3 ms·
Painfully. I remember working on sites back then that might be considered web apps, and I don't think you could even count on cookies at that time. One experi
by spc476 16y ago
Painfully.
I remember working on sites back then that might be considered web apps, and I don't think you could even count on cookies at that time. One experiment I did involved passing data along (part of the URL in a GET, or a continuous set of pages generated via POST requests). Everything done on the server side (even Java applets were problematic: http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp1.html http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp1.html).
Web apps at the time were more ... um ... document centric than now. But still, despite the lack of cookies, AJAX and Javascript, databases still existed back then, and CGI programs could be written in any langauge (Perl was popular back then). So it wasn't completely hopeless, but the apps were simpler though.
- InclinedPlane 16y agoYou'd think it was the dark ages back then, with people rubbing sticks and stones together. In truth it wasn't so bad. Markup was more cruder and more troublesome than today with HTML4/5 and CSS2/3 but there's nothing wrong with a simple layout. Cookies couldn't be entirely depended on but you could still keep track of the equivalent with a query parameter that you put into every url. Server side tools were cruder but there was still perl so you didn't have to roll everything on your own out of C (though many web apps in 1996 were written in C/C++). Some of the biggest web companies of today such as amazon and ebay got their start in that era and were already doing big business even back then.