10 ms·

I Used Netscape Composer in 2024

170 points by 101008 2y ago

Dwedit 2y ago
Mozilla SeaMonkey still has the HTML editor (and has been updated within a year!). SeaMonkey is strange because it looks like it was pulled straight out of 1999, but still has a Modern version of FireFox in there, even with the F12 web developer tools, despite also having the historical version of those same web developer tools there too. If you want to test it out, make sure you install https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock-for-firefox-legacy/releases/tag/firefox-legacy-1.16.4.30 https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock-for-firefox-legacy/release... from there, because it won't show up in the extensions search.
- treve 2y ago
  It's awesome that this is still maintained. I'm curious what motivates the maintainers.
  - hnlmorg 2y ago
    Probably the fact they some people do still use it (likely themselves included).
- jjav 2y ago
  > Mozilla SeaMonkey still has the HTML editor (and has been updated within a year!) +1 to that. I still use SeaMonkey every time I need to edit HTML docs directly. Works great, haven't found anything better. (Admittedly haven't looked too hard for anything better because SeaMonkey works just fine.)
- GJim 2y ago
  > Mozilla SeaMonkey still has the HTML editor And I use it regularly. I quite often need to update some of our static web pages. Not only does SeaMonkey do the job well, I'm not aware of anything else remotely similar that is still maintained (admittedly I haven't looked in a while). Lightweight static HTML is a winner for many uses, and I'm honestly puzzled why there is so little of it remaining.
exodust 2y ago
It was meant for very basic pages as I found out the hard way. It would freeze up with even moderately complex table layouts. I used it for my first paid website build. With money made I bought an Iomega Zip Drive. I wonder where all the stuff I used back then is today. The plastic and metal scrap of late 20th century e-waste. Somewhere buried deep.
tkgally 2y ago
I used Netscape Composer and then the similar component of SeaMonkey to maintain several static websites from around 2000 to 2015 or so. They were a bit buggy, but I was able to make them work well enough, and they produced much cleaner code than the other WYSIWYG editors I tried at the time. I finally stopped using SeaMonkey when I felt the need to make my sites responsive. I now maintain my sites with a text editor and an FTP app, which work fine but feel like a step backward.
mproud 2y ago
Honestly, the web page he was aiming to design doesn’t seem all that ambitious.
- bonzini 2y ago
  I suppose that's why he tried? It's a 20 years old tool that was nowhere near "professional" editors like Dreamweaver or Fireworks.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
noufalibrahim 2y ago
Oh wow. <center> </center>. When it was easy to do this.
- sllabres 2y ago
  Yes and this was just on HN: https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/ https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/
  - spartanatreyu 2y ago
    Yeah, but that was less about centering in the web, and more about fonts in general tend to be made incorrectly which makes vertical centering hard everywhere, including the web.
    - sllabres 2y ago
      There where several topics around centering (horizontal and vertical) and of course much more detailed than a simple "center" But this [1] looks as something one would archive with a "center" back in the day. [1] https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/apple_sign_in_business@2x.webp?t=1713455735 https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/apple_sign_in_business@2x.w...
- Kwpolska 2y ago
  Horizontal centring was never hard in CSS, it's just `text-align: center` for inline elements and `margin: 0 auto` for block elements. It's vertical centering that was impossible for many years.
  - tarsinge 2y ago
    `margin: 0 auto` was harder than <center> for a lot of people back then.
  - shiomiru 2y ago
    > `margin: 0 auto` for block elements. margin: 0 auto adds an equal amount of margin to its left and right. This often does have the effect of getting the element centered, but may or may not be what you really need; e.g. it doesn't work if you need real margins, or if you want to nest aligned boxes. For center tags, browsers to this day use a separate vendor-prefixed property, e.g. text-align: -moz-center. It is still much easier to use than whatever margin/float/flexbox/grid hack standard CSS has come up with, but -moz-center seems to be doomed to an eternal life as a non-standard (albeit ubiquitous) property. (I remember that not so long ago even Google would set -moz-center on their search page. Such a great opportunity to standardize existing practice, left unexploited for 27 years and counting.)
weinzierl 2y ago
I used it in 1995 and that's how I learned HTML (CSS didn't exist yet). Today the BlueGriffon Editor[1] fulfills a similar purpose. At least that is what my daughter used in class. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueGriffon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueGriffon
- drooopy 2y ago
  Same here. Composer and to a lesser extend FrontPage Express taught me HTML and a bit of CSS back in 1997.
- zilti 2y ago
  Also, the Seamonkey composer (which is the direct descendant of the Netscape tool)
- dantondwa 2y ago
  But BlueGriffon is discontinued. Today, nothing that is actively maintained fulfills this purpose, except from SeaMonkey Composer. I wish there was a WYSIWYG editor that has CSS support and modern HTML.
jhoechtl 2y ago
In my opinion the paramount of create you own web site with one tool was reached with Dreamweaver 3
acherion 2y ago
I learnt HTML purely because I was sick of waiting for Netscape Composer to launch on my 80386 PC back in the mid nineties. It had an 85MB WD HDD and 4MB of ram, running Windows 3.1. Double-clicking on the Netscape Composer icon in Program Manager would cause my hard drive to thrash for a solid 5 minutes, before the screen would update with _some_ resemblance of a Netscape window. There's gotta be a better way to create web pages -- so I learnt HTML and was using notepad.exe to hand-craft my HTML pages. I would then copy them to disk (usually using ARJ.EXE to compress everything), and then go to school to use their internet connection to upload my pages to Geocities.
- bartread 2y ago
  > Netscape Composer to launch on my 80386 PC back in the mid nineties. It had an 85MB WD HDD and 4MB of ram, running Windows 3.1. Bleedin' Nora: that's certainly an optimistic system configuration for that application. I'm not surprised you lost patience with it. I remember using a real mixed bag of tools to create HTML in the late 90s/early 2000s. Started off with Notepad but stayed away from Communicator until I had a PC powerful enough to run it easily (early y2k). I also briefly tried exporting Word documents as HTML, which I think might have been new in Office 2000. This was a bad idea: the markup was hugely bloated, and images were primarily embedded as ActiveX objects that only looked good in IE, with heavily downscaled/coloured versions available for other browsers. Similar issues with Frontpage. But I found the markup generated by Composer to be pretty clean by the standards of the time, so developed a hybrid workflow where I'd rough out pages, along with their content, in composer, and then tweak the markup manually. I also remember finding a really nice text editor for working with web pages. It came free on a magazine cover CD and I wish I could remember what it was called [EDIT: it might have been HoTMetaL]. For editing raw HTML and JavaScript nothing could better it. It wasn't as good as VSCode + the right extensions today but, for the time, it was literally streets ahead. So I ended up using that + Composer for at least a couple of years, up until maybe 2002.
  - ogurechny 2y ago
    Word 97 has sensible export to basic HTML. No specific web page editing tools, but allows conversion of text content of existing documents in bulk. Search for <META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="Microsoft Word 97"> Later versions of Office use HTML as some kind of complete document serialization format. The website http://mc-computing.com/HTML_Examples/html_Generators.htm http://mc-computing.com/HTML_Examples/html_Generators.htm reminds that there exist Microsoft's own clean-up tool (without doubt, an internal pet project which became essential), “Office 2000 HTML Filter”.
justsomehnguy 2y ago
> The result pretty much occupies the whole viewport, with no margin. I did not find a way to add margins or padding to the page's body in Netscape Composer. Should had just threw the contents in the table. Also, every time some idiot assumes my 43" 4k display in the landscape mode is just a strange 6" smartphone and renders the site with gigantic text with 35% of viewport width - I just really want to punch them in the face over TCP/IP. Please, don't be an asshole to your visitors, let them (and their devices) decide how to render the information you present to the whole world to see.
n0n0n4t0r 2y ago
With my best friend, in our teenage we used to maintain our website using Netscape composer. I'm very surprised that it came out this year because I believe we started our website maybe before 1997, but don't remember using another tool. It was pretty easy to use for childs with zero help at all from adults. But was crashing pretty often (so where many apps in this era). The hard part for childs was to host the website, hopefully, in France was had the free hosting association mygale.org I'm so sad my bestie deleted our website with no backup without asking me about. Those are fond memories that I'm pretty sure are the reason I because a developer.
- throwaway124219 2y ago
  I went to high school at the time (in Europe) and could create decent looking websites. I could have made a decent income from making web sites for businesses, but the idea of finding someone to host it on proper servers (with domain names) and actually sell and market it to customers were too foreign to me. Computers were expensive, so even if I found a place to host it for cheap, the machine was too much for my budget. You couldn't sell a website to a business and place it on Geocities... Looking back at it now, the only truly difficult part (for me) was the infrastructure. I have heard stories about people just cold calling a merchant and sell a quick "home page" for $500 + hosting fees within minutes, and just generated a static page from a template with a logo, name and contact details. It was a gold rush where the right people with the right skills could make easy money. Some of them were lucky enough to live in cities with local ISPs and hosted the sites on their personal PCs on a dial-up. People didn't expect much from the web at the time. I simply didn't have that kind of knowledge and risk taking ability at the time. My personal network did not contain any people who could have pointed me in the right direction either. I'm kind of envious of today's youth, because they seem to have a better awareness of the business side of things and easily available technologies.
- matthieucan 2y ago
  I feel you for the website deletion. Maybe you can find it on archive.org?
ulrikrasmussen 2y ago
Oh, how I miss the Windows 98 UI. It just now occurred to me how genius the use bevels was. When glancing at a window, it is immediately clear what cannot be interacted with (flat things), what can be clicked on (bevels outwards) and what is an input element (bevels inwards). It's like modern flat UIs completely ignore our species intuitive ability to perceive depth.
- prox 2y ago
  I am so bored with material design, a bit more skeuomorphic design here and there wouldn’t be so bad.
- drooopy 2y ago
  No kidding. UI design peaked with Windows 98/2000 and Mac OS 9.
  - edwcross 2y ago
    I think one of the major "sins" of those interfaces (that is still pervasive today) is the inability to select text on most labels. Back then, Google did not exist, but being able to select and copy the text on e.g. an error message is something that has since become very useful, and that's still not afforded by GUIs. Well, at least nowadays we can use ridiculous solutions such as normcap (taking a screenshot and OCRing it) to get such a basic feature.
    - 5- 2y ago
      you can (or could?) press ctrl-c in most windows dialogue boxes to get a nice text representation in your clipboard.
    - mbork_pl 2y ago
      My solution to this is to use Emacs whenever I can. (Almost) any text in Emacs is in some buffer, so you can usually mark (select) it, kill (cut) it etc.
    - Terr_ 2y ago
kome 2y ago
> I think the main thing I will remember about this experiment is: I had fun! It was a pleasant stroll down memory lane and a nice reminder of what HTML used to look like. I literally still edit html files and upload them with ftp. What do people do these days? ahah
- unsupp0rted 2y ago
  We render HTML using Javascript, which is itself rendered from PHP which is rendered on the back of a turtle
  - BlueTemplar 2y ago
    Ah, yes, TurtleOps !
  - kome 2y ago
    is this cloud?
  - NoGravitas 2y ago
    What is the turtle rendered on?
    - TheCleric 2y ago
      It's turtles all the way down.
unsupp0rted 2y ago
Netscape Composer! Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while. > I did not find a way to add margins or padding to the page's body in Netscape Composer. Full page width 3-column table, with your main content in the middle column?
- NoGravitas 2y ago
  That's the answer I thought of when I read the article. You can also probably adjust the column widths as percentages.
Sardtok 2y ago
Why use FileZilla for FTP, when browsers, including Netscape, had built-in FTP support? And I thought everyone knew smileys weren't part of Unicode until about a decade later.
- pmontra 2y ago
  If my memory is right, FileZilla could resume interrupted downloads, keep downloads going on from multiple sites, store credentials, etc. Browsers had the functionality but it was more conveniently organized in FileZilla and similar tools. There were a zillion of download managers of all sorts, maybe still today but I'm not using them much anymore.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    Oh man, the awesomeness is resume-able downloads... I dimly recall using "GetRight" [0]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GetRight https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GetRight
laurieg 2y ago
There's a local weightlifting gym near me that has a website line this. Checking the source it looks like it was produced with done obscure site builder and it's hosted on the owner's ISP hosting. The html is simple but functional. The color choice is a bit garish. But I love it. It loads quickly, it's always up to date and tells you exactly what you need to know. When is the gym open, where is the gym, how much does it cost. Done. I feel we've lost this kind of experience on the modern web.
- deely3 2y ago
  It works fine on mobile? Then thats a win.
- sitzkrieg 2y ago
  nah, i think that site needs to be a SPA of several megs of js so it pauses for a while on mobile before opening a modal welcoming me to their website with a full side bar of navigation links that fade in the new info before breaking and requiring refreshes for some sections of info to load because too many xhr that would be way cooler than a usable website
pavlov 2y ago
> “So, how was it to use a WYSIWYG web page editor from over 20 years ago? Quite pleasant, actually.” The dirty secret of web apps is that we’ve mostly gone backwards in usability compared to native desktop apps from 25 years ago. Web apps are a mishmash of paradigms. Pieces of desktop UI are reproduced using a woefully limited framework inside a static request-based page navigation model. The user never quite knows whether an action will trigger a multi-second page refresh, whether the back button does anything useful, etc. Desktop UIs had professionally designed human interface guidelines based on decades of actual research. On the web, designers are primarily graphics artists who pick fonts and pride on making buttons look like nobody else’s buttons. Icons are nowadays tiny monochrome line scribbles without labels. Just pray there are tooltips so you can figure out what happens if you press one of these icon buttons in a web app. (Or maybe it’s just an icon and not a button? No way of knowing, since the conventions that made buttons obvious have been thrown away.) The web is the worst application delivery platform of the past 30 years, so of course it’s the one we got stuck with. Worse often wins by its simplicity and ubiquity. Everybody could author a HTML page and some gradually built their skills towards apps. This review of old Netscape Composer reminds of how important that was.
- Valodim 2y ago
  This is a wildly pessimistic take, to the point it just reads like old man yelling at cloud
  - lostlogin 2y ago
    > yelling at cloud Yes, yes I am. Maybe it’ll work if I turn it off and on again.
  - layer8 2y ago
    General usability degradation is absolutely the experience of those who grew up before the smartphone revolution. Those who came later, one must presume, don’t know what they’re missing.
    - helf 2y ago
datascienced 2y ago
Want a margin? Nested tables
- cpach 2y ago
  Just like Hacker News :)
gnfargbl 2y ago
> discovering the "Insert Special Character" feature along the way (that I hoped would contain :smiley:) Heh, back then, "special characters" meant "characters you get in languages that aren't English but still use a mostly Latin alphabet". The characters in the screenshot look pretty much like the high-bit-set portion of ISO-8859-1. If you wanted the Forrest Gump smiley face, then you had to use Wingdings.
- layer8 2y ago
  It’s probably mostly the standard character entity references: https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html
franze 2y ago
I love the <center> tag. it works. always.
- hambos22 2y ago
  <center> is deprecated (near a decade though, browsers still support it) and it might not work in the near future https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/center https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ce...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dep_b 2y ago
I also liked the "I type a character and it appears immediately and in the order I typed it on my screen" feature older software used to have.
bitwize 2y ago
Remember when apps were designed to help the user get things done in them? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
masswerk 2y ago
I totally forgot about the HSPACE attribute. What a blast from the past! :-)
donatj 2y ago
My first non-geocities website was built entirely in Netscape Composer. Eventually I got frustrated with it's limitations and started editing the HTML myself. I later briefly switched to Microsoft Frontpage before eventually settling into basically always running HTML by hand. This is all documented in the news feed of the site that is still needlessly online.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ThinkBeat 2y ago
Microsoft Frontpage is where it is at. I wonder how many thousands website was created using Frontpage by folks who in general had no knowledge about html/css. I miss it.

170 points by 101008 2y ago

Mozilla SeaMonkey still has the HTML editor (and has been updated within a year!). SeaMonkey is strange because it looks like it was pulled straight out of 1999, but still has a Modern version of FireFox in there, even with the F12 web developer tools, despite also having the historical version of those same web developer tools there too. If you want to test it out, make sure you install https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock-for-firefox-legacy/releases/tag/firefox-legacy-1.16.4.30 https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock-for-firefox-legacy/release... from there, because it won't show up in the extensions search.

treve 2y ago
It's awesome that this is still maintained. I'm curious what motivates the maintainers.
- hnlmorg 2y ago
  Probably the fact they some people do still use it (likely themselves included).
jjav 2y ago
> Mozilla SeaMonkey still has the HTML editor (and has been updated within a year!) +1 to that. I still use SeaMonkey every time I need to edit HTML docs directly. Works great, haven't found anything better. (Admittedly haven't looked too hard for anything better because SeaMonkey works just fine.)
GJim 2y ago
> Mozilla SeaMonkey still has the HTML editor And I use it regularly. I quite often need to update some of our static web pages. Not only does SeaMonkey do the job well, I'm not aware of anything else remotely similar that is still maintained (admittedly I haven't looked in a while). Lightweight static HTML is a winner for many uses, and I'm honestly puzzled why there is so little of it remaining.

exodust 2y ago

It was meant for very basic pages as I found out the hard way. It would freeze up with even moderately complex table layouts. I used it for my first paid website build. With money made I bought an Iomega Zip Drive. I wonder where all the stuff I used back then is today. The plastic and metal scrap of late 20th century e-waste. Somewhere buried deep.

tkgally 2y ago

I used Netscape Composer and then the similar component of SeaMonkey to maintain several static websites from around 2000 to 2015 or so. They were a bit buggy, but I was able to make them work well enough, and they produced much cleaner code than the other WYSIWYG editors I tried at the time. I finally stopped using SeaMonkey when I felt the need to make my sites responsive. I now maintain my sites with a text editor and an FTP app, which work fine but feel like a step backward.

mproud 2y ago

Honestly, the web page he was aiming to design doesn’t seem all that ambitious.

bonzini 2y ago
I suppose that's why he tried? It's a 20 years old tool that was nowhere near "professional" editors like Dreamweaver or Fireworks.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

noufalibrahim 2y ago

Oh wow. <center> </center>. When it was easy to do this.

sllabres 2y ago
Yes and this was just on HN: https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/ https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/
- spartanatreyu 2y ago
  Yeah, but that was less about centering in the web, and more about fonts in general tend to be made incorrectly which makes vertical centering hard everywhere, including the web.
  - sllabres 2y ago
    There where several topics around centering (horizontal and vertical) and of course much more detailed than a simple "center" But this [1] looks as something one would archive with a "center" back in the day. [1] https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/apple_sign_in_business@2x.webp?t=1713455735 https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/apple_sign_in_business@2x.w...
Kwpolska 2y ago
Horizontal centring was never hard in CSS, it's just `text-align: center` for inline elements and `margin: 0 auto` for block elements. It's vertical centering that was impossible for many years.
- tarsinge 2y ago
  `margin: 0 auto` was harder than <center> for a lot of people back then.
- shiomiru 2y ago
  > `margin: 0 auto` for block elements. margin: 0 auto adds an equal amount of margin to its left and right. This often does have the effect of getting the element centered, but may or may not be what you really need; e.g. it doesn't work if you need real margins, or if you want to nest aligned boxes. For center tags, browsers to this day use a separate vendor-prefixed property, e.g. text-align: -moz-center. It is still much easier to use than whatever margin/float/flexbox/grid hack standard CSS has come up with, but -moz-center seems to be doomed to an eternal life as a non-standard (albeit ubiquitous) property. (I remember that not so long ago even Google would set -moz-center on their search page. Such a great opportunity to standardize existing practice, left unexploited for 27 years and counting.)

weinzierl 2y ago

I used it in 1995 and that's how I learned HTML (CSS didn't exist yet). Today the BlueGriffon Editor[1] fulfills a similar purpose. At least that is what my daughter used in class. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueGriffon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueGriffon

drooopy 2y ago
Same here. Composer and to a lesser extend FrontPage Express taught me HTML and a bit of CSS back in 1997.
zilti 2y ago
Also, the Seamonkey composer (which is the direct descendant of the Netscape tool)
dantondwa 2y ago
But BlueGriffon is discontinued. Today, nothing that is actively maintained fulfills this purpose, except from SeaMonkey Composer. I wish there was a WYSIWYG editor that has CSS support and modern HTML.

jhoechtl 2y ago

In my opinion the paramount of create you own web site with one tool was reached with Dreamweaver 3

acherion 2y ago

I learnt HTML purely because I was sick of waiting for Netscape Composer to launch on my 80386 PC back in the mid nineties. It had an 85MB WD HDD and 4MB of ram, running Windows 3.1. Double-clicking on the Netscape Composer icon in Program Manager would cause my hard drive to thrash for a solid 5 minutes, before the screen would update with _some_ resemblance of a Netscape window. There's gotta be a better way to create web pages -- so I learnt HTML and was using notepad.exe to hand-craft my HTML pages. I would then copy them to disk (usually using ARJ.EXE to compress everything), and then go to school to use their internet connection to upload my pages to Geocities.

bartread 2y ago
> Netscape Composer to launch on my 80386 PC back in the mid nineties. It had an 85MB WD HDD and 4MB of ram, running Windows 3.1. Bleedin' Nora: that's certainly an optimistic system configuration for that application. I'm not surprised you lost patience with it. I remember using a real mixed bag of tools to create HTML in the late 90s/early 2000s. Started off with Notepad but stayed away from Communicator until I had a PC powerful enough to run it easily (early y2k). I also briefly tried exporting Word documents as HTML, which I think might have been new in Office 2000. This was a bad idea: the markup was hugely bloated, and images were primarily embedded as ActiveX objects that only looked good in IE, with heavily downscaled/coloured versions available for other browsers. Similar issues with Frontpage. But I found the markup generated by Composer to be pretty clean by the standards of the time, so developed a hybrid workflow where I'd rough out pages, along with their content, in composer, and then tweak the markup manually. I also remember finding a really nice text editor for working with web pages. It came free on a magazine cover CD and I wish I could remember what it was called [EDIT: it might have been HoTMetaL]. For editing raw HTML and JavaScript nothing could better it. It wasn't as good as VSCode + the right extensions today but, for the time, it was literally streets ahead. So I ended up using that + Composer for at least a couple of years, up until maybe 2002.
- ogurechny 2y ago
  Word 97 has sensible export to basic HTML. No specific web page editing tools, but allows conversion of text content of existing documents in bulk. Search for <META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="Microsoft Word 97"> Later versions of Office use HTML as some kind of complete document serialization format. The website http://mc-computing.com/HTML_Examples/html_Generators.htm http://mc-computing.com/HTML_Examples/html_Generators.htm reminds that there exist Microsoft's own clean-up tool (without doubt, an internal pet project which became essential), “Office 2000 HTML Filter”.

justsomehnguy 2y ago

> The result pretty much occupies the whole viewport, with no margin. I did not find a way to add margins or padding to the page's body in Netscape Composer. Should had just threw the contents in the table. Also, every time some idiot assumes my 43" 4k display in the landscape mode is just a strange 6" smartphone and renders the site with gigantic text with 35% of viewport width - I just really want to punch them in the face over TCP/IP. Please, don't be an asshole to your visitors, let them (and their devices) decide how to render the information you present to the whole world to see.

n0n0n4t0r 2y ago

With my best friend, in our teenage we used to maintain our website using Netscape composer. I'm very surprised that it came out this year because I believe we started our website maybe before 1997, but don't remember using another tool. It was pretty easy to use for childs with zero help at all from adults. But was crashing pretty often (so where many apps in this era). The hard part for childs was to host the website, hopefully, in France was had the free hosting association mygale.org I'm so sad my bestie deleted our website with no backup without asking me about. Those are fond memories that I'm pretty sure are the reason I because a developer.

throwaway124219 2y ago
I went to high school at the time (in Europe) and could create decent looking websites. I could have made a decent income from making web sites for businesses, but the idea of finding someone to host it on proper servers (with domain names) and actually sell and market it to customers were too foreign to me. Computers were expensive, so even if I found a place to host it for cheap, the machine was too much for my budget. You couldn't sell a website to a business and place it on Geocities... Looking back at it now, the only truly difficult part (for me) was the infrastructure. I have heard stories about people just cold calling a merchant and sell a quick "home page" for $500 + hosting fees within minutes, and just generated a static page from a template with a logo, name and contact details. It was a gold rush where the right people with the right skills could make easy money. Some of them were lucky enough to live in cities with local ISPs and hosted the sites on their personal PCs on a dial-up. People didn't expect much from the web at the time. I simply didn't have that kind of knowledge and risk taking ability at the time. My personal network did not contain any people who could have pointed me in the right direction either. I'm kind of envious of today's youth, because they seem to have a better awareness of the business side of things and easily available technologies.
matthieucan 2y ago
I feel you for the website deletion. Maybe you can find it on archive.org?

ulrikrasmussen 2y ago

Oh, how I miss the Windows 98 UI. It just now occurred to me how genius the use bevels was. When glancing at a window, it is immediately clear what cannot be interacted with (flat things), what can be clicked on (bevels outwards) and what is an input element (bevels inwards). It's like modern flat UIs completely ignore our species intuitive ability to perceive depth.

prox 2y ago
I am so bored with material design, a bit more skeuomorphic design here and there wouldn’t be so bad.
drooopy 2y ago
No kidding. UI design peaked with Windows 98/2000 and Mac OS 9.
- edwcross 2y ago
  I think one of the major "sins" of those interfaces (that is still pervasive today) is the inability to select text on most labels. Back then, Google did not exist, but being able to select and copy the text on e.g. an error message is something that has since become very useful, and that's still not afforded by GUIs. Well, at least nowadays we can use ridiculous solutions such as normcap (taking a screenshot and OCRing it) to get such a basic feature.
  - 5- 2y ago
    you can (or could?) press ctrl-c in most windows dialogue boxes to get a nice text representation in your clipboard.
  - mbork_pl 2y ago
    My solution to this is to use Emacs whenever I can. (Almost) any text in Emacs is in some buffer, so you can usually mark (select) it, kill (cut) it etc.
  - Terr_ 2y ago

kome 2y ago

> I think the main thing I will remember about this experiment is: I had fun! It was a pleasant stroll down memory lane and a nice reminder of what HTML used to look like. I literally still edit html files and upload them with ftp. What do people do these days? ahah

unsupp0rted 2y ago
We render HTML using Javascript, which is itself rendered from PHP which is rendered on the back of a turtle
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  Ah, yes, TurtleOps !
- kome 2y ago
  is this cloud?
- NoGravitas 2y ago
  What is the turtle rendered on?
  - TheCleric 2y ago
    It's turtles all the way down.

unsupp0rted 2y ago

Netscape Composer! Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while. > I did not find a way to add margins or padding to the page's body in Netscape Composer. Full page width 3-column table, with your main content in the middle column?

NoGravitas 2y ago
That's the answer I thought of when I read the article. You can also probably adjust the column widths as percentages.

Sardtok 2y ago

Why use FileZilla for FTP, when browsers, including Netscape, had built-in FTP support? And I thought everyone knew smileys weren't part of Unicode until about a decade later.

pmontra 2y ago
If my memory is right, FileZilla could resume interrupted downloads, keep downloads going on from multiple sites, store credentials, etc. Browsers had the functionality but it was more conveniently organized in FileZilla and similar tools. There were a zillion of download managers of all sorts, maybe still today but I'm not using them much anymore.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  Oh man, the awesomeness is resume-able downloads... I dimly recall using "GetRight" [0]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GetRight https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GetRight

laurieg 2y ago

There's a local weightlifting gym near me that has a website line this. Checking the source it looks like it was produced with done obscure site builder and it's hosted on the owner's ISP hosting. The html is simple but functional. The color choice is a bit garish. But I love it. It loads quickly, it's always up to date and tells you exactly what you need to know. When is the gym open, where is the gym, how much does it cost. Done. I feel we've lost this kind of experience on the modern web.

deely3 2y ago
It works fine on mobile? Then thats a win.
sitzkrieg 2y ago
nah, i think that site needs to be a SPA of several megs of js so it pauses for a while on mobile before opening a modal welcoming me to their website with a full side bar of navigation links that fade in the new info before breaking and requiring refreshes for some sections of info to load because too many xhr that would be way cooler than a usable website

pavlov 2y ago

> “So, how was it to use a WYSIWYG web page editor from over 20 years ago? Quite pleasant, actually.” The dirty secret of web apps is that we’ve mostly gone backwards in usability compared to native desktop apps from 25 years ago. Web apps are a mishmash of paradigms. Pieces of desktop UI are reproduced using a woefully limited framework inside a static request-based page navigation model. The user never quite knows whether an action will trigger a multi-second page refresh, whether the back button does anything useful, etc. Desktop UIs had professionally designed human interface guidelines based on decades of actual research. On the web, designers are primarily graphics artists who pick fonts and pride on making buttons look like nobody else’s buttons. Icons are nowadays tiny monochrome line scribbles without labels. Just pray there are tooltips so you can figure out what happens if you press one of these icon buttons in a web app. (Or maybe it’s just an icon and not a button? No way of knowing, since the conventions that made buttons obvious have been thrown away.) The web is the worst application delivery platform of the past 30 years, so of course it’s the one we got stuck with. Worse often wins by its simplicity and ubiquity. Everybody could author a HTML page and some gradually built their skills towards apps. This review of old Netscape Composer reminds of how important that was.

Valodim 2y ago
This is a wildly pessimistic take, to the point it just reads like old man yelling at cloud
- lostlogin 2y ago
  > yelling at cloud Yes, yes I am. Maybe it’ll work if I turn it off and on again.
- layer8 2y ago
  General usability degradation is absolutely the experience of those who grew up before the smartphone revolution. Those who came later, one must presume, don’t know what they’re missing.
  - helf 2y ago

datascienced 2y ago

Want a margin? Nested tables

cpach 2y ago
Just like Hacker News :)

gnfargbl 2y ago

> discovering the "Insert Special Character" feature along the way (that I hoped would contain :smiley:) Heh, back then, "special characters" meant "characters you get in languages that aren't English but still use a mostly Latin alphabet". The characters in the screenshot look pretty much like the high-bit-set portion of ISO-8859-1. If you wanted the Forrest Gump smiley face, then you had to use Wingdings.

layer8 2y ago
It’s probably mostly the standard character entity references: https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html

franze 2y ago

I love the <center> tag. it works. always.

hambos22 2y ago
<center> is deprecated (near a decade though, browsers still support it) and it might not work in the near future https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/center https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ce...

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dep_b 2y ago

I also liked the "I type a character and it appears immediately and in the order I typed it on my screen" feature older software used to have.

bitwize 2y ago

Remember when apps were designed to help the user get things done in them? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

masswerk 2y ago

I totally forgot about the HSPACE attribute. What a blast from the past! :-)

donatj 2y ago

My first non-geocities website was built entirely in Netscape Composer. Eventually I got frustrated with it's limitations and started editing the HTML myself. I later briefly switched to Microsoft Frontpage before eventually settling into basically always running HTML by hand. This is all documented in the news feed of the site that is still needlessly online.

deleted 2y ago

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ThinkBeat 2y ago

Microsoft Frontpage is where it is at. I wonder how many thousands website was created using Frontpage by folks who in general had no knowledge about html/css. I miss it.