27 ms·

FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)

234 points by soheilpro 8y ago

logicallee 8y ago
I read quite a bit of this but couldn't figure it out: is this writer sort of mocking their own purple prose in a sort of self-consciously over-the-top way? Or is that just their writing style? (It's hard to imagine anyone reading this style seriously. Even the subtitle, "elegant and exquisite" is a weird way to talk about software.) Do you think they're making fun of something?
- TotempaaltJ 8y ago
  It took me until he started showing the themes to realize it was a joke, but after that it becomes a bit more evident.
  - karmickoala 8y ago
    > My resume page is pretty good on wait time -- 14 seconds and that includes a graphic in addition to a massive HTML file! Ah, those were the times...
pjc50 8y ago
Oh god, the horror. Not just the ugly webpages, those were the ubiquitous style at the time. No, FrontPage pioneered deep ugliness, because like all Microsoft products of the 90s it regarded interoperability as a threat. It produces ugly HTML that works best in IE, and it has an optional upload mechanism that requires IIS on the server side. https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/frontpage/the-death-of-frontpage-extensions https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/frontpage/th...
- k_ 8y ago
  At my current job I am rewriting a 25 year-old VB application into a web-based application, and the majority* of our documentation is written in FrontPage. The horror, indeed. *: Well, sort of.. there are bits scattered everywhere, I had to dig into email archives to find some specifications.
  - janlaureys 8y ago
    Medical sector ?
    - k_ 8y ago
      No, industrial sector
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    Not too hard to cut and paste into another editor, the convert html with pandoc, or filter it with Python or other script.
- hb3b 8y ago
  The server interaction features also worked on Linux! https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/202198/how-to-install-the-frontpage-2000-server-extensions-to-an-apache-web-s https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/202198/how-to-insta...
  - Terretta 8y ago
    And BSD. Early on, we ran the first and largest MS FrontPage 'certified' web hosting provider, we enabled it on BSD with content in the same Unix home directories we gave our dialup clients. Folks who made web sites in those days and paid $20/month to host them provided a pretty compelling library of content compared to today's pay-per-click 'blogosphere'. I liked the "put up or shut up" pay-to-host model, driven by your beliefs, not your readers. And despite the pretty garish things that happened in that web design era that FrontPage memorialized (rollover buttons!), kudos to Vermeer for democratizing web site creation.
    - lupin_sansei 8y ago
      Good point. Not a lot of people remembered that Microsoft acquired FrontPage from Vermeer in 1996 for millions. There's a pretty good old book about it "High St@kes, No Prisoners"
- paulie_a 8y ago
  Ugly html is a very kind way of putting it. To be fair that was the era of 20 nested tables for layout. Microsoft just managed to double down.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  > and it has an optional upload mechanism that requires IIS on the server side. So much time spent, as a small kid, looking for a free webhost that supported FrontPage extensions...
  - rangibaby 8y ago
    It wasn’t that hard to upload the whole thing with Cute ftp (I figured it out when I was 10...)
    - Vinnl 8y ago
      Sure, but then how would you then process form data?
- archergod 8y ago
  Well, they works best in IE because at that time there was IE only. Netscape navigator the other browser charge user, Firefox was just a beginning, as they want to take down IE because of their Navigator failure. It was great because it support some dynamic content. It was the first step to software like Dreamweaver as it bring concept in place. Having said that it was ugly design and I never like them even back then..
  - BillyBreen 8y ago
    Netscape never charged users. Perhaps you’re thinking of Opera. The reasons IE won over Netscape are many, but bundling with dominant OS and embracing/extending standards such that sites only worked in IE was a big part of it. Heck, there was a whole antitrust case about just that.
    - dep_b 8y ago
      > Netscape never charged users. Perhaps you’re thinking of Opera. No Netscape would officially cost you US$49 until 1998.
      - BillyBreen 8y ago
        Wow, I had no recollection of that. My mistake.
      - icedchai 8y ago
        "Officially", Netscape had a "free trial" for 90 days. In reality, I personally don't know one person who actually paid. Some companies did buy corporate licenses. https://www.fastcompany.com/27743/nothing-netscape https://www.fastcompany.com/27743/nothing-netscape
    - rustcharm 8y ago
      Here's an article stating that Netscape charged $49. It was in PC Magazine October 22, 1996 https://books.google.com/books?id=sjA_WJ82CSsC&lpg=PA102&dq=%22Netscape%20Browser%22%20%2449&pg=PA102#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=sjA_WJ82CSsC&lpg=PA102&dq=... @dang can you edit/delete the parent comment? No need to spread lies here!
- enriquto 8y ago
  > because like all Microsoft products of the 90s it regarded interoperability as a threat. It produces ugly HTML that works best in IE Just like nowadays with chrome!
  - barrystaes 8y ago
    Can you give some examples?
    - jamesblonde 8y ago
      Google facets/dive
    - enriquto 8y ago
      the whole fucking internet except hn and wikipedia XD
    - egeozcan 8y ago
      Chrome Google-login integration is one.
    - michaelt 8y ago
      Since an update to vector-based mapping, Google Maps performance and stability is pretty bad on anything except Chrome.
    - tallblondeguy 8y ago
      This article from The Verge[0] cites some support Tweets: - AirBnb[1]: "We'd always recommend that you use Google Chrome to browse the site: we've optimised things for this browser. Thanks." - Seamless[2]: "Safari is not a good browser to use with our website. Google Chrome work better with our website or you can download the app." - DirecTV Now[3] - IDAT solutions[4] (some random thing I found while searching) - Countfire[5] (ditto) Groupon said something similar as well but walked it back. Whatsapp's web app didn't support Firefox initially but does now. Could browse through Web Compat[6] as well, though I'm not sure if this site is more about sites that should work in FF but don't, or Firefox bugs. [0]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/4/16805216/google-chrome-only-sites-internet-explorer-6-web-standards https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/4/16805216/google-chrome-onl... [1]: https://twitter.com/AirbnbHelp/status/752829250198245376 https://twitter.com/AirbnbHelp/status/752829250198245376 [2]: https://twitter.com/Seamless_Care/status/942798540396474368 https://twitter.com/Seamless_Care/status/942798540396474368 [3]: https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/7/15758274/directv-now-google-chrome-exclusive-safari-internet-explorer-browser-support https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/7/15758274/directv-now-googl... [4]: https://www.idatsolutions.com/faq/ https://www.idatsolutions.com/faq/ [5]: https://www.countfire.com/ https://www.countfire.com/ [6]: https://webcompat.com/issues https://webcompat.com/issues
- scarface74 8y ago
  I love how they laid it on the line. “If you want to do web development, you need to actually learn web technology” Now if someone would tell web developers that if you want to write desktop/mobile apps, you need to learn native frameworks..... What are newer FrontPage alternatives? The Internet and the web have changed drastically since the days when FrontPage was a very common website editor. Almost every modern website editor these days will require you to have some basic understanding of the concepts of HTML, and CSS coding, instead of the drag and drop design that FrontPage used.
  - tgtweak 8y ago
    Many, many "drag and drop" web based alternatives. Webflow,ukit, even Adobe edge on the desktop.
    - stantaylor 8y ago
      NetObjects Fusion! In 1996-7, I worked on AT&T's small business web hosting service, and it supported FrontPage and NetObjects Fusion.
      - copperx 8y ago
        NetObjects was brilliant, and sometimes miss it when I'm deep in CSS insanity.
      - stevenicr 8y ago
        I still have sites live that were built with NetObjects fusion. Still the best design / editor I've ever used, and I've tried so many. I recently found this thing called 'pinegrove editor' (I think that's' what it's called. looks the closest to something like it and modern. maybe blue griffon. Sadly drop and drop widgets with wordpress themes is probably the most widely used that is similar.
        tonyedgecombe 8y ago
        Pinegrow: https://pinegrow.com https://pinegrow.com
- tinus_hn 8y ago
  It actually found new ways to write HTML that ‘accidentally’ crashed the current version of Netscape Navigator.
- linsomniac 8y ago
  Didn't require IIS, you could run it on a Linux box with Apache. It would remind you at every step that you were a second class citizen and that you really should be running IIS, but you could do it. Those Cobalt RaQ and Qube boxes came with that support baked in, which was a nice feature until Cobalt died and we had to replicate the functionality on straight Linux boxes. It wasn't hard, it's just that a little part of me died in side every time I had to do it.
  - icameron 8y ago
    Did you know you can still run RaQ today, on a VM. Its called BlueOnyx now, its been slightly modernized, and we have a few sites running on it to this day. Its as rock solid as ever. Have some sites that are 20 years old and were migrated from original RaQs
- tomc1985 8y ago
  Oh man frontpage HTML was ugggly! I remember I'd use "View Source" and look for Frontpage tags as a cue for whether a site's designers deserved a good mocking
  - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    I remember I'd use "View Source" Rather than look at the actual design?
    - tomc1985 8y ago
      IIRC FrontPage written-pages and hand-written (by people actually good at it) pages looked pretty similar in-browser, but the HTML that FrontPage produced was an atrocity
TheOrange 8y ago
Hey. Don’t knock it. I had to use that
swerner 8y ago
Back then, we thought those were bloated web pages. Litte did we know.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Greycht 8y ago
Oh man, this brings back memories.
hawkilt 8y ago
Nostalgia
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
  Vaporwave...
- nocman 8y ago
  It ain't what it used to be! :-D
orionblastar 8y ago
I remember Frontpage 98 along with Outlook 98 they were offered as free upgrades from older versions. I had Frontpage 97 and Outlook 97. For programming, I used Visual Interdev which resembled Microsoft Visual Code more than Frontpage. Visual Interdev was part of the Visual Studio package.
- subir 8y ago
  > Visual InterDev Haven't come across that word for over ~15 years =)
- 1Hrse2Shrmp 8y ago
  Visual Interdev was also in the Office Suite (97 or 2000). VBScript debugging was revelatory. :)
kumarvvr 8y ago
"WebMaster". I see this term a lot in older sites. "WebMasters click here !" sort of links. What does it really mean? The term.
- bru 8y ago
  Person who built the website & is responsible for its uptime.
- steerpike 8y ago
  It's what we used to call anyone who was a web developer back then. Bit of a mix between a system admin and front-end developer with maybe some perl tinkering in place.
- Angostura 8y ago
  Quite simply, the person in charge of the web site. In those days, it was likely to be the person who wrote the HTML, wrote the content and set up the web server. There are still quite a lot of them about in smaller companies - they keep Wordpress patched, post news stories, update pages etc.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  It used to be convention that emails to webmaster@[domain.com] would go to whoever was responsible for maintaining the website. I don't think anyone ever had it as an official job title, however.
  - dagw 8y ago
    I don't think anyone ever had it as an official job title, however. I knew lots and lots of people that did.
- subir 8y ago
  Ah! Those were the days when there were no admins, there were 'webmasters'! They were the people behind building and maintaining the website. Think webdev + ops. Nothing today compares to the grandeur of being a 'Webmaster' in 1996 :)
- 8y ago
maaaats 8y ago
Born in 91, I was the perfect age to be obsessed with Harry Potter. When I was around ten, an older kid in the neighborhood helped me make a Harry Potter themed website using FrontPage (the Express version I think it was named). Small, random event that end up having a big effect on my life. My hobbies, what&where I chose to study, the friends I got there etc. I can trace back to this.
- Svip 8y ago
  Oh man, I had a similar experience around 2000. I built a Danish website about Goldeneye 64 in FrontPage. The first website I ever made. It used frames, but I feel it was quite pleasing on the eyes, because I avoided a lot of the 'fancy effects' that was common for the time. I'll admit, being born in 87, most of the site was simply copied from other websites about the game, and translated to Danish. So it was a decent exercise - particularly for someone dyslexic as me - to both built a website and translate from English to Danish. If only I knew where that website ended up...
  - benibela 8y ago
    Born in 89, I made a webpage for my mother at that time. She still likes it :/ Check the generator tag on the frameset page http://www.roswithavanderzander.de/index_EN.htm http://www.roswithavanderzander.de/index_EN.htm
    - egeozcan 8y ago
      It can use some minimal styling but much better than loading 100MB to see less content. I say great job :)
    - scarface74 8y ago
      It loads fast. It’s easy to navigate. With just a little bit of work, it would be more appealing than most “modern” web page.
    - elliotpage 8y ago
      This page is great. It loads instantly, shows you the content up front, has clear navigation, and has clear contrast between elements. Also, it has frames, which I honestly miss even though I am glad we have moved past them.
cybervegan 8y ago
There were sooo many crap webpages created with that software. I used it myself for a while, before I knew better. It produced horrendous, buggy HTML. Table handling was pants - I used to have to hand code tables (used for layout!) to make them work properly. At least we don't have to do that these days... oh, wait, sorry. Ok, we do.
steerpike 8y ago
Hmm. I'm pretty certain Homesite was out by then which I always felt was the best web IDE. Such a shame what happened to it.
- dagw 8y ago
  Homesite was amazing. I think it was the first 'professional' piece of software I actually spent my own money on.
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
I remember FrontPage Express being pretty good too. Basically a souped-up web developers' Notepad. It had nowhere near the feature set of full-blown FrontPage, of course.
flukus 8y ago
My first programming job often consisted of us adding buttons and a javascript snippet to third party websites as part of the on boarding process (thinking embedding a webring script). Usually this was easy, but sometimes you'd get a FrontPage site and this simple edition would completely blow up the site. Fortunately I usually didn't have to use front page to do it and could hand edit the HTML, if it blew up when they tried to edit it in front page again we could blame that on MS, which was believable with their software quality at the time.
gattilorenz 8y ago
The whole domain is amazing. Just look at this page, updated LAST YEAR: http://www.telecommanderhosting.com/ec/framed_Microsoft_OS.html http://www.telecommanderhosting.com/ec/framed_Microsoft_OS.h... Look at the waving Win 95 logo! Not to mention the "office clipart guy" in the homepage... I am just suprised that the obligatory "under construction" gif is missing!
- hadrien01 8y ago
 That Macromedia Flash theme for the cart <3
- watersb 8y ago
 It loaded freaky fast. So there's that advantage over current design.
- timrichard 8y ago
 Where's the hit counter? Don't forget to sign the guestbook.
 - tinus_hn 8y ago
 I remember that was from IRC trolling, would you please /sign my guestbook?, as the /sign command would sign you off of the server.
- benibela 8y ago
 " You need to have JavaScript turned on for the shopping cart to work. " That rarely happened on old pages
- ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
 Don't worry, Ling's Cars will make sure you get your full fix of Geocities design. https://www.lingscars.com/ https://www.lingscars.com/
 - contras1970 8y ago
 see the comment on lines 29-170!
nosjwshere 8y ago
we crapped all over wysiwyg editors, yet nowadays we dream of a binary web format that's fast as balls. we'll probably need a wysiwyg editor for that.
nicolaslem 8y ago
> Microsoft FrontPage 98 also now provides support for the Channel Definition Format (CDF) which is a really keen way of broadcasting your web content to an end user's Windows desktop. You can "push" content to your visitors without having them seek you out daily for updates. It looks like this used to be the precursor of RSS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Definition_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Definition_Format
- carlob 8y ago
  And desktop notifications
sdrothrock 8y ago
I love this! This is a much better example of what things were like in the early days of the internet than a lot of what I saw on the Web Design Museum (https://webdesignmuseum.org https://webdesignmuseum.org, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17891826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17891826) -- I'd completely forgotten about the tendency to use garish round images for buttons and weird fonts.
OskarS 8y ago
You know, good design principles weren't invented in 2006. There was plenty of good design in the 90s in other industries (publishing, newspapers, magazines, advertising, academia, ...), but apparently fucking nothing of that filtered down to webdesign. I mean: yes, technology was limited. I get that you couldn't have free range with things like typography and that CSS wasn't a thing yet. But for the love of god: a textured red background that made the already shittily rendered text even harder to read?! What were we thinking?
- kristopolous 8y ago
  I'm so glad we've learned these days with 10,000KB of JS for 1KB of text rendered in tiny, hairline thin fonts on no-contrast backgrounds. It's honestly always been bad ... before the web you'd dial into terminal based systems (BBS) and be assaulted with a perverse amount of ANSI escape codes and 8-bit extended ASCII flying around the screen and blinking at you (interfaces like this: https://s0.mundogamers.com/uploaded/bbsmenu.jpg https://s0.mundogamers.com/uploaded/bbsmenu.jpg). In between the two eras even IRC and UseNet got full of crufty ASCII art followed by leet-speak spelled weirdly cased words...it was illegible, unappealing and awful. Having the maturity to know when to stop and having the control to know what not to do have always been talents far more rare than we'd prefer.
  - Fjolsvith 8y ago
    Frankly, that was not an artistic example of the BBS scene. Here is one that had aesthetically pleasing features: https://cleaner.ansilove.org/bbs.html https://cleaner.ansilove.org/bbs.html And, if you want to see a live version of a sweet looking BBS, check out this one in your telnet app: telnet: absinthe.darktech.org:23
    - kristopolous 8y ago
      Well sure, you can always cherry-pick good examples of anything.
- pvg 8y ago
  What were we thinking? Nobody was thinking this was 'web design'. You're looking at a consumer product and a specific 'novelty' theme in it. Just like nobody thought Comet Cursor was UI design.
netgusto 8y ago
https://boles.com/ https://boles.com/ (website the article uses in examples) is now front'd by Bootstrap. Is Bootstrap is the new Frontpage?
subir 8y ago
FrontPage 97 was the first WYSIWYG tool I ever used, since graduating from the humble text editors. IIRC, I got a free upgrade to FrontPage98. Coupled with Visual InterDev, it formed the core of my webdev workflow. At the time Macromedia was making terrific advances in this space. Ca. 1999-2000 I moved to Dreamweaver, Ultradev, Flash and Paint Shop Pro(liked it better than Fireworks; story for another day).
- anentropic 8y ago
  isn't that back to front? you were supposed to graduate from WYSIWYG tools like FrontPage, which generated utterly awful markup, to writing proper HTML yourself in a text editor
  - subir 8y ago
    Yeah, I guess I started off the hard (wrong?) way. The first few websites I built was typed out on notepad. Progress was slow and excruciatingly difficult. Then, I discovered FrontPage and my productivity went through the roof :) Of course, the markup generated was garbage. I understood none of it and for all I knew, this was the way forward!
  - cannonedhamster 8y ago
    Actually I did this as well. I learned to code in HTML and was forced to use Dreamweaver in school because it was "faster". I could use a template and code most of what I needed to by hand faster than most other students could with the tool. I also made very clean, super fast loading sites because I tried to do everything as simple as possible. On of my final projects fell through despite me building them an entire, completely custom, hand written website that was accessible, clean, and loaded super fast. I've never thought I've had a keen eye for designing new things but I've definitely got an eye for the classics and got a lot of accolades in my class for that work.
ricardoscotland 8y ago
I used it back in the day to create biology-online.org All the cool kids used DreamWeaver, the hardcore ones notepad.
donatj 8y ago
I used Netscape’s Composer for a while, then Frontpage. It was the sheer frustration of trying to get it to do what I want that lead me into actually learning and mastering HTML. I was told by a number of “experts” at the time that I was silly and WYSIWYGs were the way forward. It’s some 20 years later and thus far they’ve still never really worked very well. Also, man that makes me feel old.
- mgkimsal 8y ago
  in 1997, i had people tell me i would never be a real webmaster if I wasn't using hotdogpro. i never wanted to be a real webmaster, so I guess I dodged a bullet there.
petercooper 8y ago
One related tool that's often forgotten, I find, is Microsoft Publisher. Publisher 97 had an option to build and export an entire site 100% visually. I had family members use it to build their complete personal sites. It was a pretty clever system, too. It built layouts automatically using complex tables, split out text where it could, used image maps where it had to, etc. It wasn't something you'd be proud of using but it was the fastest tool for non-technical users at the time and would probably even hold up pretty well now(!)
- mercer 8y ago
  Oh man, I remember 'upgrading' to Publisher from FrontPage. I do agree that it was surprisingly clever at what it did, but I'm also happy I eventually learned how to write my own html/css eventually!
p4bl0 8y ago
Are there good free (as is free software) WYSIWYG website editors nowadays?
- dagw 8y ago
  Hell are there good WYSIWYG website editors nowadays at any price?
  - giancarlostoro 8y ago
    Dunno depends on what you like, I liked Microsoft Expression Web and that seemed to be free but they discontinued it. I would love to see VS Code become a reasonable WYSIWYG editor for Markdown and HTML5 / CSS though. I have seen some Electron based editors for Bootstrap that are very good, trick is to do an HTML WYSIWYG editor you really do need a damn browser component to do it properly enough. I would also like to see Mozilla create something similar for Firefox Developer Edition, not just more JS editors.
- ar0 8y ago
  I was looking for that a while back, too, and a Wikipedia search led me to BlueGriffon (http://bluegriffon.org/ http://bluegriffon.org/), which (through various forks like Nvu etc.) was apparently originally based on the "Composer" part of Netscape / Mozilla.
- nix0n 8y ago
  SeaMonkey (used to be Mozilla) Composer is free and WYSIWYG but the website you make will be very 90s looking.
wiradikusuma 8y ago
Isn't it funny that the _tone_ for an article written more than 20 years ago can change over time? Honestly, I don't know if the article was written in sarcasm or not.
tjoff 8y ago
Man, look at that site. Unimaginably fast, works perfect on mobile, no clutter and readable. It truly has gone downhill since then.
- pjc50 8y ago
 Zero javascript, zero CSS; it uses and <center> only.
- reitanqild 8y ago
 Fast, yes. Really bad on my mobile (equally bad as a number of mobile web sites today, only different). Web site I dealt with earlier today: lose state when I go back. This page: unreadable small fonts (and it takes months between every time I complain about that). And when I zoom it doesn't reflow the text so I have to scroll back and forth to read it.
- Kerrick 8y ago
 > Unimaginably fast From the article: > I also like the load time estimation found in the bottom right corner -- that's a constant reminder how long it will take the page you're working on to load for your visitors. My resume page is pretty good on wait time -- 14 seconds and that includes a graphic in addition to a massive HTML file! His "unimaginably fast" website took 14 seconds to load. Compare that to today's "bloated" sites like CNN's home page. Loads in 4.3 seconds, and finishes asynchronously loading all the bloat in 7.8 seconds.
 - tjoff 8y ago
 That was probably with a 28.8k modem under less than ideal circumstances. He probably could optimize it further though, sure, is that your point? Yes, technology at the time did limit the kind of bloat that would be tolerated. Is that an excuse to go all in now just because we can?
AriaMinaei 8y ago
I was obsessed with this software as a kid. I could never get it to run on my computer though. My PC had a faulty RAM which would get hit somewhere in the middle of installation and trigger the blue screen of death. I tried that install program a hundred times. Tried different distributions, tried changing the OS (98 to ME and back). Nothing worked. And we couldn't afford getting me a new RAM. Mom and Dad were still repaying the loan that they took three years ago to buy me that broken computer. No way they could add a brand new RAM to their expenses. But I really wanted to build my own website. I would watch video tutorials of FrontPage (on pirated CDs), and I'd imagine using all the techniques from the videos to design my own website. You could make links (for some reason, links seemed cool), and dynamic links that didn't reload the page (which meant iframes everywhere). You could add clip arts (those tacky office cliparts), and buttons that react to the mouse (I could imagine building whole games out of those). The possibilities would be endless... if only I could get the money to buy that new RAM. After attempting and failing a few ideas to raise the money, I decided that the only way I could get that kind of money would be to... write a book! The book would be a guide to a software called "Multimedia Builder." MMB was a tool to make Autorun programs. You could make a window with buttons, videos, music, interactivity. It even had a scripting language. It was very popular at the time and my classmates were asking me to show them how to use it. I decided I'd write a book about it (there were none on the market), sell the book to a publisher, and use the money to buy not just a new RAM, but a whole new computer! I drafted the layout (somehow layout was more important than content for me). Outlined the chapters. Built folders of step-by-step screenshots... ... until Mom surprised me with $36 that she had gotten as extra salary! One of the best days of my life! Off I ran to the computer market. Bought a brand new SDR Ram, put it on my underpowered PC400 motherboard, started the computer, put the FrontPage CD in, and fired up install. I remember watching the install progress bar slowly fill. It was always near the halfway mark that the blue screen would appear. I remember the angst I felt as the progress bar approached the halfway mark, passed it, and the screen remained very not blue! I outgrew FrontPage in two weeks. Turns out, FrontPage can't really do much :) What I should have learned was actually HTML, CSS, and PHP. Which I did, right after. Funny things is though, they would've all ran fine on my faulty RAM! I could've started my web dev adventure a whole year earlier! Good times.
- maaaats 8y ago
oxplot 8y ago
I don't get it. Maybe someone can explain why these style and many other at the time were so hedious given that in print for a century preceding it, we had beautiful color, font and layout.
- zerr 8y ago
  I guess partly because it became easily accessible and also the curiosity to try different things. Cyan fonts on black background? It was beautiful and fun. :)
- pavlov 8y ago
  It wasn’t obvious at the time that web design should have anything to do with print. Its immediate predecessors were a bunch of online systems like BBSes, Compuserve, Prodigy that either ran inside a terminal emulator with garish ANSI colors at best, or shipped with their own custom GUI app for access. There was a lot of activity in the late ‘90s around what “authentic to the medium” web design could look like, but I don’t remember people being very interested in emulating traditional print design — which itself was in turmoil thanks to digital publishing systems. Open a 1996 issue of Wired and you’ll probably think the designers were on crack: purple text on garish background images, cut-up barely readable fonts, that kind of thing.
- sgnnseven 8y ago
  It's a really a complex answer with many facets but the main one in my opinion is that the displays of that era were CRTs with extremely low resolution (e.g. 1024x768) and generally dull color depth. This in turn required things within the page to be large, blocky, and saturated to make it appear pleasant to the eyes. What you see in these screenshots of FrontPage is _not_ what the user nor the developer would experience on such hardware. As a analogue example of a game character on an LCD vs CRT might help illustrate this: https://kayin.moe/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/1391807722376-1024x614.png https://kayin.moe/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/1391807722376-1.... Some other smaller things also contributed but I don't think they were such big deals: - Lack of good compression on both transfer of data and file formats, necessitating simpler designs and palette-based image formats. - Graphics acceleration was generally slow so smooth animations were out. - Image creation/editing tools were practically non-existent and digital cameras were rare so it makes sense that the resulting pages that have had designed assets were scary-looking.
watersb 8y ago
"Exquisite Channeling" Wow. I worked at Netscape summer of 1997, a team that helped content providers get their web sites ready to showcase the Dynamic HTML and Channel features in Netscape 4.0. Javascript and RDF. In 1997.
patrickg_zill 8y ago
FrontPage was based on the Vermeer acquisition by Microsoft. The book by the founder, "High Stakes, No Prisoners" should be required reading for anyone interested in doing an internet startup IMHO.
Anonymous4C54D6 8y ago
I miss this. Web pages were just data not programs.
- olalonde 8y ago
  Why?
  - Aardwolf 8y ago
    Because you could just read the text and view the images without being disturbed by 3 floating elements you have to close first, then when you scrolled 25% down some new thing popping up in your way, then when you scrolled 50% down some other annoying thing happening, and when at the end of the article suddenly it changes into another one, all while some video starts autoplaying but not without first having a wait during which you cannot pause it, and without following you around in a tiny window at the bottom that automatically appears again when you scroll, even if you tried to pause it. All while some small floating elements on the sides somehow appear on top of small parts of the text you are trying to read left or right.
    - rayiner 8y ago
      Yes! And also, because you weren't running a little program to display each page, the back button actually worked. (Compare what HN does when you follow a link then hit back to what Reddit does.)
cntlzw 8y ago
You can say what you want but these were great times! Everyone could make their own little ugly homepage and it was exciting. People didn't really judge each other or bragged about how this tech is better than that. I kinda miss it.
- degenerate 8y ago
  I made some groovy table-based sites by setting up the table layout with the FrontPage GUI and then editing the raw HTML it generated. It taught me HTML and opened the doors to web development for me. Same story using Visual Basic and my segway into programming.
  - stantaylor 8y ago
    It was pretty amazing to me that you could do WYSIWYG (wow, that's an anachronism itself!) valid HTML development, and then hand-manipulate the HTML and it let you put any invalid shit in there without complaining.
    - Zardoz84 8y ago
      I remeber messing HTML stuff with HotDog
      - stevenicr 8y ago
        I remember hotdog! I preferred "netobjects fusion" more than any other similar though. Still have not found anything that makes design as easy, and visual, like netobjects fusion.
  - lukewrites 8y ago
    Ah, tables…I spent so much time tinkering with them to try to get my pages looking right. And then came the day in high school when the computer club advisor told us about Netscape supporting frames. Frames were _so_ exciting.
  - VyperCard 8y ago
jkabrg 8y ago
I'm wondering how many of the complaints here are to do with FrontPage itself, or the very idea of WYSIWYG web design. To me, it seems that web design is a visual thing. And if so, then a WYSIWYG editor is the appropriate thing to use. I'm suspicious that some people here don't think visually, and don't see the value in thinking visually. I don't know what people mean when they say "bad markup". I imagine it might include things like positioning elements using absolute coordinates. But I'm sure this is solvable by previewing the webpage on different resolutions, browsers and device types.
- c-smile 8y ago
  browsers do the following: By given set of HTML and CSS produce bitmap on screen. That's perfectly determined task (modulo browser differences). WYSIWYG editor does the opposite task: With the given bitmap on screen produce set of valid HTML and CSS declarations. The last task is undetermined mathematically speaking - with modern HTML and especially CSS there are too many ways of get the same rendering using completely different CSS tricks - absolute positioning, floats, display:grid and flexbox etc. etc.
- stevenicr 8y ago
  bad markup meant lots of things. frontpage seemed to add tons of extra fluff in the code. Other editors for a while used 1pixel cleargifs to space and align all the elements on the page. That added a lot of extra code just to move over 42 pixels and down 133 for every element. Then using tables for layouts was better. Cutting graphics for rounded corners worked. The web purists kept posting how bad it was, web visitors never cared. Once monitors were less standardized (more than just 800 px wide and 1024) - and mobile became a thing- the web purists really pushed to do layout with css only - and they spend years posting about hacks and recreating.. table layout called something else. Either way lots of extra code that is certainly not needed if using the modern grid css tagging... I still preferred the table layouts of years past, though I like the new tiny code that is needed for grid, the bloated code of the 90s and 00s is nothing compared to all the hi rez images, video and javascript bloat these days.
chippy 8y ago
Frontpage came with the all the usual Office software in the bundle which meant that it was often found on most internet cafes PCs. I spent a year backpacking in 2000 and used Frontpage in those cafes to edit and update my travel website. I kept most of it on a floppy disk, and also used FTP. The internet cafes often had scanners too, so I was able to scan a selection of developed print photos to include in the site there.
code4tee 8y ago
I remember the excitement of hunting for animated GIFs for your homepage and putting up the ubiquitous “under construction” image on the pages you were still working on.
zer0faith 8y ago
When stuff like this comes up I cannot help but think of websites hosted on geocities and angelfire. Oh the memories.
apazgo 8y ago
Was there some kind of html mode for Word? I have a faint memory of actually using word instead of frontpage
- Bluecobra 8y ago
  Yes, I remember making "websites" in high school with this feature for a class. I think it came out in Word 2000.
jeffmcmahan 8y ago
"Here's an Automotive theme that is quite unique and pleasing to the eye: ... <BARF>"
acconrad 8y ago
I remember ogling over the this and Dreamweaver and begging my parents to let me have a copy. It seemed like it could do everything at the time!
brightball 8y ago
People laugh, but this is how I learned HTML back then. I did something in Frontpage and then checked the code it generated to see how to do it with the tags.I still remember the Dreamweaver vs Frontpage vs Notepad arguments. I'm getting old.
- jypepin 8y ago
  Same as me here. The day I realised that what I was doing actually generated HTML and that HTML was actually the real thing was so eye opening to me. I got interested in HTML this way and that's how I got to engineering.
- franze 8y ago
  Me, too. Use FrontPage (later DreamWeaver), check code. Delete bit by bit what wasn't needed. Unserstand what the rest was doing. Iterrate on it. For those who laugh: we didn't have any proper html dev dokus at that point. search engine still sucked. we learned html by copy&pasting&deleting&iterrating.
thedaemon 8y ago
Although it's just a footnote on this page, Microsoft GIF Animator is still the easiest and most useful GIF animation tool out there. I have yet to find anything quite as easy to make animated GIFs. I haven't used it in years though, not sure if it's still floating around and if it runs on a modern OS.
- trading_wheels 8y ago
  I loved and used Image Composer for years after I'd moved on from Frontpage; I remember havng to install FP solely to get a copy of it (and some of the other tools like GIF animator)
- stevenicr 8y ago
  Loved the gif animator that used to ship with photoimpact. When corel bought it they stopped shipping the separate gif animator with it though. Glad I bought them on cd / dvd back in the day.
teilo 8y ago
I know a guy in his 70s that still uses it.
vital101 8y ago
Back when I was in middle school I used a copy FrontPage 98 at school to generate frames for my Star Wars site and then finished up the rest at home with FrontPage Express. A few years ago I restored the site after finding a broken version of it on the WayBack machine. http://re-cycledair.com/starwars/Entrance.html http://re-cycledair.com/starwars/Entrance.html
- alexharrisnyc 8y ago
  > Approx. download time: 2 hours and 9 min. at 28.8 kbps
cube00 8y ago
Fond memories of looking for that free web hosting with Microsoft FrontPage Extensions enabled to make my forms work.
lwerdna 8y ago
I pirated frontpage around 97,98 and used it to make garish homepages with all the elements we consider sins today: frames, lens flare, flame gifs, and background music. This was a formative experience that contributed to my career and life today.
- fluxsauce 8y ago
  Playing around with a tool is still using it. Who cares if it's ridiculous? Getting anyone to be engaged with something new is way easier if they're passionate about it. If a kid wants to edit a video about farts, they're going to learn what it takes to make that fart video, and I applaud them. Also, the marquee tag is mission critical.
joshstrange 8y ago
Frontpage was terrible for the web in many ways but damn it if I didn't love it to death when I first figured out how to use it and made my first websites with it. It was my first "code" editor in a long line (Frontpage -> Notepad++ -> Coda -> Sublime Text -> Sublime Text 2 -> PHPStorm -> IDEA Ultimate)
js2 8y ago
In the mid 90s while getting my CS degree, I had a side job as an SA at a small ISP. We also provided site hosting. One of our clients designed his site with FrontPage. This story reminded me of that, so out of curiosity I checked to see if the site was still around. Not only is it still around, it still looks like something straight out of the 90s. Behold: http://lotteryamerica.com/ http://lotteryamerica.com/
bootsz 8y ago
So much nostalgia... Was just thinking it would be neat to try to make a "Web Classic" version of the web without javascript and which only supports HTML 2.0 or 3.0. Maybe even bring back the 'blink' and 'marquee' tags :) . Kind of goes completely against the "one web" principle though, so definitely not practical. Fun to imagine having that kind of blank slate though.
nacho2sweet 8y ago
Loved reading code like this
marsrover 8y ago
I never had the privilege of using Frontpage. I had the program and some books but I felt like good ole notepad was good enough for me, so I never even tried it out. My mind was blown when I realized I could have different colors on my syntax and people actually indented things.
outside1234 8y ago
Were we really that color blind back then or did we really have that poor taste?
- shakna 8y ago
  A bit of both. The color palette was limited. 216 web-safe colors, 256 if you didn't mind the user's open programs changing how it looked. Colors displayed differently on different monitors, and 'dead' areas of the screen, where colors would be less vibrant, were common. And finally... The web was different, so we tossed all the rules. If you liked it, that's good enough! Why pander to anybody else? This was your own thing.
bitwize 8y ago
Good old GruntPage. Yet another technology I let pass by me as it grew to dominance and then faded--I much preferred to work in Emacs, hand-crufting HTML directly, and I never felt unproductive, especially when I used Scheme scripts (outside Emacs) to generate lots of similar pages. Given the tangle of unreadable, unmaintainable IE-specific garbage that FrontPage produced, I'd say I came out on top overall.
Adutude 8y ago
Elegant and Exquisite, Hoo Hoo, Hee Hee, Gufaw!! I was running an ISP at that time. This caused me no end of headaches in getting the FrontPage extensions working on various and sundry web servers. It allowed people to easily create websites, but caused a nightmare of support and infrastructure issues just to keep it working. So glad this piece of tech faded into infamy.
MiscIdeaMaker99 8y ago
I don't miss any of that. I remember having to maintain "FrontPage Extension" on IIS systems back in those days, and it was rough.
mbritton72 8y ago
Frontpage, the tool of choice for boss's sons and nephews to help save money on a website design.
pwned1 8y ago
I remember the pure excitement of tiled background images. Those were the days.
comesee 8y ago
When the client side ruled, and hosting was democratized. Anyone truly could have had their own websitr. Now everyone uses facebook, Twitter or squarespace.
aavotins 8y ago
Wow, this was a trip down memory lane. In fact it was Frontpage 98 that inspired me to try out my hand at building the web, back in 1999. I was just 10 years old back then. However it sparked my interest, because I could create something. Creating a webpage about my then most favorite game Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, publishing it and receiving my first ever e-mail from someone in the UK about a spelling error resulted in an experience that struck me so deeply that I became a web developer. Almost 20 years later I still love what Microsoft FrontPage 98 allowed me to discover.
clon 8y ago
I skimmed this entire article thinking it is a clever tongue-in-cheek piece, and found it hilarious, only to realise that it was from 1997 and written sincerely. Wow, I wish I could get back those hours drawing complex tables and placing 1x1 pixel images in strategic places.
th0ma5 8y ago
I think WebDAV was of course the best thing about FrontPage and I still use it whenever I can. FP made web development accessible to more people which is fine, but I don't miss all the cruft it added, although, arguably we're in a crazier mess now perhaps :P

234 points by soheilpro 8y ago

I read quite a bit of this but couldn't figure it out: is this writer sort of mocking their own purple prose in a sort of self-consciously over-the-top way? Or is that just their writing style? (It's hard to imagine anyone reading this style seriously. Even the subtitle, "elegant and exquisite" is a weird way to talk about software.) Do you think they're making fun of something?

TotempaaltJ 8y ago
It took me until he started showing the themes to realize it was a joke, but after that it becomes a bit more evident.
- karmickoala 8y ago
  > My resume page is pretty good on wait time -- 14 seconds and that includes a graphic in addition to a massive HTML file! Ah, those were the times...

pjc50 8y ago

Oh god, the horror. Not just the ugly webpages, those were the ubiquitous style at the time. No, FrontPage pioneered deep ugliness, because like all Microsoft products of the 90s it regarded interoperability as a threat. It produces ugly HTML that works best in IE, and it has an optional upload mechanism that requires IIS on the server side. https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/frontpage/the-death-of-frontpage-extensions https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/frontpage/th...

k_ 8y ago
At my current job I am rewriting a 25 year-old VB application into a web-based application, and the majority* of our documentation is written in FrontPage. The horror, indeed. *: Well, sort of.. there are bits scattered everywhere, I had to dig into email archives to find some specifications.
- janlaureys 8y ago
  Medical sector ?
  - k_ 8y ago
    No, industrial sector
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Not too hard to cut and paste into another editor, the convert html with pandoc, or filter it with Python or other script.
hb3b 8y ago
The server interaction features also worked on Linux! https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/202198/how-to-install-the-frontpage-2000-server-extensions-to-an-apache-web-s https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/202198/how-to-insta...
- Terretta 8y ago
  And BSD. Early on, we ran the first and largest MS FrontPage 'certified' web hosting provider, we enabled it on BSD with content in the same Unix home directories we gave our dialup clients. Folks who made web sites in those days and paid $20/month to host them provided a pretty compelling library of content compared to today's pay-per-click 'blogosphere'. I liked the "put up or shut up" pay-to-host model, driven by your beliefs, not your readers. And despite the pretty garish things that happened in that web design era that FrontPage memorialized (rollover buttons!), kudos to Vermeer for democratizing web site creation.
  - lupin_sansei 8y ago
    Good point. Not a lot of people remembered that Microsoft acquired FrontPage from Vermeer in 1996 for millions. There's a pretty good old book about it "High St@kes, No Prisoners"
paulie_a 8y ago
Ugly html is a very kind way of putting it. To be fair that was the era of 20 nested tables for layout. Microsoft just managed to double down.
Vinnl 8y ago
> and it has an optional upload mechanism that requires IIS on the server side. So much time spent, as a small kid, looking for a free webhost that supported FrontPage extensions...
- rangibaby 8y ago
  It wasn’t that hard to upload the whole thing with Cute ftp (I figured it out when I was 10...)
  - Vinnl 8y ago
    Sure, but then how would you then process form data?
archergod 8y ago
Well, they works best in IE because at that time there was IE only. Netscape navigator the other browser charge user, Firefox was just a beginning, as they want to take down IE because of their Navigator failure. It was great because it support some dynamic content. It was the first step to software like Dreamweaver as it bring concept in place. Having said that it was ugly design and I never like them even back then..
- BillyBreen 8y ago
  Netscape never charged users. Perhaps you’re thinking of Opera. The reasons IE won over Netscape are many, but bundling with dominant OS and embracing/extending standards such that sites only worked in IE was a big part of it. Heck, there was a whole antitrust case about just that.
  - dep_b 8y ago
    > Netscape never charged users. Perhaps you’re thinking of Opera. No Netscape would officially cost you US$49 until 1998.
    - BillyBreen 8y ago
      Wow, I had no recollection of that. My mistake.
    - icedchai 8y ago
      "Officially", Netscape had a "free trial" for 90 days. In reality, I personally don't know one person who actually paid. Some companies did buy corporate licenses. https://www.fastcompany.com/27743/nothing-netscape https://www.fastcompany.com/27743/nothing-netscape
  - rustcharm 8y ago
    Here's an article stating that Netscape charged $49. It was in PC Magazine October 22, 1996 https://books.google.com/books?id=sjA_WJ82CSsC&lpg=PA102&dq=%22Netscape%20Browser%22%20%2449&pg=PA102#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=sjA_WJ82CSsC&lpg=PA102&dq=... @dang can you edit/delete the parent comment? No need to spread lies here!
enriquto 8y ago
> because like all Microsoft products of the 90s it regarded interoperability as a threat. It produces ugly HTML that works best in IE Just like nowadays with chrome!
- barrystaes 8y ago
  Can you give some examples?
  - jamesblonde 8y ago
    Google facets/dive
  - enriquto 8y ago
    the whole fucking internet except hn and wikipedia XD
  - egeozcan 8y ago
    Chrome Google-login integration is one.
  - michaelt 8y ago
    Since an update to vector-based mapping, Google Maps performance and stability is pretty bad on anything except Chrome.
  - tallblondeguy 8y ago
    This article from The Verge[0] cites some support Tweets: - AirBnb[1]: "We'd always recommend that you use Google Chrome to browse the site: we've optimised things for this browser. Thanks." - Seamless[2]: "Safari is not a good browser to use with our website. Google Chrome work better with our website or you can download the app." - DirecTV Now[3] - IDAT solutions[4] (some random thing I found while searching) - Countfire[5] (ditto) Groupon said something similar as well but walked it back. Whatsapp's web app didn't support Firefox initially but does now. Could browse through Web Compat[6] as well, though I'm not sure if this site is more about sites that should work in FF but don't, or Firefox bugs. [0]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/4/16805216/google-chrome-only-sites-internet-explorer-6-web-standards https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/4/16805216/google-chrome-onl... [1]: https://twitter.com/AirbnbHelp/status/752829250198245376 https://twitter.com/AirbnbHelp/status/752829250198245376 [2]: https://twitter.com/Seamless_Care/status/942798540396474368 https://twitter.com/Seamless_Care/status/942798540396474368 [3]: https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/7/15758274/directv-now-google-chrome-exclusive-safari-internet-explorer-browser-support https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/7/15758274/directv-now-googl... [4]: https://www.idatsolutions.com/faq/ https://www.idatsolutions.com/faq/ [5]: https://www.countfire.com/ https://www.countfire.com/ [6]: https://webcompat.com/issues https://webcompat.com/issues
scarface74 8y ago
I love how they laid it on the line. “If you want to do web development, you need to actually learn web technology” Now if someone would tell web developers that if you want to write desktop/mobile apps, you need to learn native frameworks..... What are newer FrontPage alternatives? The Internet and the web have changed drastically since the days when FrontPage was a very common website editor. Almost every modern website editor these days will require you to have some basic understanding of the concepts of HTML, and CSS coding, instead of the drag and drop design that FrontPage used.
- tgtweak 8y ago
  Many, many "drag and drop" web based alternatives. Webflow,ukit, even Adobe edge on the desktop.
  - stantaylor 8y ago
    NetObjects Fusion! In 1996-7, I worked on AT&T's small business web hosting service, and it supported FrontPage and NetObjects Fusion.
    - copperx 8y ago
      NetObjects was brilliant, and sometimes miss it when I'm deep in CSS insanity.
    - stevenicr 8y ago
      I still have sites live that were built with NetObjects fusion. Still the best design / editor I've ever used, and I've tried so many. I recently found this thing called 'pinegrove editor' (I think that's' what it's called. looks the closest to something like it and modern. maybe blue griffon. Sadly drop and drop widgets with wordpress themes is probably the most widely used that is similar.
      - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
        Pinegrow: https://pinegrow.com https://pinegrow.com
tinus_hn 8y ago
It actually found new ways to write HTML that ‘accidentally’ crashed the current version of Netscape Navigator.
linsomniac 8y ago
Didn't require IIS, you could run it on a Linux box with Apache. It would remind you at every step that you were a second class citizen and that you really should be running IIS, but you could do it. Those Cobalt RaQ and Qube boxes came with that support baked in, which was a nice feature until Cobalt died and we had to replicate the functionality on straight Linux boxes. It wasn't hard, it's just that a little part of me died in side every time I had to do it.
- icameron 8y ago
  Did you know you can still run RaQ today, on a VM. Its called BlueOnyx now, its been slightly modernized, and we have a few sites running on it to this day. Its as rock solid as ever. Have some sites that are 20 years old and were migrated from original RaQs
tomc1985 8y ago
Oh man frontpage HTML was ugggly! I remember I'd use "View Source" and look for Frontpage tags as a cue for whether a site's designers deserved a good mocking
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  I remember I'd use "View Source" Rather than look at the actual design?
  - tomc1985 8y ago
    IIRC FrontPage written-pages and hand-written (by people actually good at it) pages looked pretty similar in-browser, but the HTML that FrontPage produced was an atrocity

TheOrange 8y ago

Hey. Don’t knock it. I had to use that

swerner 8y ago

Back then, we thought those were bloated web pages. Litte did we know.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Greycht 8y ago

Oh man, this brings back memories.

hawkilt 8y ago

Nostalgia

bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
Vaporwave...
nocman 8y ago
It ain't what it used to be! :-D

orionblastar 8y ago

I remember Frontpage 98 along with Outlook 98 they were offered as free upgrades from older versions. I had Frontpage 97 and Outlook 97. For programming, I used Visual Interdev which resembled Microsoft Visual Code more than Frontpage. Visual Interdev was part of the Visual Studio package.

subir 8y ago
> Visual InterDev Haven't come across that word for over ~15 years =)
1Hrse2Shrmp 8y ago
Visual Interdev was also in the Office Suite (97 or 2000). VBScript debugging was revelatory. :)

kumarvvr 8y ago

"WebMaster". I see this term a lot in older sites. "WebMasters click here !" sort of links. What does it really mean? The term.

bru 8y ago
Person who built the website & is responsible for its uptime.
steerpike 8y ago
It's what we used to call anyone who was a web developer back then. Bit of a mix between a system admin and front-end developer with maybe some perl tinkering in place.
Angostura 8y ago
Quite simply, the person in charge of the web site. In those days, it was likely to be the person who wrote the HTML, wrote the content and set up the web server. There are still quite a lot of them about in smaller companies - they keep Wordpress patched, post news stories, update pages etc.
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
It used to be convention that emails to webmaster@[domain.com] would go to whoever was responsible for maintaining the website. I don't think anyone ever had it as an official job title, however.
- dagw 8y ago
  I don't think anyone ever had it as an official job title, however. I knew lots and lots of people that did.
subir 8y ago
Ah! Those were the days when there were no admins, there were 'webmasters'! They were the people behind building and maintaining the website. Think webdev + ops. Nothing today compares to the grandeur of being a 'Webmaster' in 1996 :)
8y ago

maaaats 8y ago

Born in 91, I was the perfect age to be obsessed with Harry Potter. When I was around ten, an older kid in the neighborhood helped me make a Harry Potter themed website using FrontPage (the Express version I think it was named). Small, random event that end up having a big effect on my life. My hobbies, what&where I chose to study, the friends I got there etc. I can trace back to this.

Svip 8y ago
Oh man, I had a similar experience around 2000. I built a Danish website about Goldeneye 64 in FrontPage. The first website I ever made. It used frames, but I feel it was quite pleasing on the eyes, because I avoided a lot of the 'fancy effects' that was common for the time. I'll admit, being born in 87, most of the site was simply copied from other websites about the game, and translated to Danish. So it was a decent exercise - particularly for someone dyslexic as me - to both built a website and translate from English to Danish. If only I knew where that website ended up...
- benibela 8y ago
  Born in 89, I made a webpage for my mother at that time. She still likes it :/ Check the generator tag on the frameset page http://www.roswithavanderzander.de/index_EN.htm http://www.roswithavanderzander.de/index_EN.htm
  - egeozcan 8y ago
    It can use some minimal styling but much better than loading 100MB to see less content. I say great job :)
  - scarface74 8y ago
    It loads fast. It’s easy to navigate. With just a little bit of work, it would be more appealing than most “modern” web page.
  - elliotpage 8y ago
    This page is great. It loads instantly, shows you the content up front, has clear navigation, and has clear contrast between elements. Also, it has frames, which I honestly miss even though I am glad we have moved past them.

cybervegan 8y ago

There were sooo many crap webpages created with that software. I used it myself for a while, before I knew better. It produced horrendous, buggy HTML. Table handling was pants - I used to have to hand code tables (used for layout!) to make them work properly. At least we don't have to do that these days... oh, wait, sorry. Ok, we do.

steerpike 8y ago

Hmm. I'm pretty certain Homesite was out by then which I always felt was the best web IDE. Such a shame what happened to it.

dagw 8y ago
Homesite was amazing. I think it was the first 'professional' piece of software I actually spent my own money on.

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago

I remember FrontPage Express being pretty good too. Basically a souped-up web developers' Notepad. It had nowhere near the feature set of full-blown FrontPage, of course.

flukus 8y ago

My first programming job often consisted of us adding buttons and a javascript snippet to third party websites as part of the on boarding process (thinking embedding a webring script). Usually this was easy, but sometimes you'd get a FrontPage site and this simple edition would completely blow up the site. Fortunately I usually didn't have to use front page to do it and could hand edit the HTML, if it blew up when they tried to edit it in front page again we could blame that on MS, which was believable with their software quality at the time.

gattilorenz 8y ago

The whole domain is amazing. Just look at this page, updated LAST YEAR: http://www.telecommanderhosting.com/ec/framed_Microsoft_OS.html http://www.telecommanderhosting.com/ec/framed_Microsoft_OS.h... Look at the waving Win 95 logo! Not to mention the "office clipart guy" in the homepage... I am just suprised that the obligatory "under construction" gif is missing!

hadrien01 8y ago
That Macromedia Flash theme for the cart <3
watersb 8y ago
It loaded freaky fast. So there's that advantage over current design.
timrichard 8y ago
Where's the hit counter? Don't forget to sign the guestbook.
- tinus_hn 8y ago
  I remember that was from IRC trolling, would you please /sign my guestbook?, as the /sign command would sign you off of the server.
benibela 8y ago
" You need to have JavaScript turned on for the shopping cart to work. " That rarely happened on old pages
ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
Don't worry, Ling's Cars will make sure you get your full fix of Geocities design. https://www.lingscars.com/ https://www.lingscars.com/
- contras1970 8y ago
  see the comment on lines 29-170!

nosjwshere 8y ago

we crapped all over wysiwyg editors, yet nowadays we dream of a binary web format that's fast as balls. we'll probably need a wysiwyg editor for that.

nicolaslem 8y ago

> Microsoft FrontPage 98 also now provides support for the Channel Definition Format (CDF) which is a really keen way of broadcasting your web content to an end user's Windows desktop. You can "push" content to your visitors without having them seek you out daily for updates. It looks like this used to be the precursor of RSS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Definition_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Definition_Format

carlob 8y ago
And desktop notifications

sdrothrock 8y ago

I love this! This is a much better example of what things were like in the early days of the internet than a lot of what I saw on the Web Design Museum (https://webdesignmuseum.org https://webdesignmuseum.org, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17891826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17891826) -- I'd completely forgotten about the tendency to use garish round images for buttons and weird fonts.

OskarS 8y ago

You know, good design principles weren't invented in 2006. There was plenty of good design in the 90s in other industries (publishing, newspapers, magazines, advertising, academia, ...), but apparently fucking nothing of that filtered down to webdesign. I mean: yes, technology was limited. I get that you couldn't have free range with things like typography and that CSS wasn't a thing yet. But for the love of god: a textured red background that made the already shittily rendered text even harder to read?! What were we thinking?

kristopolous 8y ago
I'm so glad we've learned these days with 10,000KB of JS for 1KB of text rendered in tiny, hairline thin fonts on no-contrast backgrounds. It's honestly always been bad ... before the web you'd dial into terminal based systems (BBS) and be assaulted with a perverse amount of ANSI escape codes and 8-bit extended ASCII flying around the screen and blinking at you (interfaces like this: https://s0.mundogamers.com/uploaded/bbsmenu.jpg https://s0.mundogamers.com/uploaded/bbsmenu.jpg). In between the two eras even IRC and UseNet got full of crufty ASCII art followed by leet-speak spelled weirdly cased words...it was illegible, unappealing and awful. Having the maturity to know when to stop and having the control to know what not to do have always been talents far more rare than we'd prefer.
- Fjolsvith 8y ago
  Frankly, that was not an artistic example of the BBS scene. Here is one that had aesthetically pleasing features: https://cleaner.ansilove.org/bbs.html https://cleaner.ansilove.org/bbs.html And, if you want to see a live version of a sweet looking BBS, check out this one in your telnet app: telnet: absinthe.darktech.org:23
  - kristopolous 8y ago
    Well sure, you can always cherry-pick good examples of anything.
pvg 8y ago
What were we thinking? Nobody was thinking this was 'web design'. You're looking at a consumer product and a specific 'novelty' theme in it. Just like nobody thought Comet Cursor was UI design.

netgusto 8y ago

https://boles.com/ https://boles.com/ (website the article uses in examples) is now front'd by Bootstrap. Is Bootstrap is the new Frontpage?

subir 8y ago

FrontPage 97 was the first WYSIWYG tool I ever used, since graduating from the humble text editors. IIRC, I got a free upgrade to FrontPage98. Coupled with Visual InterDev, it formed the core of my webdev workflow. At the time Macromedia was making terrific advances in this space. Ca. 1999-2000 I moved to Dreamweaver, Ultradev, Flash and Paint Shop Pro(liked it better than Fireworks; story for another day).

anentropic 8y ago
isn't that back to front? you were supposed to graduate from WYSIWYG tools like FrontPage, which generated utterly awful markup, to writing proper HTML yourself in a text editor
- subir 8y ago
  Yeah, I guess I started off the hard (wrong?) way. The first few websites I built was typed out on notepad. Progress was slow and excruciatingly difficult. Then, I discovered FrontPage and my productivity went through the roof :) Of course, the markup generated was garbage. I understood none of it and for all I knew, this was the way forward!
- cannonedhamster 8y ago
  Actually I did this as well. I learned to code in HTML and was forced to use Dreamweaver in school because it was "faster". I could use a template and code most of what I needed to by hand faster than most other students could with the tool. I also made very clean, super fast loading sites because I tried to do everything as simple as possible. On of my final projects fell through despite me building them an entire, completely custom, hand written website that was accessible, clean, and loaded super fast. I've never thought I've had a keen eye for designing new things but I've definitely got an eye for the classics and got a lot of accolades in my class for that work.

ricardoscotland 8y ago

I used it back in the day to create biology-online.org All the cool kids used DreamWeaver, the hardcore ones notepad.

donatj 8y ago

I used Netscape’s Composer for a while, then Frontpage. It was the sheer frustration of trying to get it to do what I want that lead me into actually learning and mastering HTML. I was told by a number of “experts” at the time that I was silly and WYSIWYGs were the way forward. It’s some 20 years later and thus far they’ve still never really worked very well. Also, man that makes me feel old.

mgkimsal 8y ago
in 1997, i had people tell me i would never be a real webmaster if I wasn't using hotdogpro. i never wanted to be a real webmaster, so I guess I dodged a bullet there.

petercooper 8y ago

One related tool that's often forgotten, I find, is Microsoft Publisher. Publisher 97 had an option to build and export an entire site 100% visually. I had family members use it to build their complete personal sites. It was a pretty clever system, too. It built layouts automatically using complex tables, split out text where it could, used image maps where it had to, etc. It wasn't something you'd be proud of using but it was the fastest tool for non-technical users at the time and would probably even hold up pretty well now(!)

mercer 8y ago
Oh man, I remember 'upgrading' to Publisher from FrontPage. I do agree that it was surprisingly clever at what it did, but I'm also happy I eventually learned how to write my own html/css eventually!

p4bl0 8y ago

Are there good free (as is free software) WYSIWYG website editors nowadays?

dagw 8y ago
Hell are there good WYSIWYG website editors nowadays at any price?
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  Dunno depends on what you like, I liked Microsoft Expression Web and that seemed to be free but they discontinued it. I would love to see VS Code become a reasonable WYSIWYG editor for Markdown and HTML5 / CSS though. I have seen some Electron based editors for Bootstrap that are very good, trick is to do an HTML WYSIWYG editor you really do need a damn browser component to do it properly enough. I would also like to see Mozilla create something similar for Firefox Developer Edition, not just more JS editors.
ar0 8y ago
I was looking for that a while back, too, and a Wikipedia search led me to BlueGriffon (http://bluegriffon.org/ http://bluegriffon.org/), which (through various forks like Nvu etc.) was apparently originally based on the "Composer" part of Netscape / Mozilla.
nix0n 8y ago
SeaMonkey (used to be Mozilla) Composer is free and WYSIWYG but the website you make will be very 90s looking.

wiradikusuma 8y ago

Isn't it funny that the _tone_ for an article written more than 20 years ago can change over time? Honestly, I don't know if the article was written in sarcasm or not.

tjoff 8y ago

Man, look at that site. Unimaginably fast, works perfect on mobile, no clutter and readable. It truly has gone downhill since then.

pjc50 8y ago
Zero javascript, zero CSS; it uses and <center> only.
reitanqild 8y ago
Fast, yes. Really bad on my mobile (equally bad as a number of mobile web sites today, only different). Web site I dealt with earlier today: lose state when I go back. This page: unreadable small fonts (and it takes months between every time I complain about that). And when I zoom it doesn't reflow the text so I have to scroll back and forth to read it.
Kerrick 8y ago
> Unimaginably fast From the article: > I also like the load time estimation found in the bottom right corner -- that's a constant reminder how long it will take the page you're working on to load for your visitors. My resume page is pretty good on wait time -- 14 seconds and that includes a graphic in addition to a massive HTML file! His "unimaginably fast" website took 14 seconds to load. Compare that to today's "bloated" sites like CNN's home page. Loads in 4.3 seconds, and finishes asynchronously loading all the bloat in 7.8 seconds.
- tjoff 8y ago
  That was probably with a 28.8k modem under less than ideal circumstances. He probably could optimize it further though, sure, is that your point? Yes, technology at the time did limit the kind of bloat that would be tolerated. Is that an excuse to go all in now just because we can?

AriaMinaei 8y ago

I was obsessed with this software as a kid. I could never get it to run on my computer though. My PC had a faulty RAM which would get hit somewhere in the middle of installation and trigger the blue screen of death. I tried that install program a hundred times. Tried different distributions, tried changing the OS (98 to ME and back). Nothing worked. And we couldn't afford getting me a new RAM. Mom and Dad were still repaying the loan that they took three years ago to buy me that broken computer. No way they could add a brand new RAM to their expenses. But I really wanted to build my own website. I would watch video tutorials of FrontPage (on pirated CDs), and I'd imagine using all the techniques from the videos to design my own website. You could make links (for some reason, links seemed cool), and dynamic links that didn't reload the page (which meant iframes everywhere). You could add clip arts (those tacky office cliparts), and buttons that react to the mouse (I could imagine building whole games out of those). The possibilities would be endless... if only I could get the money to buy that new RAM. After attempting and failing a few ideas to raise the money, I decided that the only way I could get that kind of money would be to... write a book! The book would be a guide to a software called "Multimedia Builder." MMB was a tool to make Autorun programs. You could make a window with buttons, videos, music, interactivity. It even had a scripting language. It was very popular at the time and my classmates were asking me to show them how to use it. I decided I'd write a book about it (there were none on the market), sell the book to a publisher, and use the money to buy not just a new RAM, but a whole new computer! I drafted the layout (somehow layout was more important than content for me). Outlined the chapters. Built folders of step-by-step screenshots... ... until Mom surprised me with $36 that she had gotten as extra salary! One of the best days of my life! Off I ran to the computer market. Bought a brand new SDR Ram, put it on my underpowered PC400 motherboard, started the computer, put the FrontPage CD in, and fired up install. I remember watching the install progress bar slowly fill. It was always near the halfway mark that the blue screen would appear. I remember the angst I felt as the progress bar approached the halfway mark, passed it, and the screen remained very not blue! I outgrew FrontPage in two weeks. Turns out, FrontPage can't really do much :) What I should have learned was actually HTML, CSS, and PHP. Which I did, right after. Funny things is though, they would've all ran fine on my faulty RAM! I could've started my web dev adventure a whole year earlier! Good times.

maaaats 8y ago

oxplot 8y ago

I don't get it. Maybe someone can explain why these style and many other at the time were so hedious given that in print for a century preceding it, we had beautiful color, font and layout.

zerr 8y ago
I guess partly because it became easily accessible and also the curiosity to try different things. Cyan fonts on black background? It was beautiful and fun. :)
pavlov 8y ago
It wasn’t obvious at the time that web design should have anything to do with print. Its immediate predecessors were a bunch of online systems like BBSes, Compuserve, Prodigy that either ran inside a terminal emulator with garish ANSI colors at best, or shipped with their own custom GUI app for access. There was a lot of activity in the late ‘90s around what “authentic to the medium” web design could look like, but I don’t remember people being very interested in emulating traditional print design — which itself was in turmoil thanks to digital publishing systems. Open a 1996 issue of Wired and you’ll probably think the designers were on crack: purple text on garish background images, cut-up barely readable fonts, that kind of thing.
sgnnseven 8y ago
It's a really a complex answer with many facets but the main one in my opinion is that the displays of that era were CRTs with extremely low resolution (e.g. 1024x768) and generally dull color depth. This in turn required things within the page to be large, blocky, and saturated to make it appear pleasant to the eyes. What you see in these screenshots of FrontPage is _not_ what the user nor the developer would experience on such hardware. As a analogue example of a game character on an LCD vs CRT might help illustrate this: https://kayin.moe/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/1391807722376-1024x614.png https://kayin.moe/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/1391807722376-1.... Some other smaller things also contributed but I don't think they were such big deals: - Lack of good compression on both transfer of data and file formats, necessitating simpler designs and palette-based image formats. - Graphics acceleration was generally slow so smooth animations were out. - Image creation/editing tools were practically non-existent and digital cameras were rare so it makes sense that the resulting pages that have had designed assets were scary-looking.

watersb 8y ago

"Exquisite Channeling" Wow. I worked at Netscape summer of 1997, a team that helped content providers get their web sites ready to showcase the Dynamic HTML and Channel features in Netscape 4.0. Javascript and RDF. In 1997.

patrickg_zill 8y ago

FrontPage was based on the Vermeer acquisition by Microsoft. The book by the founder, "High Stakes, No Prisoners" should be required reading for anyone interested in doing an internet startup IMHO.

Anonymous4C54D6 8y ago

I miss this. Web pages were just data not programs.

olalonde 8y ago
Why?
- Aardwolf 8y ago
  Because you could just read the text and view the images without being disturbed by 3 floating elements you have to close first, then when you scrolled 25% down some new thing popping up in your way, then when you scrolled 50% down some other annoying thing happening, and when at the end of the article suddenly it changes into another one, all while some video starts autoplaying but not without first having a wait during which you cannot pause it, and without following you around in a tiny window at the bottom that automatically appears again when you scroll, even if you tried to pause it. All while some small floating elements on the sides somehow appear on top of small parts of the text you are trying to read left or right.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    Yes! And also, because you weren't running a little program to display each page, the back button actually worked. (Compare what HN does when you follow a link then hit back to what Reddit does.)

cntlzw 8y ago

You can say what you want but these were great times! Everyone could make their own little ugly homepage and it was exciting. People didn't really judge each other or bragged about how this tech is better than that. I kinda miss it.

degenerate 8y ago
I made some groovy table-based sites by setting up the table layout with the FrontPage GUI and then editing the raw HTML it generated. It taught me HTML and opened the doors to web development for me. Same story using Visual Basic and my segway into programming.
- stantaylor 8y ago
  It was pretty amazing to me that you could do WYSIWYG (wow, that's an anachronism itself!) valid HTML development, and then hand-manipulate the HTML and it let you put any invalid shit in there without complaining.
  - Zardoz84 8y ago
    I remeber messing HTML stuff with HotDog
    - stevenicr 8y ago
      I remember hotdog! I preferred "netobjects fusion" more than any other similar though. Still have not found anything that makes design as easy, and visual, like netobjects fusion.
- lukewrites 8y ago
  Ah, tables…I spent so much time tinkering with them to try to get my pages looking right. And then came the day in high school when the computer club advisor told us about Netscape supporting frames. Frames were _so_ exciting.
- VyperCard 8y ago

jkabrg 8y ago

I'm wondering how many of the complaints here are to do with FrontPage itself, or the very idea of WYSIWYG web design. To me, it seems that web design is a visual thing. And if so, then a WYSIWYG editor is the appropriate thing to use. I'm suspicious that some people here don't think visually, and don't see the value in thinking visually. I don't know what people mean when they say "bad markup". I imagine it might include things like positioning elements using absolute coordinates. But I'm sure this is solvable by previewing the webpage on different resolutions, browsers and device types.

c-smile 8y ago
browsers do the following: By given set of HTML and CSS produce bitmap on screen. That's perfectly determined task (modulo browser differences). WYSIWYG editor does the opposite task: With the given bitmap on screen produce set of valid HTML and CSS declarations. The last task is undetermined mathematically speaking - with modern HTML and especially CSS there are too many ways of get the same rendering using completely different CSS tricks - absolute positioning, floats, display:grid and flexbox etc. etc.
stevenicr 8y ago
bad markup meant lots of things. frontpage seemed to add tons of extra fluff in the code. Other editors for a while used 1pixel cleargifs to space and align all the elements on the page. That added a lot of extra code just to move over 42 pixels and down 133 for every element. Then using tables for layouts was better. Cutting graphics for rounded corners worked. The web purists kept posting how bad it was, web visitors never cared. Once monitors were less standardized (more than just 800 px wide and 1024) - and mobile became a thing- the web purists really pushed to do layout with css only - and they spend years posting about hacks and recreating.. table layout called something else. Either way lots of extra code that is certainly not needed if using the modern grid css tagging... I still preferred the table layouts of years past, though I like the new tiny code that is needed for grid, the bloated code of the 90s and 00s is nothing compared to all the hi rez images, video and javascript bloat these days.

chippy 8y ago

Frontpage came with the all the usual Office software in the bundle which meant that it was often found on most internet cafes PCs. I spent a year backpacking in 2000 and used Frontpage in those cafes to edit and update my travel website. I kept most of it on a floppy disk, and also used FTP. The internet cafes often had scanners too, so I was able to scan a selection of developed print photos to include in the site there.

code4tee 8y ago

I remember the excitement of hunting for animated GIFs for your homepage and putting up the ubiquitous “under construction” image on the pages you were still working on.

zer0faith 8y ago

When stuff like this comes up I cannot help but think of websites hosted on geocities and angelfire. Oh the memories.

apazgo 8y ago

Was there some kind of html mode for Word? I have a faint memory of actually using word instead of frontpage

Bluecobra 8y ago
Yes, I remember making "websites" in high school with this feature for a class. I think it came out in Word 2000.

jeffmcmahan 8y ago

"Here's an Automotive theme that is quite unique and pleasing to the eye: ... <BARF>"

acconrad 8y ago

I remember ogling over the this and Dreamweaver and begging my parents to let me have a copy. It seemed like it could do everything at the time!

brightball 8y ago

People laugh, but this is how I learned HTML back then. I did something in Frontpage and then checked the code it generated to see how to do it with the tags.I still remember the Dreamweaver vs Frontpage vs Notepad arguments. I'm getting old.

jypepin 8y ago
Same as me here. The day I realised that what I was doing actually generated HTML and that HTML was actually the real thing was so eye opening to me. I got interested in HTML this way and that's how I got to engineering.
franze 8y ago
Me, too. Use FrontPage (later DreamWeaver), check code. Delete bit by bit what wasn't needed. Unserstand what the rest was doing. Iterrate on it. For those who laugh: we didn't have any proper html dev dokus at that point. search engine still sucked. we learned html by copy&pasting&deleting&iterrating.

thedaemon 8y ago

Although it's just a footnote on this page, Microsoft GIF Animator is still the easiest and most useful GIF animation tool out there. I have yet to find anything quite as easy to make animated GIFs. I haven't used it in years though, not sure if it's still floating around and if it runs on a modern OS.

trading_wheels 8y ago
I loved and used Image Composer for years after I'd moved on from Frontpage; I remember havng to install FP solely to get a copy of it (and some of the other tools like GIF animator)
stevenicr 8y ago
Loved the gif animator that used to ship with photoimpact. When corel bought it they stopped shipping the separate gif animator with it though. Glad I bought them on cd / dvd back in the day.

teilo 8y ago

I know a guy in his 70s that still uses it.

vital101 8y ago

Back when I was in middle school I used a copy FrontPage 98 at school to generate frames for my Star Wars site and then finished up the rest at home with FrontPage Express. A few years ago I restored the site after finding a broken version of it on the WayBack machine. http://re-cycledair.com/starwars/Entrance.html http://re-cycledair.com/starwars/Entrance.html

alexharrisnyc 8y ago
> Approx. download time: 2 hours and 9 min. at 28.8 kbps

cube00 8y ago

Fond memories of looking for that free web hosting with Microsoft FrontPage Extensions enabled to make my forms work.

lwerdna 8y ago

I pirated frontpage around 97,98 and used it to make garish homepages with all the elements we consider sins today: frames, lens flare, flame gifs, and background music. This was a formative experience that contributed to my career and life today.

fluxsauce 8y ago
Playing around with a tool is still using it. Who cares if it's ridiculous? Getting anyone to be engaged with something new is way easier if they're passionate about it. If a kid wants to edit a video about farts, they're going to learn what it takes to make that fart video, and I applaud them. Also, the marquee tag is mission critical.

joshstrange 8y ago

Frontpage was terrible for the web in many ways but damn it if I didn't love it to death when I first figured out how to use it and made my first websites with it. It was my first "code" editor in a long line (Frontpage -> Notepad++ -> Coda -> Sublime Text -> Sublime Text 2 -> PHPStorm -> IDEA Ultimate)

js2 8y ago

In the mid 90s while getting my CS degree, I had a side job as an SA at a small ISP. We also provided site hosting. One of our clients designed his site with FrontPage. This story reminded me of that, so out of curiosity I checked to see if the site was still around. Not only is it still around, it still looks like something straight out of the 90s. Behold: http://lotteryamerica.com/ http://lotteryamerica.com/

bootsz 8y ago

So much nostalgia... Was just thinking it would be neat to try to make a "Web Classic" version of the web without javascript and which only supports HTML 2.0 or 3.0. Maybe even bring back the 'blink' and 'marquee' tags :) . Kind of goes completely against the "one web" principle though, so definitely not practical. Fun to imagine having that kind of blank slate though.

nacho2sweet 8y ago

Loved reading code like this

marsrover 8y ago

I never had the privilege of using Frontpage. I had the program and some books but I felt like good ole notepad was good enough for me, so I never even tried it out. My mind was blown when I realized I could have different colors on my syntax and people actually indented things.

outside1234 8y ago

Were we really that color blind back then or did we really have that poor taste?

shakna 8y ago
A bit of both. The color palette was limited. 216 web-safe colors, 256 if you didn't mind the user's open programs changing how it looked. Colors displayed differently on different monitors, and 'dead' areas of the screen, where colors would be less vibrant, were common. And finally... The web was different, so we tossed all the rules. If you liked it, that's good enough! Why pander to anybody else? This was your own thing.

bitwize 8y ago

Good old GruntPage. Yet another technology I let pass by me as it grew to dominance and then faded--I much preferred to work in Emacs, hand-crufting HTML directly, and I never felt unproductive, especially when I used Scheme scripts (outside Emacs) to generate lots of similar pages. Given the tangle of unreadable, unmaintainable IE-specific garbage that FrontPage produced, I'd say I came out on top overall.

Adutude 8y ago

Elegant and Exquisite, Hoo Hoo, Hee Hee, Gufaw!! I was running an ISP at that time. This caused me no end of headaches in getting the FrontPage extensions working on various and sundry web servers. It allowed people to easily create websites, but caused a nightmare of support and infrastructure issues just to keep it working. So glad this piece of tech faded into infamy.

MiscIdeaMaker99 8y ago

I don't miss any of that. I remember having to maintain "FrontPage Extension" on IIS systems back in those days, and it was rough.

mbritton72 8y ago

Frontpage, the tool of choice for boss's sons and nephews to help save money on a website design.

pwned1 8y ago

I remember the pure excitement of tiled background images. Those were the days.

comesee 8y ago

When the client side ruled, and hosting was democratized. Anyone truly could have had their own websitr. Now everyone uses facebook, Twitter or squarespace.

aavotins 8y ago

Wow, this was a trip down memory lane. In fact it was Frontpage 98 that inspired me to try out my hand at building the web, back in 1999. I was just 10 years old back then. However it sparked my interest, because I could create something. Creating a webpage about my then most favorite game Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, publishing it and receiving my first ever e-mail from someone in the UK about a spelling error resulted in an experience that struck me so deeply that I became a web developer. Almost 20 years later I still love what Microsoft FrontPage 98 allowed me to discover.

clon 8y ago

I skimmed this entire article thinking it is a clever tongue-in-cheek piece, and found it hilarious, only to realise that it was from 1997 and written sincerely. Wow, I wish I could get back those hours drawing complex tables and placing 1x1 pixel images in strategic places.

th0ma5 8y ago

I think WebDAV was of course the best thing about FrontPage and I still use it whenever I can. FP made web development accessible to more people which is fine, but I don't miss all the cruft it added, although, arguably we're in a crazier mess now perhaps :P