13 ms·

Web Dark Ages

230 points by jslakro 6y ago

m4r35n357 6y ago
Brilliant! Historically, this was the start of an important process. That of turning a fully functional multimedia access and delivery network (the WWW) into a money-extraction system. But Web 2.0 was just around the corner to solve that problem . . .
amelius 6y ago
Well done, but I think this should be called "Web Design Dark Ages". In a broader sense, I'd like to see sections on Altavista, Lycos, Geocities, the rise and decline of Myspace and how Paypal and IE sucked.
- tutfbhuf 6y ago
  > ... and how Paypal and IE sucked. IE and Paypal still sucks.
- flyinghamster 6y ago
  Not to mention the evolution of Google from "a better search engine than the others" to "a lumbering behemoth that's competing with Facebook to gobble up the web." Or, conversely, the evolution of Facebook from "bulletin board system for college students" to "a lumbering behemoth that's competing with Google to gobble up the web."
guerrilla 6y ago
I really love this. Aside from the nostalgia, it was actually somewhat relaxing to view this. It was just easier to pay attention to for some reason. I wonder if the sterility and conformity of today has some measurable effect on attention.
- josephg 6y ago
  I suspect part of me knew I didn’t have to worry about a barrage of popovers telling me about my cookie policy options, begging me to join the mailing list or to install an app for some reason. It was just content. Blissfully simple, visually compelling content.
dreen 6y ago
Not a single <frameset>!
- jccooper 6y ago
  Nor image maps, my favorite antique web technology.
  - tomjen3 6y ago
    I have seen it put to decent use on Wikipedia where you could click on a person in a group painting and go directly to that persons article.
hnlmorg 6y ago
Really enjoyed this but I feel it missed a trick at the end where it says: To be continued? ...to have an "under construction" GIF a la https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CvHFU_zXEAAVUNd?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CvHFU_zXEAAVUNd?format=jpg&name=...
- sp332 6y ago
  http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/ http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/
fsiefken 6y ago
i know it's more modern but i want dejanews back so bad
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  I was positively surprised to find new on-topic usenet content lately in comp.lang.* (and not just formal announcements). As you know, DejaNews was just a web interface for usenet before they were bought by Google to lead audiences towards Google Groups, like they did with XMPP and a couple social sites such as Orkut.
  - flyinghamster 6y ago
    Maybe I should check out what's going on in some of the newsgroups I hung out in, and if anything worthwhile comes up, get back on. I kind of quit bothering after Comcast killed off their news servers. I don't want to bother with the binaries groups, though.
    - tomjen3 6y ago
      If you don't want binary groups, you can get free access: https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/
  - fsiefken 6y ago
    A that's nice, yes I miss DejaNews because it provided a search interface, you couldn't search the whole tree unless you had downloaded all messages yourself.
DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
Ironic, isn't it? Here we are, on a site that uses tables for layout, laughint about using tables for layout...
- pjc50 6y ago
  Unpopular opinion: there never was much wrong with the table layout, and subsequent standards efforts never really managed to properly support a lot of use-cases. You can still see people using display: table and display: table-cell for exactly this reason. Where's my vertically centered div? Where is my elastic newspaper column layout? How much Javascript exists because people couldn't figure out how to position things the way they wanted? And many websites have the div version of the "table nightmare", especially Facebook and Instagram. It's also popular to put a transparent div over images to prevent people casually saving them.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
    CSS Grid and Flex Box solve all of the use-cases of tables; it's only a matter of browser support these days. For a page created 3 years ago, it might still make sense to be using tables because some users are on older browsers, but for any website created from now on, it gets harder and harder to justify still using tables.
rvz 6y ago
Adobe® Flash® Player != Adobe® Flash® 8/CS/CC (Authoring tools) Those icons are for the Flash authoring tool which isn't the one being killed. The flash player is.
factorialboy 6y ago
Some might say we are in the dark ages now. With the centralized web representing the feudal structure.
mitch-snipline 6y ago
Seeing those stickers and buttons definitely gave me flash backs (no pun intended) to when I was first discovering the web. I have vivid memories of making websites during secondary school. First for free on Geocities and then later on my first paid hosting (Lycos if I recall correctly) so that I could host my PHP projects. At some point I started making websites and animations in Macromedia Flash and those glassy buttons easy but cool to make at the time.
mard 6y ago
I think the Web Dark Ages are yet ahead of us. I've grown extremely pessimistic with the state of modern web, with corporate censorship and disinformation on ad-driven social media, dissolution of many open Web standards and WebKit/Blink hegemony that is impossible to topple. A decade ago I expected Web to become more open, but instead it has become a hellscape of closed gardens where maintaining even reasonable amount of privacy is nearly impossible. 90s web was a wild west, but it was a far cry from its "dark ages".
- kgraves 6y ago
  The transition from Flash -> WASM means we have come full circle. I may get my Photoshop in the browser dream, but it is another nail in coffin for the free and open web.
  - paulgb 6y ago
    A big difference to me is that there is no gatekeeper for WASM like there was (Macromedia/Adobe) for Flash. Yes, it's true that you can't "view source" on WASM and get something meaningful like you could with JavaScript in the early days, but I'd argue that in the age of minification, most JS and the textual representation of WASM are comparably (il)legible.
    - srpablo 6y ago
      I think the "gatekeeper" of Macromedia/Adobe is a bit of an overstatement; the proliferation of open SWF player projects shows it wasn't an obfuscated or challenging format. Additionally, they partnered with Mozilla to write the the JS engine for Firefox, then ES4 got scrapped. Adobe, having already built and shipped it for Flash, rebranded it as ActionScript 3. But it literally was a JS engine (what was supposed to become JS, anyways) and meant to be shipped in the most "open web" browser in wide use! Also, before Atom and VS Code, Adobe worked on Brackets, which was a text editor built with web technologies (pre-Electron) with a lot of the same goals. All this to say… it still wouldn't have been my preference (I love "View Source") but there's plenty of evidence they made attempts to engage the broader developer communities and do a fair bit of work in the open.
Jaruzel 6y ago
> Popular Screen resolutions Is completely wrong; Even today the most popular desktop screen resolution by a country mile is 1366x768. All the budget laptops sold in supermarkets etc. still use that resolution and most people simply can't afford to drop ~1,000 GBP/USD on the 'family computer'. Fun fact... 1366x768 exists because it was trivial for far-east manufacturers to switch from 1024x768 4:3 to 1366x768 16:9, as the latter could still use 90% of existing LCD controller design, thus making it really cheap to switch their fabrication over.
- ketzu 6y ago
  This prompted me to look around a bit and found this: https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/ https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/ It's super interesting to look at and filter for various categories. For desktop 1366x768 wins out slightly ahead of 1920x1080. But for mobile, devices report a lot of 360x640. Fascinating. Here's the mandatory stackexchange discussion on why that is: https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/98985/why-the-360x640px-resolution-is-currently-the-most-used-one https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/98985/why-the-360x640...
  - Jaruzel 6y ago
    I hadn't looked in a while - it's nice to see 1920x1080 finally gaining popular traction - I guess those bargain-bin laptops are slowly getting upgraded!
    - GekkePrutser 6y ago
      Even my $160 "Chuwi" laptop has a 1920x1080 IPS screen, so really there is no excuse for any laptop not to have it, cost can't be an issue anymore. In fact its display is remarkably good.. Much better than the 1366x768 TN crap of my company Thinkpad. Embarassingly for Lenovo.
  - pmlnr 6y ago
    > 360x640 I'm curious of that's a 2x, 4x, etc version of high ppi devices; it's not impossible.
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
JavaScript alert() boxes!
ascotan 6y ago
There's a lot missing from here but a pretty nice site. - Java applets - metacrawlers - IE conditional stylesheets As a side note, I've never understood "tag clouds". They're definitely not "dark ages" because they're still used unfortunately. I think they're the intersection between business-speak gibberish and graphic design and the represent the dangers of mixing product managers with graphic designers.
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
What about sites that actively tried to prevent you from leaving their site? Messing with the back button, browser history, modal dialogs...
- jansan 6y ago
  And how about dialing malware that connected your modem to a very coslty phone number. Was that a thing in other countries? in Germany quite a few people got ripped off this way and I always disconnected my modem whenever I wasn't online.
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    Interesting, I never heard of that before (I’m not in Germany)
shrew 6y ago
The Web 2.0 section with the ultra shiny, shadowy buttons and stickers was particularly amusing to see again. I'm certainly glad a standardised way of handling custom fonts emerged though, I remember SIFR being particularly painful. That said, this site could almost do with a "Best viewed in Chrome" sticker, as the removal of -webkit-font-smoothing does some weird things to text in desktop Safari for me.
oedmarap 6y ago
Very nostalgic, now all that's needed is a conspicuous <marquee> element somewhere at the top, a custom cursor image, and background MIDI music.
- classified 6y ago
  I had a large pink mouse cursor on one of the pages. So romantic. But, yea, no MIDI music.
ImaCake 6y ago
As a follow up on this website's name. What does "web dark age" mean to HN people? I've seen political comments but no consensus yet. For a long time I have thought of it as a period where all our data was stored in decaying media that would be lost to future historians, much like the real dark ages. My source for this idea comes from sci-fi author Charles Stross: >In the future, the 20th century will be seen as a dark age — while previous centuries left books and papers that are stable for centuries with proper storage, many of the early analog recordings were stable enough to survive for decades, but the digital media and magnetic tapes and optical disks of the latter third of the 20th century decay in mere years. And if they don't decay, they become unreadable: the original tapes of the slow-scan video from the first moon landing, for example, appear to be missing, and the much lower quality broadcast images are all that remain. So stability is important, and I'm not even going to start on how we store data and metainformation describing it. From here: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping-the-future.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping...
- dgb23 6y ago
  I had this discussion with my partner while hiking last weekend! Our consensus was that the persistence of digital information is extremely fragile compared to physical media and oral tradition. This is kind of scary. Our biological niche is very much dependent on culture and passing on information.
  - tannhaeuser 6y ago
    For the web as a medium it would be especially tragic since SGML (on what HTML is based) is explicitly designed for long-term archival of digital text and other media (gave a tutorial about preserving HTML sites using SGML just last year [1]). [1]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/sgml-html-tutorial.html http://sgmljs.net/docs/sgml-html-tutorial.html
k__ 6y ago
I had the impression we went from 1024 to full HD without any steps in between
- mywittyname 6y ago
  We had the transition to 16:9 before full HD. 1366x768 was a pretty common interim resolution used in low/medium-spec laptops.
  - k__ 6y ago
    Yes, you're right. I even had one such notebook myself, but it always felt to me like a one-off thing, because I already had full HD displays on desktop for years.
buboard 6y ago
Well they look like a lot of fun for dark ages. If anything that was the spring of the web, nowadays things have moved to mobile and web is neglected. And i dont get the hate for tables, they are really handy to center stuff vertically/horizontally, and to scale an interface gracefully (e.g. image column takes up 15% of width), in a way that 12-grid systems fail. HN is tables. One thing that responsive design does is it makes the zoom out/in gesture useless, while tables can preserve that.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
You know when the Web Dark Ages are? They're upon us right now. With Google, Fb extracting all value out of the extant web, github & co having "educated" developers what to expect from software download sites and depending on network effects, StackExchange and a couple other sites covering "How To" material (not meant as a SE critique) and ad prices going down, the only "rational" incentive for new content is to publish polarizing clickbait. In the 1990s and 2000s, all kinds of Wikis and collaboration sites emerged; in the early 2010s, the nascent mobile web prompted a vibrant web design community, but when was the last time you went to a new web site? The web was once meant as an easy way for self-publishing, bypassing middle-men. Turns out we've just exchanged one middleman with another. I'm especially pissed at the staged HTML5 campaign to yield power over web standards to Google. HTML5 chose a shield as a logo, but who's going to shield us from Google and WHATWG destroying the web?
- GordonS 6y ago
  Facebook is perhaps the most frightening for me, because for many people Facebook is the internet! Something I absolutely hate is when I want to learn more about a local business and search for them on Google, but all I find is a Facebook page with minimal info - what happened to websites?!
  - artificial 6y ago
    Facebook is like AOL in the heyday: a curated contained world complete with IM. Chrome is effectively IE6 as Blink makes up a significant portion of the browser engines these days and many only test against it. Need some "Best viewed in Chrome!" gifs.
  - irrational 6y ago
    I know. It would be okay if you could view Facebook pages without an account, but since I don’t have one, all of those pages (including many friends and family members) are entirely shut out for me.
  - sdevonoes 6y ago
    Facebook is "free" (as in it does not cost money to open a profile and post info there). Websites are not, and even if they are, not all people know how to publish something to a website. I hate it too yeah, but for non-techie people Facebook is just plain simple.
gglnx 6y ago
Are sitemaps really dead? Still a good way to fulfill the WCAG requirement of providing multiple ways to locate a page [1]. [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/G63.html https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/G63.html
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  Yes. “Site map” links in the footer of business or government sites are much less common than they used to be, and those that are still there are regularly just an auto-generated list of URLs or of links with their page names, which in most cases is atrocious. The idea of it was that it present structure, and be curated. For most sites, I’d say the near-ubiquitous mega footer pattern has supplanted the site map.
quyleanh 6y ago
What a pretty recall. I haven't known some of theme.
datalus 6y ago
Lately, I've been having thoughts about this a lot. I've yearned for a simpler age in technology. I grew up on the internet around 96/97ish, mostly because I wanted to play games over dial-up. In those formative years, I forged a lifelong fascination with wanting to know how all (most? some?) of this worked. Things have changed a lot for me personally and for technology. In general, I feel my enthusiasm has dwindled somewhat in the way tech's role has played out in society. In my opinion the big "Web 2.0" and social rush was more about bending the Internet to the wills of private enterprise rather then private enterprise bending to the wills of the Internet. Or maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon now, a salty junior level graybeard. I do have hope, though. It's probably that my youthful enthusiasm has given way to cautious optimism.
jccooper 6y ago
I found it useful as well as entertaining. Convinced me to drop the "Home" link in the header of one of my sites.
GekkePrutser 6y ago
The aspect ratio is wrong for the 2 middle resolutions, really bothers me :D PS: I don't think tables are a bad layout option. It's not as flexible as CSS obviously but you could make it scale really well to vastly different UI sizes with a combo of fixed and percentage based dimensions. Most "modern" sites just dump everything in a column in the middle. And scale everything as if everyone is on a fat-finger touch interface. And I do miss the gradient button designs, I hate today's obsession with flatness. Bt that's a matter of taste I suppose. Maybe I don't have any :) PS It should realllly have mentioned the <marquee>!
- duxup 6y ago
  I have to deal with table layouts now and then. What css will work on what element of a table or won't work and why feels like an endless rabbit hole for me.
subir 6y ago
Imo, those were the times of unbounded creativity. With the limited, primitive tools, devs (webmasters?) of that era achieved great results. A big chunk of modern websites lack character and look nearly the same to me. I know - consistency, principle of least surprise, et al. Maybe it is just me, but designing a website engaged more of my creative juices and certainly felt like more fun 20y ago. Say what you will about the Flash website boom of the early 2000s, creative design did peak at the time. Discovering a new site and wowing over the unique design and interactions is an experience lost in time.
irrational 6y ago
This is missing the main reason we used Flash: it was basically the Java of the web. Or maybe the jQuery of the web. Since no browser were standards compliant (or rather every browser adhered to their own version of a standard) writing web pages that were cross browser compatible was a pain (hence all the Best Viewed in Netscape Navigator or IE messages). Flash, on the other hand, took care of the cross-platform mess. You could use Flash and be reasonably sure it would look and work the same on every browser and OS that had a Flash player.
cromwellian 6y ago
I’d say the real problem is that social media platforms became the predominant publishing mechanism now. There was a time when millions of people had their own home pages, and now they’ve been replaced with templated social network posts. Even tumblr and blogger were better in the sense that there was some diversity and of course GeoCities while centralized, allowed people much greater content control. The Dark Ages are the fact that Twitter and public Facebook pages eT al, won’t be backed up by Archive.org and decades of human culture will vanish one day when these sites go the way of GeoCities. The rising appification of everything behind app stores also mean the death of content preservation. I can still load the first Web page ever published, I can still run spacejam.com, but tens of thousands of 32bit apps have disappeared from app stores never to be runnable again. I can run 8bit and 16bit apps on emulators from my childhood, but can’t run games I enjoyed on iOS just a few years ago. Death of culture.
tomphoolery 6y ago
haha "dark ages"...in my opinion, these were the GOOD TIMES! the only thing you needed to know was HTML, and you could just "view source" and see how everyone else was doing it. but yeah...a lot of people got paid a lot of money to do things that are so trivial nowadays, that there's a whole industry of workers who get paid to NOT do them.
chadlavi 6y ago
perhaps ironically, huge parts of this site don't work for me. All the images are broken, some of the clickable things don't do anything.
a_t48 6y ago
By Dark Ages, you mean Golden Age, right? (: Bronze Age might be better, I guess. Nothing wrong with it, just a simpler time.
danilocesar 6y ago
You mean golden ages, right? </joke> It's an exaggeration, I know. The web was visually unpleasant those days. Techwise too. Flash?! IE-only? OGM... But almost all information was opened and text-search-ready. Now information is behind walls (facebook, google) and hidden in videos. Websites lost control with amp-fication of the web, and we're seeing more and more Chrome-only signs. Ads? everywhere. I remember long time when people despised the idea of using a computer with always-on ads display if it was cheaper. Now we have exactly that. The web did evolve, but mainly in the wrong direction.
basicallydan 6y ago
I appreciate the celebration retrospective on what the web used to look like. However I take issue with the name. Since this is Hacker News, I hope you're okay with this kind of unimportant semantic argument. From Wikipedia: > The "Dark Ages" is a historical periodization traditionally referring to the Middle Ages (c. 5th–15th century) that asserts that a demographic, cultural, and economic deterioration occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire. If you're trying to keep with how "Dark Age" I don't think the periods you're referring to are at all "Dark". The cultural output of the web back then was _massive_, novel, and growing. It's even more massive now, and growing at a faster rate than before. Whether that output is quite as novel now is up for debate, but what I'm saying is that if there is such a thing as a "Web Dark Age", we haven't seen it yet. Back then, it was the early days and things were still being worked out. It wasn't a deterioration, since there was nothing to deteriorate. Nonetheless, I like the website and it's a nice snapshot of some design trends of the time.
hanaq 6y ago
interesting. However dancing baby was scary for me! Why it does not have 2020?
stelonix 6y ago
I thought this would be a post of what the web has become (big corp bubbles) and what's to come in the next years, but was pleased to find a shout out to 90s web, specially since some 12 hours ago I was showing a friend how the web looked like when she was just 2 years old. And then I found some things I forgot to mention, like Guestbooks (wow) and Sitemaps. Gonna tour her right now!
bluedays 6y ago
lol, this is awesome. You're missing the under construction gifs. I was talking about this to someone the other day. In fact I wrote a script after the conversation to simulate loading porn as a joke. https://hastebin.com/fuvixuxeqo.rb https://hastebin.com/fuvixuxeqo.rb
wackget 6y ago
It's ironic that this site doesn't work without enabling third-party external JavaScript.
vladoh 6y ago
Reminds me of my first website attempts... :-D It is missing some <marquee> elements and flashing ad banners...

230 points by jslakro 6y ago

Brilliant! Historically, this was the start of an important process. That of turning a fully functional multimedia access and delivery network (the WWW) into a money-extraction system. But Web 2.0 was just around the corner to solve that problem . . .

amelius 6y ago

Well done, but I think this should be called "Web Design Dark Ages". In a broader sense, I'd like to see sections on Altavista, Lycos, Geocities, the rise and decline of Myspace and how Paypal and IE sucked.

tutfbhuf 6y ago
> ... and how Paypal and IE sucked. IE and Paypal still sucks.
flyinghamster 6y ago
Not to mention the evolution of Google from "a better search engine than the others" to "a lumbering behemoth that's competing with Facebook to gobble up the web." Or, conversely, the evolution of Facebook from "bulletin board system for college students" to "a lumbering behemoth that's competing with Google to gobble up the web."

guerrilla 6y ago

I really love this. Aside from the nostalgia, it was actually somewhat relaxing to view this. It was just easier to pay attention to for some reason. I wonder if the sterility and conformity of today has some measurable effect on attention.

josephg 6y ago
I suspect part of me knew I didn’t have to worry about a barrage of popovers telling me about my cookie policy options, begging me to join the mailing list or to install an app for some reason. It was just content. Blissfully simple, visually compelling content.

dreen 6y ago

Not a single <frameset>!

jccooper 6y ago
Nor image maps, my favorite antique web technology.
- tomjen3 6y ago
  I have seen it put to decent use on Wikipedia where you could click on a person in a group painting and go directly to that persons article.

hnlmorg 6y ago

Really enjoyed this but I feel it missed a trick at the end where it says: To be continued? ...to have an "under construction" GIF a la https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CvHFU_zXEAAVUNd?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CvHFU_zXEAAVUNd?format=jpg&name=...

sp332 6y ago
http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/ http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/

fsiefken 6y ago

i know it's more modern but i want dejanews back so bad

tannhaeuser 6y ago
I was positively surprised to find new on-topic usenet content lately in comp.lang.* (and not just formal announcements). As you know, DejaNews was just a web interface for usenet before they were bought by Google to lead audiences towards Google Groups, like they did with XMPP and a couple social sites such as Orkut.
- flyinghamster 6y ago
  Maybe I should check out what's going on in some of the newsgroups I hung out in, and if anything worthwhile comes up, get back on. I kind of quit bothering after Comcast killed off their news servers. I don't want to bother with the binaries groups, though.
  - tomjen3 6y ago
    If you don't want binary groups, you can get free access: https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/
- fsiefken 6y ago
  A that's nice, yes I miss DejaNews because it provided a search interface, you couldn't search the whole tree unless you had downloaded all messages yourself.

DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago

Ironic, isn't it? Here we are, on a site that uses tables for layout, laughint about using tables for layout...

pjc50 6y ago
Unpopular opinion: there never was much wrong with the table layout, and subsequent standards efforts never really managed to properly support a lot of use-cases. You can still see people using display: table and display: table-cell for exactly this reason. Where's my vertically centered div? Where is my elastic newspaper column layout? How much Javascript exists because people couldn't figure out how to position things the way they wanted? And many websites have the div version of the "table nightmare", especially Facebook and Instagram. It's also popular to put a transparent div over images to prevent people casually saving them.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
  CSS Grid and Flex Box solve all of the use-cases of tables; it's only a matter of browser support these days. For a page created 3 years ago, it might still make sense to be using tables because some users are on older browsers, but for any website created from now on, it gets harder and harder to justify still using tables.

rvz 6y ago

Adobe® Flash® Player != Adobe® Flash® 8/CS/CC (Authoring tools) Those icons are for the Flash authoring tool which isn't the one being killed. The flash player is.

factorialboy 6y ago

Some might say we are in the dark ages now. With the centralized web representing the feudal structure.

mitch-snipline 6y ago

Seeing those stickers and buttons definitely gave me flash backs (no pun intended) to when I was first discovering the web. I have vivid memories of making websites during secondary school. First for free on Geocities and then later on my first paid hosting (Lycos if I recall correctly) so that I could host my PHP projects. At some point I started making websites and animations in Macromedia Flash and those glassy buttons easy but cool to make at the time.

mard 6y ago

I think the Web Dark Ages are yet ahead of us. I've grown extremely pessimistic with the state of modern web, with corporate censorship and disinformation on ad-driven social media, dissolution of many open Web standards and WebKit/Blink hegemony that is impossible to topple. A decade ago I expected Web to become more open, but instead it has become a hellscape of closed gardens where maintaining even reasonable amount of privacy is nearly impossible. 90s web was a wild west, but it was a far cry from its "dark ages".

kgraves 6y ago
The transition from Flash -> WASM means we have come full circle. I may get my Photoshop in the browser dream, but it is another nail in coffin for the free and open web.
- paulgb 6y ago
  A big difference to me is that there is no gatekeeper for WASM like there was (Macromedia/Adobe) for Flash. Yes, it's true that you can't "view source" on WASM and get something meaningful like you could with JavaScript in the early days, but I'd argue that in the age of minification, most JS and the textual representation of WASM are comparably (il)legible.
  - srpablo 6y ago
    I think the "gatekeeper" of Macromedia/Adobe is a bit of an overstatement; the proliferation of open SWF player projects shows it wasn't an obfuscated or challenging format. Additionally, they partnered with Mozilla to write the the JS engine for Firefox, then ES4 got scrapped. Adobe, having already built and shipped it for Flash, rebranded it as ActionScript 3. But it literally was a JS engine (what was supposed to become JS, anyways) and meant to be shipped in the most "open web" browser in wide use! Also, before Atom and VS Code, Adobe worked on Brackets, which was a text editor built with web technologies (pre-Electron) with a lot of the same goals. All this to say… it still wouldn't have been my preference (I love "View Source") but there's plenty of evidence they made attempts to engage the broader developer communities and do a fair bit of work in the open.

Jaruzel 6y ago

> Popular Screen resolutions Is completely wrong; Even today the most popular desktop screen resolution by a country mile is 1366x768. All the budget laptops sold in supermarkets etc. still use that resolution and most people simply can't afford to drop ~1,000 GBP/USD on the 'family computer'. Fun fact... 1366x768 exists because it was trivial for far-east manufacturers to switch from 1024x768 4:3 to 1366x768 16:9, as the latter could still use 90% of existing LCD controller design, thus making it really cheap to switch their fabrication over.

ketzu 6y ago
This prompted me to look around a bit and found this: https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/ https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/ It's super interesting to look at and filter for various categories. For desktop 1366x768 wins out slightly ahead of 1920x1080. But for mobile, devices report a lot of 360x640. Fascinating. Here's the mandatory stackexchange discussion on why that is: https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/98985/why-the-360x640px-resolution-is-currently-the-most-used-one https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/98985/why-the-360x640...
- Jaruzel 6y ago
  I hadn't looked in a while - it's nice to see 1920x1080 finally gaining popular traction - I guess those bargain-bin laptops are slowly getting upgraded!
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    Even my $160 "Chuwi" laptop has a 1920x1080 IPS screen, so really there is no excuse for any laptop not to have it, cost can't be an issue anymore. In fact its display is remarkably good.. Much better than the 1366x768 TN crap of my company Thinkpad. Embarassingly for Lenovo.
- pmlnr 6y ago
  > 360x640 I'm curious of that's a 2x, 4x, etc version of high ppi devices; it's not impossible.

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago

JavaScript alert() boxes!

ascotan 6y ago

There's a lot missing from here but a pretty nice site. - Java applets - metacrawlers - IE conditional stylesheets As a side note, I've never understood "tag clouds". They're definitely not "dark ages" because they're still used unfortunately. I think they're the intersection between business-speak gibberish and graphic design and the represent the dangers of mixing product managers with graphic designers.

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago

What about sites that actively tried to prevent you from leaving their site? Messing with the back button, browser history, modal dialogs...

jansan 6y ago
And how about dialing malware that connected your modem to a very coslty phone number. Was that a thing in other countries? in Germany quite a few people got ripped off this way and I always disconnected my modem whenever I wasn't online.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  Interesting, I never heard of that before (I’m not in Germany)

shrew 6y ago

The Web 2.0 section with the ultra shiny, shadowy buttons and stickers was particularly amusing to see again. I'm certainly glad a standardised way of handling custom fonts emerged though, I remember SIFR being particularly painful. That said, this site could almost do with a "Best viewed in Chrome" sticker, as the removal of -webkit-font-smoothing does some weird things to text in desktop Safari for me.

oedmarap 6y ago

Very nostalgic, now all that's needed is a conspicuous <marquee> element somewhere at the top, a custom cursor image, and background MIDI music.

classified 6y ago
I had a large pink mouse cursor on one of the pages. So romantic. But, yea, no MIDI music.

ImaCake 6y ago

As a follow up on this website's name. What does "web dark age" mean to HN people? I've seen political comments but no consensus yet. For a long time I have thought of it as a period where all our data was stored in decaying media that would be lost to future historians, much like the real dark ages. My source for this idea comes from sci-fi author Charles Stross: >In the future, the 20th century will be seen as a dark age — while previous centuries left books and papers that are stable for centuries with proper storage, many of the early analog recordings were stable enough to survive for decades, but the digital media and magnetic tapes and optical disks of the latter third of the 20th century decay in mere years. And if they don't decay, they become unreadable: the original tapes of the slow-scan video from the first moon landing, for example, appear to be missing, and the much lower quality broadcast images are all that remain. So stability is important, and I'm not even going to start on how we store data and metainformation describing it. From here: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping-the-future.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping...

dgb23 6y ago
I had this discussion with my partner while hiking last weekend! Our consensus was that the persistence of digital information is extremely fragile compared to physical media and oral tradition. This is kind of scary. Our biological niche is very much dependent on culture and passing on information.
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  For the web as a medium it would be especially tragic since SGML (on what HTML is based) is explicitly designed for long-term archival of digital text and other media (gave a tutorial about preserving HTML sites using SGML just last year [1]). [1]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/sgml-html-tutorial.html http://sgmljs.net/docs/sgml-html-tutorial.html

k__ 6y ago

I had the impression we went from 1024 to full HD without any steps in between

mywittyname 6y ago
We had the transition to 16:9 before full HD. 1366x768 was a pretty common interim resolution used in low/medium-spec laptops.
- k__ 6y ago
  Yes, you're right. I even had one such notebook myself, but it always felt to me like a one-off thing, because I already had full HD displays on desktop for years.

buboard 6y ago

Well they look like a lot of fun for dark ages. If anything that was the spring of the web, nowadays things have moved to mobile and web is neglected. And i dont get the hate for tables, they are really handy to center stuff vertically/horizontally, and to scale an interface gracefully (e.g. image column takes up 15% of width), in a way that 12-grid systems fail. HN is tables. One thing that responsive design does is it makes the zoom out/in gesture useless, while tables can preserve that.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

You know when the Web Dark Ages are? They're upon us right now. With Google, Fb extracting all value out of the extant web, github & co having "educated" developers what to expect from software download sites and depending on network effects, StackExchange and a couple other sites covering "How To" material (not meant as a SE critique) and ad prices going down, the only "rational" incentive for new content is to publish polarizing clickbait. In the 1990s and 2000s, all kinds of Wikis and collaboration sites emerged; in the early 2010s, the nascent mobile web prompted a vibrant web design community, but when was the last time you went to a new web site? The web was once meant as an easy way for self-publishing, bypassing middle-men. Turns out we've just exchanged one middleman with another. I'm especially pissed at the staged HTML5 campaign to yield power over web standards to Google. HTML5 chose a shield as a logo, but who's going to shield us from Google and WHATWG destroying the web?

GordonS 6y ago
Facebook is perhaps the most frightening for me, because for many people Facebook is the internet! Something I absolutely hate is when I want to learn more about a local business and search for them on Google, but all I find is a Facebook page with minimal info - what happened to websites?!
- artificial 6y ago
  Facebook is like AOL in the heyday: a curated contained world complete with IM. Chrome is effectively IE6 as Blink makes up a significant portion of the browser engines these days and many only test against it. Need some "Best viewed in Chrome!" gifs.
- irrational 6y ago
  I know. It would be okay if you could view Facebook pages without an account, but since I don’t have one, all of those pages (including many friends and family members) are entirely shut out for me.
- sdevonoes 6y ago
  Facebook is "free" (as in it does not cost money to open a profile and post info there). Websites are not, and even if they are, not all people know how to publish something to a website. I hate it too yeah, but for non-techie people Facebook is just plain simple.

gglnx 6y ago

Are sitemaps really dead? Still a good way to fulfill the WCAG requirement of providing multiple ways to locate a page [1]. [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/G63.html https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/G63.html

chrismorgan 6y ago
Yes. “Site map” links in the footer of business or government sites are much less common than they used to be, and those that are still there are regularly just an auto-generated list of URLs or of links with their page names, which in most cases is atrocious. The idea of it was that it present structure, and be curated. For most sites, I’d say the near-ubiquitous mega footer pattern has supplanted the site map.

quyleanh 6y ago

What a pretty recall. I haven't known some of theme.

datalus 6y ago

Lately, I've been having thoughts about this a lot. I've yearned for a simpler age in technology. I grew up on the internet around 96/97ish, mostly because I wanted to play games over dial-up. In those formative years, I forged a lifelong fascination with wanting to know how all (most? some?) of this worked. Things have changed a lot for me personally and for technology. In general, I feel my enthusiasm has dwindled somewhat in the way tech's role has played out in society. In my opinion the big "Web 2.0" and social rush was more about bending the Internet to the wills of private enterprise rather then private enterprise bending to the wills of the Internet. Or maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon now, a salty junior level graybeard. I do have hope, though. It's probably that my youthful enthusiasm has given way to cautious optimism.

jccooper 6y ago

I found it useful as well as entertaining. Convinced me to drop the "Home" link in the header of one of my sites.

GekkePrutser 6y ago

The aspect ratio is wrong for the 2 middle resolutions, really bothers me :D PS: I don't think tables are a bad layout option. It's not as flexible as CSS obviously but you could make it scale really well to vastly different UI sizes with a combo of fixed and percentage based dimensions. Most "modern" sites just dump everything in a column in the middle. And scale everything as if everyone is on a fat-finger touch interface. And I do miss the gradient button designs, I hate today's obsession with flatness. Bt that's a matter of taste I suppose. Maybe I don't have any :) PS It should realllly have mentioned the <marquee>!

duxup 6y ago
I have to deal with table layouts now and then. What css will work on what element of a table or won't work and why feels like an endless rabbit hole for me.

subir 6y ago

Imo, those were the times of unbounded creativity. With the limited, primitive tools, devs (webmasters?) of that era achieved great results. A big chunk of modern websites lack character and look nearly the same to me. I know - consistency, principle of least surprise, et al. Maybe it is just me, but designing a website engaged more of my creative juices and certainly felt like more fun 20y ago. Say what you will about the Flash website boom of the early 2000s, creative design did peak at the time. Discovering a new site and wowing over the unique design and interactions is an experience lost in time.

irrational 6y ago

This is missing the main reason we used Flash: it was basically the Java of the web. Or maybe the jQuery of the web. Since no browser were standards compliant (or rather every browser adhered to their own version of a standard) writing web pages that were cross browser compatible was a pain (hence all the Best Viewed in Netscape Navigator or IE messages). Flash, on the other hand, took care of the cross-platform mess. You could use Flash and be reasonably sure it would look and work the same on every browser and OS that had a Flash player.

cromwellian 6y ago

I’d say the real problem is that social media platforms became the predominant publishing mechanism now. There was a time when millions of people had their own home pages, and now they’ve been replaced with templated social network posts. Even tumblr and blogger were better in the sense that there was some diversity and of course GeoCities while centralized, allowed people much greater content control. The Dark Ages are the fact that Twitter and public Facebook pages eT al, won’t be backed up by Archive.org and decades of human culture will vanish one day when these sites go the way of GeoCities. The rising appification of everything behind app stores also mean the death of content preservation. I can still load the first Web page ever published, I can still run spacejam.com, but tens of thousands of 32bit apps have disappeared from app stores never to be runnable again. I can run 8bit and 16bit apps on emulators from my childhood, but can’t run games I enjoyed on iOS just a few years ago. Death of culture.

tomphoolery 6y ago

haha "dark ages"...in my opinion, these were the GOOD TIMES! the only thing you needed to know was HTML, and you could just "view source" and see how everyone else was doing it. but yeah...a lot of people got paid a lot of money to do things that are so trivial nowadays, that there's a whole industry of workers who get paid to NOT do them.

chadlavi 6y ago

perhaps ironically, huge parts of this site don't work for me. All the images are broken, some of the clickable things don't do anything.

a_t48 6y ago

By Dark Ages, you mean Golden Age, right? (: Bronze Age might be better, I guess. Nothing wrong with it, just a simpler time.

danilocesar 6y ago

You mean golden ages, right? </joke> It's an exaggeration, I know. The web was visually unpleasant those days. Techwise too. Flash?! IE-only? OGM... But almost all information was opened and text-search-ready. Now information is behind walls (facebook, google) and hidden in videos. Websites lost control with amp-fication of the web, and we're seeing more and more Chrome-only signs. Ads? everywhere. I remember long time when people despised the idea of using a computer with always-on ads display if it was cheaper. Now we have exactly that. The web did evolve, but mainly in the wrong direction.

basicallydan 6y ago

I appreciate the celebration retrospective on what the web used to look like. However I take issue with the name. Since this is Hacker News, I hope you're okay with this kind of unimportant semantic argument. From Wikipedia: > The "Dark Ages" is a historical periodization traditionally referring to the Middle Ages (c. 5th–15th century) that asserts that a demographic, cultural, and economic deterioration occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire. If you're trying to keep with how "Dark Age" I don't think the periods you're referring to are at all "Dark". The cultural output of the web back then was _massive_, novel, and growing. It's even more massive now, and growing at a faster rate than before. Whether that output is quite as novel now is up for debate, but what I'm saying is that if there is such a thing as a "Web Dark Age", we haven't seen it yet. Back then, it was the early days and things were still being worked out. It wasn't a deterioration, since there was nothing to deteriorate. Nonetheless, I like the website and it's a nice snapshot of some design trends of the time.

hanaq 6y ago

interesting. However dancing baby was scary for me! Why it does not have 2020?

stelonix 6y ago

I thought this would be a post of what the web has become (big corp bubbles) and what's to come in the next years, but was pleased to find a shout out to 90s web, specially since some 12 hours ago I was showing a friend how the web looked like when she was just 2 years old. And then I found some things I forgot to mention, like Guestbooks (wow) and Sitemaps. Gonna tour her right now!

bluedays 6y ago

lol, this is awesome. You're missing the under construction gifs. I was talking about this to someone the other day. In fact I wrote a script after the conversation to simulate loading porn as a joke. https://hastebin.com/fuvixuxeqo.rb https://hastebin.com/fuvixuxeqo.rb

wackget 6y ago

It's ironic that this site doesn't work without enabling third-party external JavaScript.

vladoh 6y ago

Reminds me of my first website attempts... :-D It is missing some <marquee> elements and flashing ad banners...