5 ms·

In 1999, I could view a simple page containing nothing but text without requiring me to download, compile and execute a massive wad of code in a huge bloated VM

In 1999, I could view a simple page containing nothing but text without requiring me to download, compile and execute a massive wad of code in a huge bloated VM with a JIT. There's no need for any javascript there, try having a web page.

WorldMaker 10y ago
I don't know where you were in 1999, but where I was in 1999 IE4's DHTML was all the rage among the elite wannabe high school web developers. Early explorations into XMLHttpRequest (via this awesome ActiveX technology, wow) and DHTML Components (which perhaps unsurprisingly don't seem all that different from today's Web Components under the surface). (I'm only remembering some of this because I recently dug up some of my actual circa 1999 website work.)
- MustardTiger 10y ago
  I was on the same web you were. The one where doc ozone was a bizarre novelty and well over 99.999% of text based sites had no javascript at all, much less being entirely created from javascript.
  - WorldMaker 10y ago
    It may have been more of a novelty back then, but I remember a lot more than 0.001% of websites having some JS or some Flash (or both), and maybe not many were entirely JS (though there were some I'm trying to recall), there were plenty of websites at the time that were 100% Flash, including the websites of some major corporations. Again, certainly from the perspective of a high school web developer at the time, my "budget" consisted of just about as much JS as a I wanted and could get my hands on, whereas I was on mostly static web hosts which constrained me from doing as much as I would have liked at the time in server side code... I know I wrote some very heavy JS sites at the time, and I know I was not alone in that constraint. Again, sure, it was mostly for novelty, but the web where websites had basically no JS at all was several years before 1999.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - MustardTiger 10y ago
      text based sites Just because "web designers" had shitty flash pages, doesn't mean "personal home pages" that were just test and images did.

WorldMaker 10y ago

I don't know where you were in 1999, but where I was in 1999 IE4's DHTML was all the rage among the elite wannabe high school web developers. Early explorations into XMLHttpRequest (via this awesome ActiveX technology, wow) and DHTML Components (which perhaps unsurprisingly don't seem all that different from today's Web Components under the surface). (I'm only remembering some of this because I recently dug up some of my actual circa 1999 website work.)

MustardTiger 10y ago
I was on the same web you were. The one where doc ozone was a bizarre novelty and well over 99.999% of text based sites had no javascript at all, much less being entirely created from javascript.
- WorldMaker 10y ago
  It may have been more of a novelty back then, but I remember a lot more than 0.001% of websites having some JS or some Flash (or both), and maybe not many were entirely JS (though there were some I'm trying to recall), there were plenty of websites at the time that were 100% Flash, including the websites of some major corporations. Again, certainly from the perspective of a high school web developer at the time, my "budget" consisted of just about as much JS as a I wanted and could get my hands on, whereas I was on mostly static web hosts which constrained me from doing as much as I would have liked at the time in server side code... I know I wrote some very heavy JS sites at the time, and I know I was not alone in that constraint. Again, sure, it was mostly for novelty, but the web where websites had basically no JS at all was several years before 1999.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - MustardTiger 10y ago
    text based sites Just because "web designers" had shitty flash pages, doesn't mean "personal home pages" that were just test and images did.