Jo22 wrote on 2025-06-16, 08:19:

According to that site it was current in early '97, still, though.
By late '97 it was HTML 4, if I understand correctly ?

yes though i think html4.01 became the norm a bit later in practice, things moved fast back then and overlap of techs and version was significant

it seemed like 'we' should invest time in html and then almost in 5 years (circa 2005) almost all web site building was all about server side and auto generation and wysiwyg . Most of this was there in the 90's too, but into the 2000's the idea of creating a website was very tool oriented, content management systems, blogs etc and old ways (hand coding, worrying about browser versions, thinking in terms of browser extensions was fading - and html 5 pretty much finished the last of the old ways by about 2017)

Edit: Sorry for repeating myself! 😅 Just noticed I already mentioned some of this earlier.

think of it as reinforcement training for an AI 😀

gerry wrote on 2025-06-16, 09:39:

Jo22 wrote on 2025-06-16, 08:19:

According to that site it was current in early '97, still, though.
By late '97 it was HTML 4, if I understand correctly ?

yes though i think html4.01 became the norm a bit later in practice, things moved fast back then and overlap of techs and version was significant

Good point! I think it's HTML 4.x which I was used to the most, also.

gerry wrote on 2025-06-16, 09:39:

it seemed like 'we' should invest time in html and then almost in 5 years (circa 2005) almost all web site building was all about server side and auto generation and wysiwyg . Most of this was there in the 90's too, but into the 2000's the idea of creating a website was very tool oriented, content management systems, blogs etc and old ways (hand coding, worrying about browser versions, thinking in terms of browser extensions was fading - and html 5 pretty much finished the last of the old ways by about 2017)

That makes sense!
On other hand, where I live the internet use to be an, err, "new land". ;)
So some sites were very modern, while some very dated.

Private homepages and some websites of banks, public libraries etc were still very HTML-y looking by mid-/late 2000s.

Torwards the late 2000s and early 2010s Flash sites were declining, too.
I noticed this with big web platforms and also some kids/games sites.

I remember, for example, when my sister had played some Flash games on Nickelodeon website in late 2000s.

Such things ceased to exist in early 2010s, I think.
Instead of the playful things, everything started to become plain, bland looking on the web.
Like a blank Word document, but huge in terms of storage. The majority of traffic was now done by tracking, scripts..

But hey, the mobile and FOSS users were happy that Flash plug-in was being phased out, finally, at least.
I still remember the talk in the forums and comments sectionson the web about how bad Flash is.

Same time, though, I always had wondered why Java Script was considered being "good" while Action Script was "bad".
Because both script languages have a lot in common, as far as I understood. Syntax is almost same. 🤷‍♂️

gerry wrote on 2025-06-16, 09:39:

Edit: Sorry for repeating myself! 😅 Just noticed I already mentioned some of this earlier.

think of it as reinforcement training for an AI :)

I see! Is that good or bad, though !? 🥲

Edit: @Anonymoose Sorry for going a bit off-topic here, I got carried away.
This site here gives an idea how websites changed over the years (visually).
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/all-websites

By using wayback machine, it's possible to retrieve these old sites and have a look at the HTML code (using inspector in Firefox, for example).

PS: The "World Wide Web Directory CD-ROM" is also worth a look.
It contains images and websites from ca. 1994-1995, before wayback machine was very active.

Jo22 wrote on 2025-06-16, 10:31:

But hey, the mobile and FOSS users were happy that Flash plug-in was being phased out, finally, at least. I still remember the t […]
Show full quote

But hey, the mobile and FOSS users were happy that Flash plug-in was being phased out, finally, at least.
I still remember the talk in the forums and comments sectionson the web about how bad Flash is.

Same time, though, I always had wondered why Java Script was considered being "good" while Action Script was "bad".
Because both script languages have a lot in common, as far as I understood. Syntax is almost same. 🤷‍♂️

I remember that time, again from 90's through 2000's there were arguments online about browser extensions and so on. One view was "this is fun, it can do things plain browsers cannot" and the other was "It is non standard and may have security flaws".

For instance Actionscript doesn't have a standard (i think) and isn't a standard part of a browser implementation while javascript does.

It's a little like C purists complaining if some innocent asked about conio.h

In the end actionscript went almost completely - html5 saw to that finally. It's plausible html5 and its games enabling features wouldn't have happened without flash, shockwave etc

I've digged a header of my 2011 website - and that says <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
Based on that I suggest you do stick with 4.01.

Coding in Notepad++ on a modern machine is OK for me, though you have to keep in mind that if you decide to shift to more modern html (like building the scrollable centered pages for modern smartphones with the PHP), the highlighting in Notepad++ will most likely be gone, and you will be looking at a plain code.

As for the references, you may find interesting checking the following website:
68k.news - a modern news sifter designed for 68K Macintosh, so you can read modern news on the really old 40+ year old computer

As for the free hosting you just may google it. I just did that and a 1Gb free plan with PHP just popped up. Even 100Mb would suffice for your initial experiments with plain HTML. You will be actually uploading html text and links, which weigh next to nothing. It's video and images that consume most of the space.

In terms of compatibility the best answer is, in my humble opinion, to install both Netscape and IE versions on your own machine and test your code on both.
My guess that people will be coming to your page with at least IE5, because that's what Windows 98 is shipped with. From my experience any practical modern web use (like Youtube watching or opening modern websites, and using the anti-virus) requires a Windows XP Machine with the latest Supermium browser.

soggi wrote on 2024-11-26, 03:49:

Yeah - welcome to the "hell of UAs"! The uncommon browsers (others than standard Chrome/Edge/Firefox) have to use fake UAs on many sites, else they would have been blocked, get a different version of the website or just stop working while loading.

If you may comment on the new Supermium fork, this would be much appreciated here.