2 ms·

I remember sites used to incorporate a lot of on-theme graphics in fun (also inaccessible) ways. It sounds backwards because of limited connection speeds, but i

by aimor 4y ago

I remember sites used to incorporate a lot of on-theme graphics in fun (also inaccessible) ways. It sounds backwards because of limited connection speeds, but it was pretty common to have titles and navigation buttons and borders and bullet points all presented as GIFs. Back then corporate websites tried hard to look small and personal ( https://web.archive.org/web/19961022174605/http://www.cocacola.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961022174605/http://www.cocaco... under the about page: "management wanted a place in the domain, so we decided to let them have this part" ), while today it seems everyone wants their website to look clean and professional with big splashy images ( https://www.coca-cola.com/ https://www.coca-cola.com/ ). That style of unified content and presentation is gone, it's visually out of date, more effort to implement, and hard to do it the right way and have it work well for everyone. But man it looked cool, the web could use a few more cool looking sites.

epc 4y ago
Well, absent graphics you couldn't really do much styling. CSS wasn't widely available until 1997 or so. I maintained one of those corporate sites…here's a library of the IBM homepages for the five years I was the webmaster: https://epcostello.net/library/ibmcom/ https://epcostello.net/library/ibmcom/
- aimor 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing your writeup, I enjoyed reading that. It's nice you had printouts of the pages, old sites just don't render correctly on archive.org. I also think v6 was something special, that one really came together and has a magazine type feel. It's frustrating that the early web turned out to be so ephemeral. I was too young to think about websites not being around forever, and I have a lot of vague memories of interesting sites now lost.
  - epc 4y ago
    Yeah, I wish I’d known about archive.org when I was in a position to help them capture the sites I worked on (ibm.com, the Deep Blue chess sites, etc.).

by aimor 4y ago

epc 4y ago

Well, absent graphics you couldn't really do much styling. CSS wasn't widely available until 1997 or so. I maintained one of those corporate sites…here's a library of the IBM homepages for the five years I was the webmaster: https://epcostello.net/library/ibmcom/ https://epcostello.net/library/ibmcom/

aimor 4y ago
Thanks for sharing your writeup, I enjoyed reading that. It's nice you had printouts of the pages, old sites just don't render correctly on archive.org. I also think v6 was something special, that one really came together and has a magazine type feel. It's frustrating that the early web turned out to be so ephemeral. I was too young to think about websites not being around forever, and I have a lot of vague memories of interesting sites now lost.
- epc 4y ago
  Yeah, I wish I’d known about archive.org when I was in a position to help them capture the sites I worked on (ibm.com, the Deep Blue chess sites, etc.).