4 ms·
Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
- bebna 14y agoThe best thing about old site designs is for me their small footprint. The whole payload of viaweb is 62.5kb, a nice size for fitting in the 64kbps of ISDN. Why do I think this is relevant today? In many countries like Germany for example it is common to have a mobile traffic upper limit around between 200mb and 512mb per month. After that you only get GPRS. Use your smartphone for a week with only 2G (53.6kbps), to get a feeling what many smartphone users here think about it: "It is better to have a Wifi ap in reach."
- Yaggo 14y agoThe irony is that nowadays we have better tools than ever to build small footprint sites, thanks to HTML5 & CSS3. We have versatile native HTML controls supporting styling; CSS gives us gradients, box-shadows, rounded borders, etc, eliminating the need for bitmaps. Why many sites are more bloated than ever is totally another story.
- untog 14y agoWhy many sites are more bloated than ever is totally another story. Because it isn't as important. If there were all the time in the world, we'd all be able to make our web sites as small as possible, but in reality, it's just not necessary. Yes, there are minorities of users that need it, and depending on what market you're in it could be important. But for most people it isn't.
- gdubs 14y agoIt's actually important in two major ways. First, conversion rates have been known to increase in correlation with site speed [1]. Second, mobile devices are often on terrible connections. 1: http://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/2010/03/31/firefox-page-load-speed-part-i/ http://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/2010/03/31/firefox-page-load...
- rhizome 14y agoI believe it has something to do with importing the 20 analytics dependencies required to appear SRS BSNS.
- mayank 14y agoHate to be pedantic, but "kbps" is actually kiloBITS per second, and including packet headers, it would take closer to 10 seconds on an ISDN line.
- lefinita 14y agosadly, the functionality not work anymore :(
- yuchi 14y agoThe logo it's an animated gif. That's awesome. The only animated gif I ever seen on a web site that actually is stylish.
- themckman 14y agoTook forever to animate for me. Had my face almost against my screen trying to see it change.
- ananthrk 14y agoDiscussions from an year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3462071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3462071
- themckman 14y agoHonestly, other than the blocky buttons and bullets, that's a very pleasing site to look at, even by today's standards.
- witek 14y agoIs this in response to another Yahoo buyout today? ;]
- asciimo 14y agoInteresting Morris Worm connection! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm
- apunic 14y agolooks like a mobile site from 2010
- jere 14y agoI'm surprised by how good the copy is. >Viaweb Store is the fastest, easiest way to open an online store. You create your site on our server, using nothing more than the browser you're using to read this page. So you can build a store and start taking orders in minutes. "Start taking orders in minutes" is better than the above the fold copy on shopify.com if you ask me.
- soheilpro 14y agoYeah! That's the first thing I noticed. I'm sure PG has written that.
- ghshephard 14y ago"Browsers then (IE 6 was still 3 years in the future) had few fonts and they weren't antialiased. If you wanted to make pages that looked good, you had to render display text as images." Ironically - Apple still does this on apple.com. Most of their large nice looking text is actually an image.
- serichsen 14y agoContinuous deployment! In your face, Agile! :)
- pjungwir 14y agoI remember Cybercash! They were no Stripe, to be sure, although I don't remember ever having problems with their functionality or reliability. I wonder what his issues were?