I don't think you should strictly target a specific HTML version. Browsers are already trying their best to accept any input and interpret it somehow.
In the days of browser wars rich web-based applications had to implement certain quirks in order to be compatible with almost every major browser engine.

So just keep everything simple. If you want to support really old browsers, use tables for layouting. Embedded GIFs are fine, videos are not - unless you are fine with requiring your visitors to have ActiveX, RealPlayer or Macromedia Flash plugins.
Notepad++ is a good choice, MS FrontPage tends to generate layout that doesn't always render well on non-IE browsers. I used Dreamweaver back then, combining WYSIWYG and code editor modes.

Hosting is another problem - most web hosters tend to force TLS which isn't supported by old browsers. You would need a hosting which doesn't do an http-to-https redirect, https://tilde.club/ could be one.

Might as well stick with HTML 3.x. With HTML 4, it was assumed you'd be using CSS for all layout/formatting instead of HTML tags, and that's when complexity exploded.

With that being said, you can use HTML 5 tags to embed OGG audio or WEBM video and those will be playable in newer browsers while simply being ignored by older browsers (in which case you could show a download link instead).

Anonymoose wrote on 2024-11-18, 15:28:

Is there an HTML I should be targeting for max compatibility? 2.0, 3.2, 4.0?

HTML 4.0 Transitional, except CSS, and if you want to be super-compatible, JavaScript, will work for reasonably modern 90s browsers (like Netscape or IE 3 or later)

Anonymoose wrote on 2024-11-18, 15:28:

I’ve read that compatibility between browsers such as Netscape and IE is hard to achieve, how do I get around this to ensure everything is viewed correctly?

If you stick to plain HTML, it will be fine.
IE had a better implementation of CSS 1.x, so if you wanted to add some CSS, it will work better in IE than Netscape. Netscape 4.x had a super half-baked implementation. Neither browser implements CSS to the letter. Where there were ambiguities back then, they differ on whether sizes of things include the margin or not, and so forth.
Another compatibility issue is what was called "DHTML" back then and eventually evolved into the DOM, AJAX, etc. It's implemented completely differently than the W3C standard. Some of it still works enough in modern browsers that you could make something work if you really want special effects like changing an image when you hover over it. Vestigates of IE's implementation (document.all) still survive; Netscape's implementaiton (<layer> tag) has fallen completely into obscurity and isn't implemented.

Anonymoose wrote on 2024-11-18, 15:28:

Is there a HTML version that has better support for features I’m looking for? Like animated gifs, possibly even an embedded video? Or is that browser side.

Animated GIFs were in Netscape incredibly early. They were already all over the place in 1996. Interestingly, they fell into obscurity for a bit in the early 2000s, only to rise again later to the point that many people think a ".GIF" is inherently an animation.
Embedded video depends on browser plug-ins. You have an <object> tag for IE and you nest inside it an <embed> tag for Netscape. I haven't thought about that in an incredibly long time. You'll have to pick a format first though. QuickTime .mov was first, then people moved to Flash which birthed early YouTube.

Anonymoose wrote on 2024-11-18, 15:28:

How should I be coding this site? Notepad++ on a modern machine? Or something like a WYSIWYG editor (MS FrontPage, Claris HomePage, Macromind Dreamweaver).

If you want to hand-code it, it doesn't matter what editor you use. I wouldn't use a WYSIWYG just because it ruins the fun. I liked the Composer feature of Netscape though.

Anonymoose wrote on 2024-11-18, 15:28:

How would I host this website? (Ideally free).

sdf.org is an option but appears down at the moment.

Anonymoose wrote on 2024-11-18, 15:28:

Lastly, are there any old html books/website guides that can help me out? I’ve been searching archive.org and have found some good reference books so far.

NCSA "HTML Primer" starts with the extreme basics, if you want an old college professor homepage style page that doesn't use any Netscape-specific stuff and sticks to the bare HTML 3.2.

Check the HTML 3.2 reference spec for a starting point: https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/SPSD-html32-20180315/

It's a good balance between simplicity and features. You should be able to do whatever you need with it.

Everything there should work on Netscape 3 and IE3, which are both pre-bloat browsers that run well on Windows 3.1.

Forget about CSS. It's not at all uniformly supported on browsers of this era. Count on not using it at all. Use HTML attribute styling and the <font> tag.

Also forget about JS. The original JavaScript (or MS's JScript) 1.0 in third generation browsers is basically a useless party trick.

I think you should also get good compatibility with DOS browsers like Arachne and Microweb that way, or at least Microweb when it's more mature.

You won't get any kind of AJAX. To get that you'll have to go up to IE5, and lose usable Win31/DOS compatibility.

Don't use a WYSIWYG editor. Learn how to visualize how the structure of your HTML affects its layout on the page.

You can edit and preview your site on the same vintage machine. Notepad++ is a good idea. There are old versions that work on Windows 95, but not 3.1. Regular Notepad is fine too but you won't get syntax highlighting.

Animated GIFs are supported on these browsers. Video embeds require plugins and are very difficult to achieve.

For hosting if you want to go absolutely barebones you can use GitHub Pages. If you want more control, just spin up a VM with Digital Ocean or some other such hosting provider, and install nginx. I would use Cloudflare for DNS.

For free hosting in style of old webpages check out
Geocities.ws
Neocities.org

Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6 have "Quirks Mode" enabled by default, I think.
That's a compatibility mode for non-standard websites that are a mash-up of different standards.

Also useful might be the use of HTML Entities for non-ASCII characters.
This workaround was used in a time before Unicode. Not sure how oldest web browsers will handle Entities. 😟

keenmaster486 wrote on 2024-11-18, 18:33:

Also forget about JS. The original JavaScript (or MS's JScript) 1.0 in third generation browsers is basically a useless party trick.

It did offer quite alot of feature for form automation and validation which was the main purpose. Quite useful for the time.

Just a short post with my 2 cents...I could write a book about that topic I think... 😁

I would stick with HTML 4.01 Strict...

1<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
2		"https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

...this should be the most compatible version to be viewed with old and new devices, I use it myself - Strict because it also looked to the future and there were some elements and attributes deprecated in that version. Validation is possible with the W3C validator, there's even an old browser add-on for validation which I still use with New Moon 28 to validate my website's pages.

Free Hosting is difficult, I had some free hosters and it wasn't a pleasure to be there after moving to payed webspace everything is OK and I have ten domains included, 500 GiB webspace, databases and much more. Before that there were always limits like only 10 MiB space, max. of 2 MiB file size, unwanted ads, always no own domain, partially really bad performance and support and so on. Looking back, I should have chosen payed hosting over twenty years ago! Now I'm paying 120 EUR/year, but you can get good hosting for the half to third.

I learned a lot with the good old SELFHTML (-> https://web.archive.org/web/20100105081903/ht … w.selfhtml.org/) back then, unfortunately only in German and partially in French.

Some of my dos'n'don'ts:

• Don't make a table design, the intension of them is to house table data, not the whole website. CSS is what you use for design, you can start with very simple CSS (I still use very simple CSS too).
• Don't use WYSIWYG editors, they put unwanted lines into your HTML and it will be formatted horribly (often hard to read)...Notepad++ is the way I recommend, your WYSIWYG tool is your browser (together with the W3C validation)!
• Don't embed videos, that's a killer - post links to the videos instead!
• Animated GIFs were also not so popular, yes they have been used very often - but who liked them??? To me they were always annoying!
• Use few different colors for different things and don't mix them up on different pages.
• Some simple PHP can be used to do things which are not possible with HTML
• Don't use JavaScript until it's unavoidable!
• Never use Flash, Java and other things like that.
• Use UTF-8 encoding with your HTML documents.
• EDIT: Don't use frames/framesets (even archive.org had problems with them back then).

Sorry, no time at the moment to write more and to go deeper in it.

kind regards
soggi

I wrote all my websites in Notepad, using plain HTML. They are quite simple pages, obviously - I don't like all these complex things with huge amounts of code.

The pages are simple enough that they will display more or less correctly in IE5, maybe earlier. Some really old browsers can't display PNG images.

Here's my main page, with links to the others: http://messui.polygonal-moogle.com/

You can examine the code and see how simple it is.

What about Frames? 😁

Back in the late ninties I used the free (for private use) Phase 5 editor to make our (admittingly small) company website.
You really work with the source code but get nice support for setting tags and such.
But it's been quiet a while I used that editor, so my memory might be a bit fuzzy, though.

Oh, dunno If this is a german only version.
HTTPS://www.phase5.info

If you newbie in HTML, one of the options is to make a website using the correct editor of that period, for example CoffeeCup HTML editor:

1996, version 3.0:
https://web.archive.org/web/19961101024550/ht … or/mirrors.html

In 1998 I used version 8.9 for my first website developed using 486 machine (can share distributive).

Also useful are web-safe colours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#Safest_web_colors

But please keep in mind that some systems like Windows 3.x have 16 or less colours available, depending on graphics driver.

Windows 3.1 is special in sofar because it has 20 system colours reserved (if used with a 256c graphics driver).

Using all 16 colours in GIF files at once might result in funny desktop colours with just a basic 16 colour driver (unless palettized).

WinGIF can be used to dither GIF files with the standard Windows 3 VGA palette.

Edit: With a 256c graphics driver, 236 colours are available for free use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_softwar … 0-color_palette

Awesome!! Thanks so much for the info, keep it coming 😀

Jo22 wrote on 2024-11-19, 16:48:

Also useful are web-safe colours. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#Safest_web_colors […]
Show full quote

Also useful are web-safe colours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#Safest_web_colors

But please keep in mind that some systems like Windows 3.x have 16 or less colours available, depending on graphics driver.

Windows 3.1 is special in sofar because it has 20 system colours reserved (if used with a 256c graphics driver).

Using all 16 colours in GIF files at once might result in funny desktop colours with just a basic 16 colour driver (unless palettized).

WinGIF can be used to dither GIF files with the standard Windows 3 VGA palette.

Edit: With a 256c graphics driver, 236 colours are available for free use.

The attachment Windows_20colors_palette.png is no longer available

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_softwar … 0-color_palette

Hmm, I never considered this! My first idea was to just use the default Mode 13h vga palette for any gifs. My Compaq has a QVision 1024 driver installed with gives me a 640x480x256 option, so I thought I was good to go (also not sure how the windows palette works, does that mean the 20 colors are mandatory, and the 236 left are free to choose?) Should I still use 256 colors for gifs then? Or should I not dither at all and leave it up to the browser if it can do it. Also, where can I find WinGIF?

MAZter wrote on 2024-11-19, 15:01:

If you newbie in HTML, one of the options is to make a website using the correct editor of that period, for example CoffeeCup HT […]
Show full quote

If you newbie in HTML, one of the options is to make a website using the correct editor of that period, for example CoffeeCup HTML editor:

1996, version 3.0:
https://web.archive.org/web/19961101024550/ht … or/mirrors.html

In 1998 I used version 8.9 for my first website developed using 486 machine (can share distributive).

Sure! I’ll take it, send it my way

Jo22 wrote on 2024-11-19, 11:25:

What about Frames? 😁

Devil's work! This one came into my mind at work, forgot it before...will edit my post! 😁

Skorbin wrote on 2024-11-19, 11:44:

Back in the late ninties I used the free (for private use) Phase 5...

Phase 5 was a good notepad replacement before Notepad++ appeared, I also used it in the early 2000s but then switched to the latter which is in active development until today (unfortunately WinXP and below aren't supported anymore, latest version will be available on my website with the next update).

Jo22 wrote on 2024-11-19, 16:48:

Also useful are web-safe colours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#Safest_web_colors

I also have chosen the colors on my website based on several criteria (low color modes, visual impairment, etc.) and consider it as an important point.

kind regards
soggi

soggi wrote on 2024-11-19, 10:38:

Just a short post with my 2 cents...I could write a book about that topic I think... :-D […]
Show full quote

Just a short post with my 2 cents...I could write a book about that topic I think... 😁

I would stick with HTML 4.01 Strict...

Copy code to clipboard

1<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
2		"https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

[...]

• Don't make a table design, the intension of them is to house table data, not the whole website. CSS is what you use for design, you can start with very simple CSS (I still use very simple CSS too).

I agree with most of the advice except these parts. This is great advice for a 2002 era website, but not a 1996 one (since the OP is talking about Netscape 3).
HTML 4.01 Strict will ban <font> tags, align= attributes on things, and so forth, forcing you to use CSS instead. The browsers we're talking about don't support CSS. Transitional will allow all that stuff, and they remain supported even in modern browsers (even if you want to also use CSS to dress up the page further when it's supported).

Wait...these are two things! The one is "Don't use table designs!" and the other is "You can use CSS!" - you don't have to use one of both...you also can write HTML pages with a very simple design, but if you want more, use CSS because tables are for table data.

No offense, but Anonymoose himself wasn't talking about Netscape 3, you came up with it. He even didn't say what OS he want to have the old browsers run on. There are even browsers for Win 3.11 (IE 5.01, Opera 3.62) with good CSS support and therefor good support for HTML 4.01 Strict - and as said above you're more compatible with modern browsers by using Strict. The deprecated HTML Transitional stuff can be simply replaced by some simple inline CSS (despite I prefer a separate CSS file).

I asked some people to test my page on very old browsers back then and got the feedback that it is also viewable and readable with browsers under DOS -> Arachne which also has a version for 8086/80186/80286, Links and Lynx are the ones I know while Arachne and Links are graphical browsers and Lynx is a text-based browser, all three are OSS (open source software).

BTW that's why my page is additionally still reachable via http://.

BTW2 Internet Explorer 5.01 and Opera 3.62 for Win 3.11 / NT 3.51 are available from my tools section (https://soggi.org/misc/tools.htm)

kind regards
soggi

You are right in that my mind made the jump from "486" to Netscape 3/4 or IE 4.
I suppose you indeed could run IE 5 if you wanted.
Still my memory is most sites didn't "get religion" on not using a table design well into the IE 6 days and rise of Firefox. Remember that IE5 for Mac had particularly good CSS support, better than for Windows, because it was a completely different engine.

Opera 10.0 which passes the ACID3 test runs on Windows 95. Later versions still on 98 and up. There is plenty of leeway to support modern web stuff on really ancient hardware.

The stuff you can't really have is HTML5 and embedded video. That is a bit much for the older comps. Almost everything else is fine, unless you intend to stick with a "period correct" web browser.