a bit limiting… I do hope to upgrade to 4.01 though once I learn the basics. Bummed that custom fonts aren’t supported until 4.01, but I’ll have to work around that. So far, making the icons and text I need in photoshop work, but only gifs support transparency, so I’m out of luck with using pngs and jpegs. Ah well, I do enjoy a tech challenge.

While the "font face" tag is not officially supported in HTML 3.2, it was supported by both Netscape 3 and IE 3.

That's an aspect that I think is important.
Some HTML features might have been available inofficially in earlier releases, already.
Sometimes it were experimental features that didn't make it into final HTML specs, also.
So it's worth a try to have various OSes/browsers around for testing simply.
Emulators and VMs can help here. They also allow going back in time in a proper way.
These older systems will display the websites accurately for a given time period.

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 28 of 50, by Anonymoose

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Good to know! I’m currently coding with Notepad++ on my Win 10 computer and FTPing it over to my 486. I’ll have to download Netscape and IE to test them, but I’ve been using Opera 3.62 in the meantime.

Hate to persist, but does anyone have an answer to my palette question? Could I use a mode 13h palette and have the browser down sample to 16 colors?

Edit: what version of IE and Netscape should I test on? Should I stick to a version of IE 3.xx and Netscape 2.xx

Reply 29 of 50, by jakethompson1

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If you don't know about <basefont> tag- try putting <basefont face="Comic Sans MS" size="+1"> or whatever you like in--I can't remember whether it goes under <head> or <body>, but it will cut down on the number of <font> tags you need but without needing CSS. (Since <font> is an inline element, it resets whenever you close a block element)

Reply 30 of 50, by Big Pink

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gerry wrote on 2024-11-22, 09:33:

This thread gave me a wave of nostalgia.

Same. I just had a look at the index page for the website I had in school (last modified 2004): so many <table> tags just to get things to line up properly 😁
There was a clip of eBay from 2000 in LGR's latest video that made me want to weep - a little austere looking, but at least it isn't a bloated galactic turd like today.

I thought IBM was born with the world

Reply 31 of 50, by Jo22

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This might be interesting, too!

Exploring The Old Internet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ddLUSu6SGE

Exploring The Old Internet #2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRTEG2a-YBw

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 32 of 50, by soggi

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Anonymoose:

I forgot the resolution in my first post in this thread. My website has a fixed width which requires at least a resolution of 1024*x - the reason is that I have some content (especially tables) that needs a minimum width. If you don't have such content, you can use a relative width (%) and so you can also have a responsive design which will be viewable on low res and mobiles (more or less). You have to make the decision!

Another thing I forgot... Use compatible fonts, preferably just one font! Many fonts are only available on Windows and if you define such a font, you should specify a replacement for other platforms. This is easily possible via CSS, f.e. I'm using the following value for that:

body	{font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;}

Is anybody surfing the web with 256 colors or less? I remember this already looked very bad ~25 years ago (web surfing with standard VGA driver) and wouldn't care about that...especially photographs make no sense with that color palette, they need at least 16 bit. Concerning text colors this is a legitimate question and is already answered above -> chose clear colors (simple hexadecimal color values) and note color blind people.

As said before, HTML 4.01 Strict is good compromise to support (very) old to modern devices and being able to design something. Why do you need transparency? The file formats for graphics and photographs for the web are .png and .jpg, for decades.

What is your goal??? Do you want to have a real website which is visited by real persons (not only testers)? Very few people use old OSes like Win2k and older to view websites...nearly nobody to really nobody uses browsers from the 90s to view websites, because there are newer browsers for those seldomly used OSes which have much better support for the later web standards! In conclusion: You can try to create a IE 3.x / Netscape 2.x compatible website just because you can do it, but what for?

Jo22:

Jo22 wrote on 2024-11-22, 10:06:

That's because the website had to be tested on various platforms.
Like for example Windows 98SE, Windows NT and MacOS 8/9/10.
Internet Explorer was already popular by late 90s, but it was slightly different on different platforms.

In very most cases it's not about platforms, but about different browsers - the platforms didn't really matter. Browser switches are still used to serve different versions of websites, f.e. based on the browser's user agent.

kind regards
soggi

Vintage BIOSes, firmware, drivers, tools, manuals and (3dfx) game patches -> soggi's BIOS & Firmware Page

soggi.org on Twitter - inactive at the moment

Reply 33 of 50, by Jo22

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^Was my previous post so unreadable? 😥
I wrote that same web browser had been available on different platforms, with different outcome.
Websites on IE 5/Windows didn't necessarily look same on IE 5/Solaris.
The fonts on both platforms were different and the GUI elements, as well.

If you worked as a web designer on behalf of a company or client, you have to meet strict requirements.
You'll eventually hear things like: "The image must be 2 centimetres (!) away from the right edge." 😮‍💨

Edit: Ever designed/written an HTML E-Mail news letter?
I wouldn't wish anyone to ever have to get through this.. 😣

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 34 of 50, by soggi

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Hm!? I just contradicted that it's mostly not about platforms but about browsers (and/or their engines). Fonts are ONE exception (as said above), GUI elements on a website usually not and the browsers GUI elements don't belong to the website. It doesn't make much difference if you run f.e. FF2 on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, BSD or Solaris - except the font(s) and maybe the charset (therefor I recommended to use the CSS mentioned above and UTF-8 for high compatibility).

BTW the CSS above says "Use 'Courier New' as font. If it is not available, use a font from the 'Courier' family. If this is also not available, use a monospace font." - this way you control that a website looks very similar on different platforms. You can also server a font with your page, but also has several pitfalls (f.e. copyright or blocking).

kind regards
soggi

Vintage BIOSes, firmware, drivers, tools, manuals and (3dfx) game patches -> soggi's BIOS & Firmware Page

soggi.org on Twitter - inactive at the moment

Reply 35 of 50, by jakethompson1

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I think the thread has gone into two directions, both of them potentially interesting.

One is to make a website compliant with web standards and modern browsers (e.g., using CSS), but that doesn't require JavaScript and gracefully degradates when accessed using an old browser rather than crashing it, blocking it, or just presenting an unusable soup of elements (like modern sites do when you attempt to print them). Add responsiveness for mobile screens and I think you're better at modern web development than modern web developers 😁

Another is to actually feed period correct HTML to 90s browsers, "under construction" animated GIFs and all, like you're going for the geocities experience.

Reply 36 of 50, by soggi

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Yeah...that's why I asked for Anonymoose's goal!

Personally (for my websites) I don't care about the earliest browsers from mid 90s, because there are (much) better browsers for all platforms as described above.

CSS1/2 are from the late 90s, this is anything but "modern" in this case, first CSS 2.1 recommendation is from 2004 and you can have simple HTML pages (even w/o CSS) which are perfectly responsive w/o using modern web development stuff.

kind regards
soggi

Vintage BIOSes, firmware, drivers, tools, manuals and (3dfx) game patches -> soggi's BIOS & Firmware Page

soggi.org on Twitter - inactive at the moment

Reply 37 of 50, by Anonymoose

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jakethompson1 wrote on 2024-11-23, 20:29:

I think the thread has gone into two directions, both of them potentially interesting.

One is to make a website compliant with web standards and modern browsers (e.g., using CSS), but that doesn't require JavaScript and gracefully degradates when accessed using an old browser rather than crashing it, blocking it, or just presenting an unusable soup of elements (like modern sites do when you attempt to print them). Add responsiveness for mobile screens and I think you're better at modern web development than modern web developers 😁

Another is to actually feed period correct HTML to 90s browsers, "under construction" animated GIFs and all, like you're going for the geocities experience.

Whoops! Apologies for leading anyone astray, my loose idea for the website was one that had a directory of websites that are still accessible on older browsers, so I wouldn’t have to do much coding. I’d like to be period correct, but I don’t care if the browser looks bad on mobile or newer browsers, just a simple page that looks nice and could also look good on other browsers with unique features like IE and Netscape. I’d say the geocities comment was more accurate

I never did ask, does such a site exist? My initial searches didn’t seem to show that one did.

Reply 38 of 50, by Jo22

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^The links about the the old web I posted before state that there's a search engine, wiby, that merely indexes oldschool websites without java scripts.
So maybe it makes sense to consider this. 🙂

Edit: For testing purposes, I recommend testing the final retro website on things like Lynx, Arachne, Dillo and old mobile devices (Palm PDAs, Pocket PCs/Windows CE handhelds, Psion handhelds, Nokia communicators and so on).

If you wish to support old mobile devices especially, then there's WML markup language.
It used to be around in late 90s/early 2000s when mobile Internet featured WAP.
Here in western world, at least. Japan had used i-mode back then, which also had interesting history.

Speaking of Japan, it's about the only place were the 90s Internet still exists more or less.
Historically, Japanese users are interested in specs, stats, in all kinds of information.
That's why their websites haven't been dumped down so much, but contain a lot of text.

The iPhone and American media/commercial world hasn’t done as much damage over there as it had done here in western world, in short.
They also had flip-phones for much longer, if memory serves. But that's true for Asia in general, maybe.
The smartphone didn't dominate everything so much as it did here, in short.
IrDA port (absent on smartphones) was used to exchange digital business cards, also.
Speaking under correction, though.

soggi wrote on 2024-11-23, 19:26:

Hm!? I just contradicted that it's mostly not about platforms but about browsers (and/or their engines). Fonts are ONE exception (as said above), GUI elements on a website usually not and the browsers GUI elements don't belong to the website. It doesn't make much difference if you run f.e. FF2 on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, BSD or Solaris - except the font(s) and maybe the charset (therefor I recommended to use the CSS mentioned above and UTF-8 for high compatibility).

It's fine, I just meant to say that life of a web designer is hart.
Many things seem trivial, until you have to work with end users/non-technical people. Then things go down hill.

Up to the the type of client that does print out web pages, page per page and tells you that the links aren’t clickable.

The aforementioned example with the centimetres was real, by the way.
There was an agency for typists who's boss asked to have certain elements on websites moved/changed in centimetres and millimetres (!) rather than pixels.
As if it was an absolute unit that's not related to screen size or resolution..

So yeah, believe it or not but such people do exist out there. 😰
Not seldomly, your clients ask for the impossible, I had the joy to work a few months for such clients until I was feeling totally dead inside of myself.

And these people/clients don't really care if the looks of the headline (font), the radio button or input form is the result of the OS' native GUI elements.
They demand that things look exactly same everywhere else as they see it on their own PC/Mac/etc.

Technical reasons don't interest them, they simply demand you to make it work that way.
That's the point you would have to get creative and try to apply skins to radio buttons, scroll bars etc. somehow by using scripts and other tricks.

And there's where plug-ins and the relevance of peculiarities of other platforms may come into play.
(There's a good reason the browser's agent string does carry version number, but also platform.)

Additionally, writing an E-Mail news letter in plain HTML format is very hard to do manually (even with help of FrontPage).
There are specialized web generators now that do it. Gratefully, I must say. 🙏
Their generated HTML code is a totall mess of encapsulated spaghetti code, but it's necessary in order to met the demands of the client.

They're more of a browser test than ACID tests could ever be, I think.
HTML news letters (HTML E-mails) are somewhat hardcore, IMHO. 🙁

Edited.

Edit: A quick elaboration here: The problem with HTML news letters is that the sender (application, server etc) does demand for plain HTML pages.
Things like CSS or JavaScript or ActionScript are being refused.
So you have to resort to frames, tables, utilizing quirks and one pixel dummy bitmaps to create desired layout. It's a mess. 😢

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 39 of 50, by soggi

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Jo22 wrote on 2024-11-24, 23:35:

^The links about the the old web I posted before state that there's a search engine, wiby, that merely indexes oldschool websites without java scripts.
So maybe it makes sense to consider this. 🙂

Wiby also was my first thought when I read directory of websites that are still accessible on older browsers, frequently my website gets visitors from there.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-11-24, 23:35:

It's fine, I just meant to say that life of a web designer is hart.
Many things seem trivial, until you have to work with end users/non-technical people. Then things go down hill.

I know and I felt the pain while reading your posts!

Jo22 wrote on 2024-11-24, 23:35:

Up to the the type of client that does print out web pages, page per page and tells you that the links aren’t clickable.

Clickable links on paper!? 🤣
BTW sometimes I have the desire of using the search function to find a specific section or position in a book or an article and one/two seconds later I notice that this isn't possible in analog media. D'oh! [sic]

Jo22 wrote on 2024-11-24, 23:35:

The aforementioned example with the centimetres was real, by the way.

I would just show the result on two very different monitors including changing the resolution, so it's noticeable that neither a fixed resolution nor a fixed monitor size are a realistic scenario in the wild and therefor absolute dimensions have no relation to the result and don't make any sense - that's an easy one. If they don't get it...f*** off, do it yourself!
BTW even pixels are absolute dimensions and don't make any sense in many to most cases.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-11-24, 23:35:

So yeah, believe it or not but such people do exist out there. 😰
Not seldomly, your clients ask for the impossible, I had the joy to work a few months for such clients until I was feeling totally dead inside of myself.

I didn't earn my money as a web designer or something similar (I just created my own pages and did some free work for friends/relatives), but I read a lot of this stuff the last decades (magazines, forums, etc.) and also talked about that with people from the other side and there was comprehension when I explained these things calmly. I never cared about such stubborn people who think they always know how it's going...leave em alone and let them do their shit on their own, they'll come back to you shortly after they realize they have absolutely no idea of what they were talking about and how to do it on their own.

Sorry, I get very upset if I feel treated unfairly (not by you, I'm just in the situation you described above)...and then I'd fight (not the angry, but the objective way). I had such an experience ~20 years ago when I did my civilian service, in the end I switched to another place where I could finish the service. Retrospectively I would call most civilian service "jobs" pure exploitation, especially if we're talking about private operators of medical centers (getting ~200 EUR each month for 40h a week while the operator receives extra funds from the state)! That's also why I'm union member and deputy member of the work council today.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-11-24, 23:35:

Technical reasons don't interest them, they simply demand you to make it work that way.
That's the point you would have to get creative and try to apply skins to radio buttons, scroll bars etc. somehow by using scripts and other tricks.

No, that's the point you should say "Piss off, do your shit yourself!". Sorry again for being so drastic...but that's the way it is.

BTW there's also a good reason why code which refers to browser's User Agent isn't the best code...UAs can be simply faked and personally I block a lot of them, there are so many invalid UAs which are only used by bots...my .htaccess is full of them together with other fake data and bad IP ranges. Relying on UAs is idiotic - f.e. on many websites you have to fake the UA of New Moon or even of Pale Moon to get the website work, ergo there must be some UA filter which excludes the Moons or only includes the latest Chrome, Edge and Firefox browsers. I don't care which browsers the visitors of my website are using...but I block fake UAs which are at 99% used by bad bots.

I think you know what I'm talking about...I could write a lot more concerning this...but that's not the topic here.

kind regards
soggi

Vintage BIOSes, firmware, drivers, tools, manuals and (3dfx) game patches -> soggi's BIOS & Firmware Page

soggi.org on Twitter - inactive at the moment