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Show HN: My Personal Website from 1998

26 points by jasonkester 9y ago

jasonkester 9y ago
I found an Ask HN this morning about googling yourself, so I did. And found that my old personal site was proper broken. No surprise, since it was written in Cold Fusion and built to run on Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 3, and thus relied heavily on document.all and such. So I fished most of it out of the wayback machine and taught it about document.getElementById() and some other things. I thought it might be fun to have a look back at what passed for cutting edge back in the day. Surprisingly, many of the demos ran faster on a Pentium 1 running IE4 than they do today in Chrome or Firefox on the fastest machine you can buy. I'll stick around to answer questions, though sadly I lost the source for the real-time networked version of the Joust game, so I won't be able to take anybody on head to head.
elsurudo 9y ago
Quite impressive for 1998! As someone who's been doing it for so long, what are your feelings about where web tech currently is, and where it is headed? Did you expect it to be farther along at this point? Replaced entirely?
- jasonkester 9y ago
  Developing for the browser feels very much the same now as it did then. Regardless of how "standard" everything claims to be these days, I still find myself coding separate paths for each browser (and platform) for anything remotely cutting edge. If anything, it's worse in this respect. Back then you had two wildly divergent browsers you had to switch for, with their own way of doing pretty much everything. Now, while you only need switches for a handful of things, you need to support 20 combinations of browser/platform/input device. And every new way they try to standardize anything just adds another dimension you need to multiply by. (See mouse/touch/pointer events for an example) (or Audio vs WebAudio support across 11 iOS versions for another). That's the gig we signed up for, though. I don't expect it to be any different in another 20 years.
  - elsurudo 9y ago
    This is kind of the answer that I expected, doing some web dev myself. It's sad, isn't it? One would think we would be solving _different_ problems 20 years later...
fiatjaf 9y ago
The game is amazing.
matt_the_bass 9y ago
What!? No <blink> tags? :) I was way guilty of that on my first site circa '96
dpweb 9y ago
..dhtml.. forgot about that term! https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=dhtml https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=dhtml
bdcravens 9y ago
Was CF $50k then? I started in 1999, version 4, and I though standard was sub-$1000 then
w0m 9y ago
... I like you.
fiftyacorn 9y ago
we knew how to design sites back then

26 points by jasonkester 9y ago

I found an Ask HN this morning about googling yourself, so I did. And found that my old personal site was proper broken. No surprise, since it was written in Cold Fusion and built to run on Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 3, and thus relied heavily on document.all and such. So I fished most of it out of the wayback machine and taught it about document.getElementById() and some other things. I thought it might be fun to have a look back at what passed for cutting edge back in the day. Surprisingly, many of the demos ran faster on a Pentium 1 running IE4 than they do today in Chrome or Firefox on the fastest machine you can buy. I'll stick around to answer questions, though sadly I lost the source for the real-time networked version of the Joust game, so I won't be able to take anybody on head to head.

elsurudo 9y ago

Quite impressive for 1998! As someone who's been doing it for so long, what are your feelings about where web tech currently is, and where it is headed? Did you expect it to be farther along at this point? Replaced entirely?

jasonkester 9y ago
Developing for the browser feels very much the same now as it did then. Regardless of how "standard" everything claims to be these days, I still find myself coding separate paths for each browser (and platform) for anything remotely cutting edge. If anything, it's worse in this respect. Back then you had two wildly divergent browsers you had to switch for, with their own way of doing pretty much everything. Now, while you only need switches for a handful of things, you need to support 20 combinations of browser/platform/input device. And every new way they try to standardize anything just adds another dimension you need to multiply by. (See mouse/touch/pointer events for an example) (or Audio vs WebAudio support across 11 iOS versions for another). That's the gig we signed up for, though. I don't expect it to be any different in another 20 years.
- elsurudo 9y ago
  This is kind of the answer that I expected, doing some web dev myself. It's sad, isn't it? One would think we would be solving _different_ problems 20 years later...

fiatjaf 9y ago

The game is amazing.

matt_the_bass 9y ago

What!? No <blink> tags? :) I was way guilty of that on my first site circa '96

dpweb 9y ago

..dhtml.. forgot about that term! https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=dhtml https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=dhtml

bdcravens 9y ago

Was CF $50k then? I started in 1999, version 4, and I though standard was sub-$1000 then

w0m 9y ago

... I like you.

fiftyacorn 9y ago

we knew how to design sites back then