31 ms·

Very retro with all those <font size="5"> tags, but that's the job of CSS :) Edit: there was no CSS support in 1.1 :)

icedchai 6y ago
Yep, CSS wasn't really supported anywhere until 1997. Most places were still using font tags and table-based layouts for quite a while after.
- jandrese 6y ago
  And in the 90s CSS was unreliable and often difficult to use. Internet Explorer made it difficult to go full CSS for a long time.
  - icedchai 6y ago
    I still think CSS is difficult to use. Out of HTML/CSS/JS, I despise CSS the most.
    - drummojg 6y ago
      It's what drove me out of wanting to work in Web authoring. I looked at CSS and literally decided "I am not going to learn this."
      - icedchai 6y ago
        It has gotten a bit better. The early CSS era (floats, etc) was worse than tables, I thought.
        jandrese 6y ago
        Early CSS had a huge problem with this. "Don't use tables, use CSS!" was a big message. But CSS's tools for tabular layout were extremely poor and difficult to use, leading to much frustration. It was a joke how hard it was to create a simple responsive three column layout in CSS, a thing easily accomplished with tables and very common on the web. Getting that three column layout right seemed like black magic in CSS1.
        icedchai 6y ago
        Yep, it was absurd. I remember spending hours fighting with CSS to do something that would've taken 5 minutes with tables. Maybe I was just bad at it.
        sli 6y ago
        I feel quite the opposite now, a table feels like so much typing compared to a quick flexbox layout. Even when I legitimately need a table, I dread it.
        jandrese 6y ago
        If Flexbox had been in CSS from the start I think people would have a far more favorable view of CSS.
        acherion 6y ago
        > "Don't use tables, use CSS!" was a big message. It was, but in hindsight maybe the message needed to be elaborated more. Perhaps it should've been "Don't use tables for layout, use CSS!" Besides that, CSS IMO accelerated more complex and visually pleasing websites, and arguably spurned on the Web 2.0 look. Unfortunately, due to the message not specifying the for layout bit, it took a while for many devs to unlearn that tables are bad – tables aren't, they should just be used for tabular data.
        jandrese 6y ago
        But this was exactly the problem. They said "don't use tables", but then didn't have anything that could do what you could do easily with tables. Instead you got many hours of arcane and confusing combinations of float: and clear: tags. Especially if you were trying to avoid absolute positioning and wanted the page to be responsive.
rsoto 6y ago
Also http since https was not supported at the time. What a way to commit into an idea!
- PAPPPmAc 6y ago
  It's committed to the idea so that it actually works on period machines. See /r/retrobattlestations announce thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/meqlql/i_built_google_news_for_vintage_web_browsers/ https://old.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/meqlql... It's surprisingly tractable to plug 90s machines into the internet via ethernet adapters or little serial gadgets that can do SLIP or pretend to be hayes modems, but the modern web full of crypto and execution environments that can bring modern computers to their knees is not kind to them.
mikepurvis 6y ago
At the same time, it's interesting to see those tags used for what otherwise looks like a pretty un-styled page. Like, part of the premise of CSS was progressive enhancement, where just the semantic structure alone would provide an adequate experience with however the browser might choose to render those elements by default. Basically my question is, if the font size tags were taken out and just bare h3/h4/p used instead, would that still render a usable page on Netscape 1.1? Could you then supply font overrides via a <style> tag in the header which could be applied by later browsers? Obviously it would be a different kind of experiment as the result would no longer be identical across all the "supported" browsers, but might be an interesting comparison point.

Yep, CSS wasn't really supported anywhere until 1997. Most places were still using font tags and table-based layouts for quite a while after.

jandrese 6y ago
And in the 90s CSS was unreliable and often difficult to use. Internet Explorer made it difficult to go full CSS for a long time.
- icedchai 6y ago
  I still think CSS is difficult to use. Out of HTML/CSS/JS, I despise CSS the most.
  - drummojg 6y ago
    It's what drove me out of wanting to work in Web authoring. I looked at CSS and literally decided "I am not going to learn this."
    - icedchai 6y ago
      It has gotten a bit better. The early CSS era (floats, etc) was worse than tables, I thought.
      - jandrese 6y ago
        Early CSS had a huge problem with this. "Don't use tables, use CSS!" was a big message. But CSS's tools for tabular layout were extremely poor and difficult to use, leading to much frustration. It was a joke how hard it was to create a simple responsive three column layout in CSS, a thing easily accomplished with tables and very common on the web. Getting that three column layout right seemed like black magic in CSS1.
        icedchai 6y ago
        Yep, it was absurd. I remember spending hours fighting with CSS to do something that would've taken 5 minutes with tables. Maybe I was just bad at it.
        sli 6y ago
        I feel quite the opposite now, a table feels like so much typing compared to a quick flexbox layout. Even when I legitimately need a table, I dread it.
        jandrese 6y ago
        If Flexbox had been in CSS from the start I think people would have a far more favorable view of CSS.
        acherion 6y ago
        > "Don't use tables, use CSS!" was a big message. It was, but in hindsight maybe the message needed to be elaborated more. Perhaps it should've been "Don't use tables for layout, use CSS!" Besides that, CSS IMO accelerated more complex and visually pleasing websites, and arguably spurned on the Web 2.0 look. Unfortunately, due to the message not specifying the for layout bit, it took a while for many devs to unlearn that tables are bad – tables aren't, they should just be used for tabular data.
        jandrese 6y ago
        But this was exactly the problem. They said "don't use tables", but then didn't have anything that could do what you could do easily with tables. Instead you got many hours of arcane and confusing combinations of float: and clear: tags. Especially if you were trying to avoid absolute positioning and wanted the page to be responsive.

rsoto 6y ago

Also http since https was not supported at the time. What a way to commit into an idea!

PAPPPmAc 6y ago
It's committed to the idea so that it actually works on period machines. See /r/retrobattlestations announce thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/meqlql/i_built_google_news_for_vintage_web_browsers/ https://old.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/meqlql... It's surprisingly tractable to plug 90s machines into the internet via ethernet adapters or little serial gadgets that can do SLIP or pretend to be hayes modems, but the modern web full of crypto and execution environments that can bring modern computers to their knees is not kind to them.

mikepurvis 6y ago

At the same time, it's interesting to see those tags used for what otherwise looks like a pretty un-styled page. Like, part of the premise of CSS was progressive enhancement, where just the semantic structure alone would provide an adequate experience with however the browser might choose to render those elements by default. Basically my question is, if the font size tags were taken out and just bare h3/h4/p used instead, would that still render a usable page on Netscape 1.1? Could you then supply font overrides via a <style> tag in the header which could be applied by later browsers? Obviously it would be a different kind of experiment as the result would no longer be identical across all the "supported" browsers, but might be an interesting comparison point.