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There wasn’t much you could do honestly. CSS was created in 1999 but only the cutting edge version of browsers could support only link colors in 2000. The edi
by b3ing 2y ago
There wasn’t much you could do honestly.
CSS was created in 1999 but only the cutting edge version of browsers could support only link colors in 2000.
The editor was nothing but a text box, no WYSIWYG.
It was non-designers and people that were learning HTML putting something together.
There was no @font-face, so you could only reference fonts people might have on their computer.
On dialup you didn’t want to load too many images. So 1 background image that tiled 50 times would load fast.
You had to use nested tables to have any structure and again put that all in a text box with no live preview or WYSIWYG. And using tables you needed to understand to use transparent gifs to prevent it from not looking right.
Many people didn’t have image editors except MS Paint, so the graphics you got had to be grabbed from somewhere else.
PNG didn’t exist, I don’t think MS-Paint supported gif on windows 95 or 98, it might of not even supported jpg. It primarily supported bmp.
But with David Carson style of design (grunge design) or lack of traditional design in the mainstream for most of the 90s it kind of worked ok.
The tools were primitive, and skills were low.
- paradox460 2y agoNetscape composer was part of Netscape from 1997 on, and provided rudimentary wysiwyg GoLive was released and for sale in 1996 Adobe pagemill was around as early as 1994 And finally, WorldWideWeb, the first browser, had a built in WYSIWYG editor, from it's first version So to say WYSIWYG wasn't around is just flat wrong
- jordanb 2y agoA friend described that era (looking back from the 2010s) as the "amateur web". Another thing worth mentioning is nobody really had any idea how to be responsive. The technology for it barely worked (things like percent widths for table cells) but design professionals did not know how to deal with it at all. They all came from print. The only upside is that the number of possible screen resolutions were pretty small.
- malfist 2y agoNobody knew about responsive design because there was no such thing as responsive design at that point. There were no mobile phones, no css media queries and pretty much everyone was viewing your webpage in 800x600 screens. Hell, was float even around then? All I remember from that time was tables.
- jordanb 2y agoWhich is why I said: > The only upside is that the number of possible screen resolutions were pretty small. But there was 640, 800, 1024. Many websites would do fixed width 800px and then you'd have to scroll left at 640 or have big gutter margins at 1024.
- al_borland 2y agoOr they could not try and get fancy, and their page would work on all screen sizes, and still will today. Some headers and paragraph tags are all a lot of pages needed, and those always work, no matter the screen.
- paradox460 2y agoI don't particularly care to read a line of text that's 5000 pixels long
- j45 2y agoResponsiveness was possible for a good part of 2000-2010. Just wasn’t in style. Flash going away maybe helped boost it.
- sircastor 2y ago> The tools were primitive, and skills were low I agree 100%. If you were ignorant of crayons, you might ask why so many kindergarteners’ art pieces are done in colorful wax.
- tail_exchange 2y agoOh, but how I miss those days... The repeating gif background, using transparent images to separate table cells, the MS FrontPage or Flash menu buttons, the comic sans, the colored scrollbars, the marquees, scrolling status on the bottom of IE, the image links on the bottom of the page for "home" and "contact, the page view counter, JS alerts with welcome messages, and of course the huge collection of fugly gifs with the dancing banana... So nostalgic. Another thing that we didn't have back in the day was platforms. Nowadays, if you want a page, you either make an account on facebook, squarespace, shopify, etc. Back then there was no such thing, so you needed to learn html and build your website yourself.
- jachee 2y agoThe ever present notification that a page/site was "Under Construction", before we all realized that they're never "done'.
- gamepsys 2y agoThis idea that a website could be 'done' was very much part of the old mentality from software people that software had to be shipped on floppy disc or cd-rom, and you had no guaranteed patch ability after you shipped. The web 2.0 craze was largely about realizing how web is different than old cd-rom based distribution.
- thrownv7032g 2y agoFiguring out why your side menu gif was approx. 1 pixel off your header gif without a guide or an inspector was a high skill task
- ramses0 2y agoAlso, don't forget 256 color + dithering. AAALLSO don't forget the CRT and line-by-line image loading. Or wonder at the genius of progressive JPG that could render from blurry to clear instead. In some ways it's like the "sega sonic games needed crt-glow to look better". I distinctly remember the "dithered sky-cloud" background aesthetic, and in many ways you couldn't see or didn't notice the banding and dots as much because it wasn't 4K 80" TV's for $1000.
- o11c 2y ago> The editor was nothing but a text box, no WYSIWYG. Macromedia (RIP) Dreamweaver came out in 1997 and I was using it at school by ... 2003? I remember having to try to debug why someone's pages weren't working (it was because the filename contained a # ... and the MacOS9 permissions addon meant you could only edit files, not rename/delete them ...) (yes, OS X had come out, but nobody used it yet - upgrading your OS is a stupid idea. In fact I explicitly begged my parents to go out and buy Windows 2000 to avoid the crap that was XP for "my" first computer)
- timeon 2y agoAlso there was MS FrontPage. (I didn't use it!)
- Dwedit 2y agoAlso FrontPage Express, which was basically a UI for MSIE's built-in HTML editor.
- piva00 2y agoIt was yet another skill to make what Dreamweaver rendering looked like into what the browser would actually display. I can't recall if Dreamweaver changed rendering engines at some point but during the time I used it (1998-2002) the rendered page on it could look very different than what Netscape, IE4 and IE5 would actually render. What a trip to memory lane reading this whole thread, haha. These early days of the web were amazing for tinkerers, after I learned HTML it took me into learning CGI, webservers, networking, Linux, databases and so on just from trying to make a visitor counter display myself.
- Gooblebrai 2y agoWhat did they use to tile the image?
- mixmastamyk 2y agoThe browser did it automatically.