5 ms·

The Homepage of the Oldternet

102 points by theden 3y ago

reidrac 3y ago
I love it. Note that despite a good attempt to use the aesthetic of the time, some modern sensibilities are still there like the narrow layout (I was in there in the late 90s and we used all the screen because the resolution on a 15" monitor -if you were lucky- wasn't that great).
- Pannoniae 3y ago
  Modern sensibilities like narrow layouts are I feel like a massive downgrade compared to full-width (or almost full-width) layouts. If the user wants less text, they can just resize the browser window, it's simple. But with those layouts, the text takes up way more vertical space than what's needed, even if you have a large screen, leading to lots of scrolling. HN has a good layout - there are some (quite small) margins but it otherwise uses most of your screen. More websites should follow this pattern, IMO.
  - tgv 3y ago
    There comes a point where the eye has trouble jumping to the start of the next line. It probably differs per style (space between lines, font, contrast, etc.), but long paragraphs will be troublesome. Requiring the user to resize the window is not a great alternative, IMO. It feels cumbersome, and people with many tabs will hate it. And doesn't work on mobile devices.
    - Pannoniae 3y ago
      Dunno, I feel the opposite way. It's comfortable for me to read one line for longer, then to jump to the next one. I think this is just "what you are used to" - I don't see how either are inherently better or more comfortable to read.
      - bayindirh 3y ago
        Brain prefers longer lines with less next-line jumps, but people are used otherwise, so they overwork their brain while trying to keep their eye muscles happy.
        ziml77 3y ago
        Where are you pulling this info you're stating like fact from? I can say for sure that it becomes harder for me to accurately jump to the next line of text the longer a line gets. Sometimes missing a line or starting the same line again even makes sense for a handful of words so it's not immediately obvious that I've messed up finding the start of the correct line.
        bayindirh 3y ago
        Let me see if I can find the study I've read quite a while ago. Will link or write another reply if I can succeed. I have no time to look at it right away.
      - ehnto 3y ago
        This kind of thing has been an issue for long before computers. Typesetting in newspapers also needed to use line width constraints for better readability. That's why long newspieces are often split across multiple columns. I have never heard if someone who prefers one long line so that's interesting!
    - verve_rat 3y ago
      On sites with a long line length I will often pop open the dev tools so I can drag them across and squish the page without resizing the whole window. If long line length was common then browsers would have a similar feature built-in.
      - account42 3y ago
        > If long line length was common then browsers would have a similar feature built-in. I wouldn't be so sure. It was common for a long time (and still is on older sites) and browsers never got that feature. They also haven't bothered with a dark/light mode switch even though that is a much simpler feature since the setting is already there.
  - cykros 3y ago
    I think the inclusion of the scroll wheel on modern mice helped fuel this trend. Scrolling was a lot more onerous when you only had 2 (or 1!) button mice, and you had to actually go navigate to the scrollbar in order to scroll (or switch to your keyboard and use the page up/down keys). The other thing in this vein that is annoying is when scroll bars are so small users don't notice the content in the pane they're viewing can scroll, and will then claim the content isn't there. It is -- you just have to scroll for it. But you can hardly be blamed for not knowing that, because some moron decided to play hide and seek with the content.
    - Pannoniae 3y ago
      100% agreed. It also doesn't help how modern programs hide/minimise the scroll bar, so you can't accurately judge the size of the content and where you are in it.
- dspillett 3y ago
  > some modern sensibilities are still there like the narrow layout I prefer that be left to me to size the column for my reading preference, by setting browser size accordingly, though I appreciate a great many users browse full-screen at all times and designers need to account for that lest they be blamed for the users choices.
  - account42 3y ago
    If you make users resize the browser window to make a single column of text comfortable to read then websites with multiple columns or sidebar will be cramped. Unfortunately there is no setting to communicate text width preference without also limiting the total viewport space so websites are left to make their own assumptions.
    - dspillett 3y ago
      The design considerations for a single column and multiple are quite different though – no need to not do something for one because of the existence of the other. > Unfortunately there is no setting to communicate text width preference Many sites have an explicit dark/light mode toggle, either instead of or as well as respecting prefers-color-scheme. Perhaps a “constrain width” toggle could similarly be implemented.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > some modern sensibilities are still there like the narrow layout Yes, this is also horrible.
baal80spam 3y ago
I love it. It's so snappy and colourful - brings back memories. Nowadays most websites are cut from a template which is as boring as design can get.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  > Nowadays most websites are cut from a template which is as boring as design can get. We need to be efficient, please. Who cares if everyone is using it. Faster we tick all the boxes, the better. So we can get a new sheet of unticked todo list. /s.
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  We need more toys so sometimes instead of posting a drawing or an essay, I build little toy websites, e.g. https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io or the footer on days.sonnet.io The traffic might be low for some/most of them, but then the interactions with people who found me through them are so much more interesting and meaningful
susam 3y ago
One of the things I like from the (g)olden days of the web is how navigation links always had text. They could be accompanied with images or icons (like it is on this website) but the text would definitely be there, often below the icons and sometimes beside them. Nowadays, more and more websites are moving towards replacing the text links with icons. And some of these icons are so simple and abstract that sometimes it is hard to tell what they even mean! For example, the default GMail web interface once had simple text buttons with options like "Archive", "Report Spam", "Delete", etc. Now it has tiny icons instead. While the bin icon is probably obvious to everyone (if not, it means "Delete"), there is an icon with a tiny down arrow in a tiny box that I would normally guess means "Download" but turns out it is "Archive" instead. There is another icon with a tiny right arrow in a tiny box. I would normally guess that means "Forward" but turns out it is "Move to". (Move to what? Move to a label!) GitHub too recently adopted this trend. It had very clear and obvious text navigation links earlier. Now we find little icons instead. One of them is an irregular but symmetrical hexagon with three line segments within it. Can you guess what it is? Turns out it is a badly drawn envelope that means "Notifications". There is another one with a little dot in a circle. Until I hovered over it to read its tooltip, I had no idea that it means "Issues"!
- cykros 3y ago
  You think it's bad; try working a phone support role where part of the job is helping people navigate around on your company's website. Sure, some of us get accustomed to the "hamburger" and "kebab" menus, but those are far from universally recognized terms. I blame Steve Jobs. "It's intuitive!" my foot. Even the idea that it's for screen economy on mobile devices doesn't make sense, because if these things are links, they either bring you somewhere else, or they expand something on your screen, presumably, over other content, or displacing other content. NO reason not to just have text that says "Menu" or "Settings."
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    The reason is because localization is expensive and tedious and discriminatory. Every instance of text needs to be dynamic. You can't just write "Text", you need to write "$text" (a variable) and have code that refers to a file containing that word in a given language to replace the variable with. It's tons of upkeep work, and you can never cover every single language known to man. An icon on the other hand? "icon.svg". Done. Ironically, in an effort to be global and inclusive we are throwing out all the languages and attempting to replace them with a single, universal iconography. I fucking hate this trend, but I can understand and respect why it happens. People are fucking lazy and this is the course of least resistance overall.
weinzierl 3y ago
One thing that struck me immediately is that while I remember the blinking GiFs as terribly annoying they seem tame compared to todays web without an ad-blocker.
- megalottachoc 3y ago
  Nice to know I'm not the only one seeing this. I'd happily trade the video ads of today for the HTML <blink> tag of old without any hesitation.
  - mxuribe 3y ago
    Agreed! Also, while i think i used it once and then never again (for no real reason), i remember there used to be some scripts, or rather a suite of scripts named, like, Greasemonkey or GreaseScripts or something...that allowed you to block certain actions from happenineg on websites, as well as customize many other elements of your experience on websites...conceptually like web extensions can provide ad blocking nowadays...anyway, as i recall, some of these scripts/functions allowed for semi-blocking blink and other features that users might have found annoying...like i noted, i used it once since blink and other banner add-like things didn't bother me too much...but this and your comments here reminded me of that suite of scripts - and how much power they granted users within their browser and browsing experience.
Nux 3y ago
Works great in Dillo browser! SO FAST! :) PS: https doesn't work on Dillo for this web site, but thanks for not enforcing a http->https redirect!
shanghaikid 3y ago
what a page without javascript! What is missing? A <marquee /> tag !
mrobins 3y ago
I miss the “Under Construction” banners. It was ok to tell your visitors your site was a work in progress! (Also you generally had to publish and debug live.)
notorandit 3y ago
There is no trumpet winsock download nor a TUCOWS link. So it is not worth wasting your 28.8 modem power for it.
jonnycomputer 3y ago
Lately I've run across a few of these--perhaps through HN--and I couldn't help but feel that they all exaggerated the "feel" of a 90s website, more of a caricature of our stereotypes of the era than a recreation of what an actual indication of what most actual personal pages looked like (the non-blank ones anyway).
- floppydiskette 3y ago
  If anything, a lot of these sites are more readable and toned down than many of that era, considering they’re not using a blue bubble pattern background with bright red Comic Sans text and spinning gifs everywhere. It taps into the nostalgia but of course it’s never going to feel exactly the same.
recursive 3y ago
Amazing. Needs more canyon.mid
thomond 3y ago
Look at the source. All tables and center tags. The only javascript is for Google tag manager.
- endemic 3y ago
  “only”
bityard 3y ago
I'll admit I'm not totally sure what this is? Satire? Art project? It looks to me like what would happen if you tried to verbally describe some kind of fan-based web site from 1996 to someone else who hadn't experienced the web pre-Web 2.0, and then they went off and did their best with it. I will say, I did enjoy the web a lot more back when it felt more like a carnival than a shopping mall.
dannyphantom 3y ago
Very cool; thanks for sharing. I have had this saved as a bookmark for a few years now: https://archive.org/web/geocities.php https://archive.org/web/geocities.php There is just so much there that it's fun to come back to every now and then to poke around and see what you find.

102 points by theden 3y ago

I love it. Note that despite a good attempt to use the aesthetic of the time, some modern sensibilities are still there like the narrow layout (I was in there in the late 90s and we used all the screen because the resolution on a 15" monitor -if you were lucky- wasn't that great).

Pannoniae 3y ago
Modern sensibilities like narrow layouts are I feel like a massive downgrade compared to full-width (or almost full-width) layouts. If the user wants less text, they can just resize the browser window, it's simple. But with those layouts, the text takes up way more vertical space than what's needed, even if you have a large screen, leading to lots of scrolling. HN has a good layout - there are some (quite small) margins but it otherwise uses most of your screen. More websites should follow this pattern, IMO.
- tgv 3y ago
  There comes a point where the eye has trouble jumping to the start of the next line. It probably differs per style (space between lines, font, contrast, etc.), but long paragraphs will be troublesome. Requiring the user to resize the window is not a great alternative, IMO. It feels cumbersome, and people with many tabs will hate it. And doesn't work on mobile devices.
  - Pannoniae 3y ago
    Dunno, I feel the opposite way. It's comfortable for me to read one line for longer, then to jump to the next one. I think this is just "what you are used to" - I don't see how either are inherently better or more comfortable to read.
    - bayindirh 3y ago
      Brain prefers longer lines with less next-line jumps, but people are used otherwise, so they overwork their brain while trying to keep their eye muscles happy.
      - ziml77 3y ago
        Where are you pulling this info you're stating like fact from? I can say for sure that it becomes harder for me to accurately jump to the next line of text the longer a line gets. Sometimes missing a line or starting the same line again even makes sense for a handful of words so it's not immediately obvious that I've messed up finding the start of the correct line.
        bayindirh 3y ago
        Let me see if I can find the study I've read quite a while ago. Will link or write another reply if I can succeed. I have no time to look at it right away.
    - ehnto 3y ago
      This kind of thing has been an issue for long before computers. Typesetting in newspapers also needed to use line width constraints for better readability. That's why long newspieces are often split across multiple columns. I have never heard if someone who prefers one long line so that's interesting!
  - verve_rat 3y ago
    On sites with a long line length I will often pop open the dev tools so I can drag them across and squish the page without resizing the whole window. If long line length was common then browsers would have a similar feature built-in.
    - account42 3y ago
      > If long line length was common then browsers would have a similar feature built-in. I wouldn't be so sure. It was common for a long time (and still is on older sites) and browsers never got that feature. They also haven't bothered with a dark/light mode switch even though that is a much simpler feature since the setting is already there.
- cykros 3y ago
  I think the inclusion of the scroll wheel on modern mice helped fuel this trend. Scrolling was a lot more onerous when you only had 2 (or 1!) button mice, and you had to actually go navigate to the scrollbar in order to scroll (or switch to your keyboard and use the page up/down keys). The other thing in this vein that is annoying is when scroll bars are so small users don't notice the content in the pane they're viewing can scroll, and will then claim the content isn't there. It is -- you just have to scroll for it. But you can hardly be blamed for not knowing that, because some moron decided to play hide and seek with the content.
  - Pannoniae 3y ago
    100% agreed. It also doesn't help how modern programs hide/minimise the scroll bar, so you can't accurately judge the size of the content and where you are in it.
dspillett 3y ago
> some modern sensibilities are still there like the narrow layout I prefer that be left to me to size the column for my reading preference, by setting browser size accordingly, though I appreciate a great many users browse full-screen at all times and designers need to account for that lest they be blamed for the users choices.
- account42 3y ago
  If you make users resize the browser window to make a single column of text comfortable to read then websites with multiple columns or sidebar will be cramped. Unfortunately there is no setting to communicate text width preference without also limiting the total viewport space so websites are left to make their own assumptions.
  - dspillett 3y ago
    The design considerations for a single column and multiple are quite different though – no need to not do something for one because of the existence of the other. > Unfortunately there is no setting to communicate text width preference Many sites have an explicit dark/light mode toggle, either instead of or as well as respecting prefers-color-scheme. Perhaps a “constrain width” toggle could similarly be implemented.
JohnFen 3y ago
> some modern sensibilities are still there like the narrow layout Yes, this is also horrible.

baal80spam 3y ago

I love it. It's so snappy and colourful - brings back memories. Nowadays most websites are cut from a template which is as boring as design can get.

bayindirh 3y ago
> Nowadays most websites are cut from a template which is as boring as design can get. We need to be efficient, please. Who cares if everyone is using it. Faster we tick all the boxes, the better. So we can get a new sheet of unticked todo list. /s.
rpastuszak 3y ago
We need more toys so sometimes instead of posting a drawing or an essay, I build little toy websites, e.g. https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io or the footer on days.sonnet.io The traffic might be low for some/most of them, but then the interactions with people who found me through them are so much more interesting and meaningful

susam 3y ago

One of the things I like from the (g)olden days of the web is how navigation links always had text. They could be accompanied with images or icons (like it is on this website) but the text would definitely be there, often below the icons and sometimes beside them. Nowadays, more and more websites are moving towards replacing the text links with icons. And some of these icons are so simple and abstract that sometimes it is hard to tell what they even mean! For example, the default GMail web interface once had simple text buttons with options like "Archive", "Report Spam", "Delete", etc. Now it has tiny icons instead. While the bin icon is probably obvious to everyone (if not, it means "Delete"), there is an icon with a tiny down arrow in a tiny box that I would normally guess means "Download" but turns out it is "Archive" instead. There is another icon with a tiny right arrow in a tiny box. I would normally guess that means "Forward" but turns out it is "Move to". (Move to what? Move to a label!) GitHub too recently adopted this trend. It had very clear and obvious text navigation links earlier. Now we find little icons instead. One of them is an irregular but symmetrical hexagon with three line segments within it. Can you guess what it is? Turns out it is a badly drawn envelope that means "Notifications". There is another one with a little dot in a circle. Until I hovered over it to read its tooltip, I had no idea that it means "Issues"!

cykros 3y ago
You think it's bad; try working a phone support role where part of the job is helping people navigate around on your company's website. Sure, some of us get accustomed to the "hamburger" and "kebab" menus, but those are far from universally recognized terms. I blame Steve Jobs. "It's intuitive!" my foot. Even the idea that it's for screen economy on mobile devices doesn't make sense, because if these things are links, they either bring you somewhere else, or they expand something on your screen, presumably, over other content, or displacing other content. NO reason not to just have text that says "Menu" or "Settings."
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  The reason is because localization is expensive and tedious and discriminatory. Every instance of text needs to be dynamic. You can't just write "Text", you need to write "$text" (a variable) and have code that refers to a file containing that word in a given language to replace the variable with. It's tons of upkeep work, and you can never cover every single language known to man. An icon on the other hand? "icon.svg". Done. Ironically, in an effort to be global and inclusive we are throwing out all the languages and attempting to replace them with a single, universal iconography. I fucking hate this trend, but I can understand and respect why it happens. People are fucking lazy and this is the course of least resistance overall.

weinzierl 3y ago

One thing that struck me immediately is that while I remember the blinking GiFs as terribly annoying they seem tame compared to todays web without an ad-blocker.

megalottachoc 3y ago
Nice to know I'm not the only one seeing this. I'd happily trade the video ads of today for the HTML <blink> tag of old without any hesitation.
- mxuribe 3y ago
  Agreed! Also, while i think i used it once and then never again (for no real reason), i remember there used to be some scripts, or rather a suite of scripts named, like, Greasemonkey or GreaseScripts or something...that allowed you to block certain actions from happenineg on websites, as well as customize many other elements of your experience on websites...conceptually like web extensions can provide ad blocking nowadays...anyway, as i recall, some of these scripts/functions allowed for semi-blocking blink and other features that users might have found annoying...like i noted, i used it once since blink and other banner add-like things didn't bother me too much...but this and your comments here reminded me of that suite of scripts - and how much power they granted users within their browser and browsing experience.

Nux 3y ago

Works great in Dillo browser! SO FAST! :) PS: https doesn't work on Dillo for this web site, but thanks for not enforcing a http->https redirect!

shanghaikid 3y ago

what a page without javascript! What is missing? A <marquee /> tag !

mrobins 3y ago

I miss the “Under Construction” banners. It was ok to tell your visitors your site was a work in progress! (Also you generally had to publish and debug live.)

notorandit 3y ago

There is no trumpet winsock download nor a TUCOWS link. So it is not worth wasting your 28.8 modem power for it.

jonnycomputer 3y ago

Lately I've run across a few of these--perhaps through HN--and I couldn't help but feel that they all exaggerated the "feel" of a 90s website, more of a caricature of our stereotypes of the era than a recreation of what an actual indication of what most actual personal pages looked like (the non-blank ones anyway).

floppydiskette 3y ago
If anything, a lot of these sites are more readable and toned down than many of that era, considering they’re not using a blue bubble pattern background with bright red Comic Sans text and spinning gifs everywhere. It taps into the nostalgia but of course it’s never going to feel exactly the same.

recursive 3y ago

Amazing. Needs more canyon.mid

thomond 3y ago

Look at the source. All tables and center tags. The only javascript is for Google tag manager.

endemic 3y ago
“only”

bityard 3y ago

I'll admit I'm not totally sure what this is? Satire? Art project? It looks to me like what would happen if you tried to verbally describe some kind of fan-based web site from 1996 to someone else who hadn't experienced the web pre-Web 2.0, and then they went off and did their best with it. I will say, I did enjoy the web a lot more back when it felt more like a carnival than a shopping mall.

dannyphantom 3y ago

Very cool; thanks for sharing. I have had this saved as a bookmark for a few years now: https://archive.org/web/geocities.php https://archive.org/web/geocities.php There is just so much there that it's fun to come back to every now and then to poke around and see what you find.