4 ms·
20 years old: Microsofts first website recreated
- pavlov 12y agoOne huge server-side imagemap. Yep, this is authentic 1994! Whatever happened to imagemaps anyway? I guess they just went completely out of fashion sometime around 1998. Before that, they were quite extensively used to create webpages that resembled HyperCard at its simplest.
- wlesieutre 12y agoIf you only use one image how will your navbar have JavaScript hover substitutions?!
- ianstallings 12y agoSwap out huge images with each state highlighted of course. If we get really fancy we can preload these images on body load.
- dragonbonheur 12y agoSEO happened. Wasn't Google created in 1998?
- chrisbalt 12y agoSome good notes on its reconstruction can be found in the readme: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/discover/1994/readme.html http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/discover/1994/readme.html
- daveslash 12y agoI checked the http headers - hoping to see them serving this up with a time era webserver (EMWAC). Nope, IIS-8. Still, pretty neat.
- usingpond 12y agoI'm going to keep asking every time a Microsoft website is posted: Why don't they embed their fonts? Indifference? Laziness? Ineptitude? Obviously I don't mean this retro landing page, just click through to any other page of theirs. It's all Times and Arial.
- ianstallings 12y agoWhy would they embed fonts that are standard on Windows? Chances are good you already have the font. And if you don't use Windows, why would they care?
- usingpond 12y agoBy that logic, Google should only care about their sites working in Chrome? Also, any web developer should be thoroughly embarrassed if their unintentionally have Times on their site. That is an unequivocal "something got fucked up" error, especially because it means you didn't care enough to make a fallback.
- ianstallings 12y agoSee that doesn't really apply to basic fonts like Times and Arial though. If you we were talking about rare fonts I can understand why you would want to embed them. But with these two all systems will have an equivalent font to render. For instance on Mac it will use Helvetica. On Linux it will probably have Arial or Helvetica depending on user's choice. And this applies for every OS I can think of. What I'm saying is not that they should ignore user's but that it's probably not an issue in the first place. They use basically boilerplate Serif and Sans-Serif fonts.
- xxxmadraxxx 12y agoGotta hand it to 'em. They've always had an eye for design.
- davidy123 12y agoIs it a coincidence it looks like a CD-ROM?