- Horizontal scrolling because it isn't properly responsive.
- it doesn't reflow when the device orientation changes
- no sound (there's an audio control so I guess there's meant to be..)
- the audio control sits over the flags
- wildly different text sizes everywhere
- so much layout shift
- from an error loading the Korean version I think it's running on a platform that tracks what users do (serverside tracking is mostly fine in my opinion, and unavoidable really, but it's still tracking).
It's fun, and oddly similar to my first website actually, but I'll take the modern Web over this sort of nostalgia every time.
> - Horizontal scrolling because it isn't properly responsive.
It actually is properly responsive: it has horizontal scrolling on desktop too, and by just the exact amount, no matter what the window size is. (At least on FF.)
> it doesn't reflow when the device orientation changes
When you lift a CRT and turn it sideways, it is usually done because it's placed incorrectly (no "reflow" wanted). It's also unusual to attempt to read a website on it at the same time you are risking injury.
Same experience here. It loads instantly when 99% of the sites need 30s to 1 min to load. It looks decent on mobile (not too big, not too small). Contrast is good, fonts are readable. This guy should give web design lessons.
The only thing worse about this than whichever 2020-era website was the "Right click is disabled!" as I tried to leave. (That made me chuckle). The other stuff is just nostalgia and not really related to the degradation of web UX. Irrelevant gifs and ugly colors are easier to ignore than 1000-page cookie dialogs.
I don't believe it was done by a nostalgic person - rather someone who wasn't really there at the time and just wants to mock it. The things that were great then have nothing to do with the ones presented on that page.
For me it's not nostalgia, it's reality. I could not believe that in 2021 i will experience internet like in 1996 waiting for an image to load. But it seems that we are cursed.
Imgur was again an example of shitty design. I could not use iPhone’s quick look to check the screen shot. I had to open the page only to consent to all cookie usage, and after giving consent the image opened in the Imgur app. Why would it ask for consent again and again, and why didn’t it open the app immediately?
Someone once told me, “you will know what nostalgia truly is, when you see a younger generations nostalgia and think it’s still shit because you are too old for that to have been your childhood”.
The jQuery era is something I’d never want to go back to. Not because jQuery was bad, but because the basic DOM api was so poor, JavaScript was much more limited and incoherent, and webpages made anything outside of text input difficult (e.g. no voice, no gestures).
In this case I could alter that to: "You will know what nostalgia truly is, when you see a younger generations representation of nostalgia and you can point out all the anachronisms in it."
Netscape 3 and websites that looked like that: 1996
In 2006, I was reading [HTML, XHTML, and CSS Bible](https://www.amazon.com/HTML-XHTML-CSS-Bible-3rd/dp/076455739...), which was new-ish at the time and using Netscape as a daily browser, building sites using GeoCities. There were precursors to jQuery (cssQuery, for instance) that made it possible to do some things that Flash was too heavy for but you couldn't do in pure CSS.
And you bet your ass we were still building flashy, wild sorts of sites like that. Still do! Absolutely go check out stuff like Neocities.
Huh. When I read that I assumed Blink referred to the <blink> tag, but reading again you might actually be right that it means Google's browser engine. Truly anachronistic indeed.
Sprinkling a little jQuery in a page to add interactive menus and AJAXify some form submissions was quite nice.
What I don't miss from the jQuery times is how painfully limited CSS was, e.g. to add rounded corners to an element (e.g. a button) required something like 11 nested elements (4 corners + 4 edges + 3 rows to contain them). The corners themselves needed image files: to support different background colours you could either use GIFs with transparent backgrounds, but they appeared "jagged" due to aliasing; you could use PNGs which support an whole alpha channel, but lose IE support; or you could create a bunch of different versions for each occasion.
I remember when web pages looked like that... and it was AFTER I started making websites. I was scrolling through this page thinking "this stuff is too new, look at all these advanced features it's using". Flaming text? That's like 1999, practically cutting-edge! hahah :)
Hey why is it that all these sites are always about how the old web was good and we should make things like the old web, but the only thing they ever make is stuff about how we should make things like the old web.
I mean I would expect them to after making the first site suggesting you do it like this, to make a number of sites showing the aesthetic put to other subjects of interest. Like, Carl's Icosahedron Spot on the WEB might be an example site but no.
It's almost like they don't have anything else to say but make it like it used to be.
So many people make websites that basically look like they are from the 90's (though without all the animated GIFs haha), and use basic features without any strictly-modern stuff. These are just a few off the top of my head:
I stumbled across this one recently, from their Please Read at Least Once:
"A word about the philosophy of this site: These pages are declared to be a fluff-free zone! There will be no unnecessary, superfluous, or useless graphics of any kind - including but not limited to: dancing, gyrating, or other animated icons, colored textured backgrounds that are impossible to read through, or forced downloading of bit intense pictures that may be of no interest to you. Nor, will I ever expect you to use a particular brand of Web browser to be able to effectively access these pages. There are and never will be any advertisements, cookies, or other impositions on your time and space. In the time that it may take wading through a single monstrosity of the professional Web page designers at other sites, you will be able to find out what you want to know, when you want to know it! What a concept. :-) (Note, however, that your browser needs to be configured properly to make sense of the many ASCII diagrams, schematics, and tables. See the document: Suggested Browser Settings for font and other related information.)"
You might notice that the author of the website orignaly included a link section to a crapload of inspirations. Unfortunately CORS policy will block this section on most up to date browsers.
Thanks to Firefox devtools and a bit of quik & dirty regexp here is this list ;)
What people miss isn't the thing, it's the feeling that the thing was novel, exciting, and good enough to be appreciated. People stayed up late creating these quirky little sites full of copy-pasted GIFs and cursor trails and felt proud of them. In retrospect it feels like a simpler and less self-conscious time. I'm not sure if it really was, though. For example, the "under construction" convention was basically a way to say "don't judge my website too harshly."
It's like they got things reversed. What I miss about old web dev is the simplicity of the tooling: no complex build systems, "CI" was just uploading your changes via FTP (maybe using something like Dreamweaver's features for keeping track of which files you've edited), and basically zero server config.
What I love about the web now is the rich features of modern HTML, CSS, and JS. I no longer spend my days debugging weird browser quirks. What I hate most are the fragile build and server environments.
I think the point wasn't that jquery was old, but it was way too new for the rest of the page. Everything on it screams mid 90s, and then jquery which is a good 10 years later.
I guess the point is to make you feel something different, to explore and try to figure the website out. I remember accessing the "hack websites" with black background and red texts in comic sans while thinking "is it a dangerous website?" haha. Today we mostly take some template because it's "cost-efficient" and end up all looking the same with flat design, call to actions everywhere "buy" "talk to sales" "schedule demo", chat on the right bottom corner and so on.
When I wrote my last website (https://kakugo.ch) I factored in how to balance in trying to making it interesting yet presentable for the everyday audience. I don't know if I achieved that but I tried. A few things one can notice there: two easter eggs, a text written from the heart and some peculiar images. If you also have any more ideas, let me know, thanks :)
Recently I've also stumbled upon three.js which is awesome to build sites like this https://bruno-simon.com/. 3D modeling for websites is pretty neat. As the owner of this website said "i like to build websites that look like videogames".
Readit News
It loads quick.
I saw no ads.
It was reasonable straight to the point: no explanation about this being grandmothers pie recipe or anything to that effect.
(In fact, if you consider the point of the website to be funny it is actually straight to the point.)
If it is fast, doesn't track me and provides the answers I need I can put up with some animations.
I'd say what we have today is far more problematic than a few animations.
Also, most surviving websites from that era aren't that bad when it comes to animation: use marginalia to search for food recipes and see what I mean.
- Horizontal scrolling because it isn't properly responsive.
- it doesn't reflow when the device orientation changes
- no sound (there's an audio control so I guess there's meant to be..)
- the audio control sits over the flags
- wildly different text sizes everywhere
- so much layout shift
- from an error loading the Korean version I think it's running on a platform that tracks what users do (serverside tracking is mostly fine in my opinion, and unavoidable really, but it's still tracking).
It's fun, and oddly similar to my first website actually, but I'll take the modern Web over this sort of nostalgia every time.
I still take this over:
- the noncompliant cookie warnings
- ... with >400 "partners" (yes, I have counted)
- works best in IE^HChrome
- 20 seconds loading
- written for Googlebot, instead of for a human like either the author or me. (Meaning it is bland, formula-driven.)
websites I often deal with as long as it provides the answers/entertainment I am looking for.
It actually is properly responsive: it has horizontal scrolling on desktop too, and by just the exact amount, no matter what the window size is. (At least on FF.)
Does anyone design sites for landscape any more?
When you lift a CRT and turn it sideways, it is usually done because it's placed incorrectly (no "reflow" wanted). It's also unusual to attempt to read a website on it at the same time you are risking injury.
https://twitter.com/NikkitaFTW
I would assume it's 'this girl', but I do agree
[1]: https://github.com/SaraVieira/make-frontend-shit-again/
I laughed when that popped up for me. A very authentic experience.
Does it have 400 "partners" too?
"27% of 3182K (at 1.5K/sec, 25:33 remaining)"
The jQuery era is something I’d never want to go back to. Not because jQuery was bad, but because the basic DOM api was so poor, JavaScript was much more limited and incoherent, and webpages made anything outside of text input difficult (e.g. no voice, no gestures).
Netscape 3 and websites that looked like that: 1996
Geocities: 1994-1999 (so far so good)
jQuery: 2006
Blink: 2013
That's what they're referring to in the page.
In 2006, I was reading [HTML, XHTML, and CSS Bible](https://www.amazon.com/HTML-XHTML-CSS-Bible-3rd/dp/076455739...), which was new-ish at the time and using Netscape as a daily browser, building sites using GeoCities. There were precursors to jQuery (cssQuery, for instance) that made it possible to do some things that Flash was too heavy for but you couldn't do in pure CSS.
And you bet your ass we were still building flashy, wild sorts of sites like that. Still do! Absolutely go check out stuff like Neocities.
... wait... I hope!
What I don't miss from the jQuery times is how painfully limited CSS was, e.g. to add rounded corners to an element (e.g. a button) required something like 11 nested elements (4 corners + 4 edges + 3 rows to contain them). The corners themselves needed image files: to support different background colours you could either use GIFs with transparent backgrounds, but they appeared "jagged" due to aliasing; you could use PNGs which support an whole alpha channel, but lose IE support; or you could create a bunch of different versions for each occasion.
I'm glad I do backend dev these days ;)
It's shit. I got a smirk out of seeing it again, but I just felt embarrassed for 1998 me.
I mean I would expect them to after making the first site suggesting you do it like this, to make a number of sites showing the aesthetic put to other subjects of interest. Like, Carl's Icosahedron Spot on the WEB might be an example site but no.
It's almost like they don't have anything else to say but make it like it used to be.
https://cblgh.org/
https://technomancy.us/list
https://alexschroeder.ch/
http://100r.co/site/about_us.html
https://dataswamp.org/~solene/
https://rgz.ee/
https://www.bsdly.net/~peter/
https://codevoid.de/
https://www.undeadly.org
https://compudanzas.net/
http://altexxanet.org/
http://sdf.org/
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
I stumbled across this one recently, from their Please Read at Least Once:
"A word about the philosophy of this site: These pages are declared to be a fluff-free zone! There will be no unnecessary, superfluous, or useless graphics of any kind - including but not limited to: dancing, gyrating, or other animated icons, colored textured backgrounds that are impossible to read through, or forced downloading of bit intense pictures that may be of no interest to you. Nor, will I ever expect you to use a particular brand of Web browser to be able to effectively access these pages. There are and never will be any advertisements, cookies, or other impositions on your time and space. In the time that it may take wading through a single monstrosity of the professional Web page designers at other sites, you will be able to find out what you want to know, when you want to know it! What a concept. :-) (Note, however, that your browser needs to be configured properly to make sense of the many ASCII diagrams, schematics, and tables. See the document: Suggested Browser Settings for font and other related information.)"
Thanks to Firefox devtools and a bit of quik & dirty regexp here is this list ;)
http://thatsthefinger.com/http://hooooooooo.com/http://tinytuba.com/http://cant-not-tweet-this.com/http://www.staggeringbeauty.com/http://eelslap.com/http://corndog.io/http://burymewithmymoney.com/http://www.trypap.com/http://www.fallingfalling.com/http://www.republiquedesmangues.fr/http://www.partridgegetslucky.com/http://weirdorconfusing.com/http://www.rrrgggbbb.com/http://www.koalastothemax.com/http://beesbeesbees.com/http://cat-bounce.com/http://r33b.net/http://www.sanger.dk/http://chrismckenzie.com/http://www.everydayim.com/http://endless.horse/http://corndogoncorndog.com/http://www.pointerpointer.com/http://www.ismycomputeron.com/http://ninjaflex.com/http://metaphorsofinfinity.com/http://imaninja.com/http://ihasabucket.com/http://iamawesome.com/http://www.electricboogiewoogie.com/http://unicodesnowmanforyou.com/http://www.wutdafuk.com/http://www.nullingthevoid.com/http://zombo.com/http://onemillionlols.com/http://pixelsfighting.com/http://www.ascii-middle-finger.com/http://buzzybuzz.biz/http://yeahlemons.com/http://www.1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111...http://fastcashmoneyplus.biz/http://space-turtles.rocks/http://rtr.hackedbygod.net/http://www.vape.horse/http://rayps.com/http://akrepnalan.com/http://terrorpigeon.us/http://paulvm.com/http://pudim.com.br/http://originalhampster.ytmnd.com/http://tacospin.comhttp://www.internetfortheday.com/http://www.akrepnalan.com/http://finger-frenzy.now.sh/http://www.oldversion.com/windows/netscape-3-04http://www.cutercounter.com/http://www.cutercounter.com/hit.php?id=10190&nd=6&style=10
https://districts.neocities.org/
It's almost all content and little "make the web old", yet it still draws on the old and fun aspect of the early internet.
What I love about the web now is the rich features of modern HTML, CSS, and JS. I no longer spend my days debugging weird browser quirks. What I hate most are the fragile build and server environments.
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> It's complicated on purpose btw, I wanted to do it in ReasonML and GraphQL but I didn't have time as this was done in an afternoon hackathon
And native DOM API as well.
When I wrote my last website (https://kakugo.ch) I factored in how to balance in trying to making it interesting yet presentable for the everyday audience. I don't know if I achieved that but I tried. A few things one can notice there: two easter eggs, a text written from the heart and some peculiar images. If you also have any more ideas, let me know, thanks :)
Recently I've also stumbled upon three.js which is awesome to build sites like this https://bruno-simon.com/. 3D modeling for websites is pretty neat. As the owner of this website said "i like to build websites that look like videogames".