I was just thinking about these the other day. The other thing that died off was "web rings". From back in the days when search engines were rubbish, so you'd have to find one site that was approximately what you were after, then click lots of links until eventually, at about 4 or 5 degrees of separation from the original search, you might find what you were originally looking for. I know, it seems barbaric now.<p>Reciprocal links between similar sites were much more important in those days. In fact, the web was generally a friendlier, less commercialised and siloed place, because cooperation between webmasters was the only way anyone would ever find your content.<p>What I find sad is that now Google is becoming more commercial and heavily gamed through SEO, the first page of results is increasingly likely to be full of links to buy a thing than information about that thing. And because there is much looser interlinking between sites now, it's a lot harder to find information any other way.
I started offering hosted guestbooks as a Perl CGI script, backed by a homegrown pipe-delimited text file database, in the 1990s. I moved them over to PHP and MySQL in 2002. 11,000 of those guestbooks are still linked from live websites, and about 600 have had people add new entries in the past year. I added reCAPTCHA a few years ago to keep the spam to a minimum, otherwise they look essentially the same as they did in the 1990s, with a variety of neon fonts on custom tiled background images. I plan to keep hosting them forever.
> "..this is one of those occasions where we should be thankful we've moved forward."<p>Have we _really_ moved forward?<p>In 20 years time, will today's parallax-scrolling, advert-laden, click-bait sites look any less ridiculous?<p>Rotating skulls have not gone away..they have just changed appearance!
Just like enjoying the delight of using Cool Retro Terminal (for short bursts) ... you too can turn any web page into a mid-90's geocity-alike unpleasant mess here: <a href="http://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/</a><p>Consider what it does to this HN discussion about Under Construction) <a href="http://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=1&music=3&url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12334868" rel="nofollow">http://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=...</a>
If you go to the guestbook [1], you'll find this gem: <i>You know, I would have hooked this up and made it work, but I'm scared of the horrors you monsters would write here.</i><p>1. <a href="http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/under-construction/guestbook.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/under-construction/guestboo...</a>
From the article:<p><i>> But the horrible truth is that this really was how these websites were. They all looked like this, every little one of the fuckers.</i><p>Well, no. Many websites did not bother to include all that stuff. But these didn't bother to do a lot of styling at all. Original browser style. Very ugly, but at least informative and not nearly as distracting as the sites described in the article.
I'd totally forgotten about the Book of Mozilla easter egg ('about:mozilla' in Firefox's url bar). Just re-checked, and yup it's still there, albeit a different text.
Article missed loads. Like the fact that a h1 would pretty much take up all the screen real estate back then because 800x600px resolution was luxurious back in the day. So no one used h1,h2 etc. They just bolded text instead for headings.<p>And used pixel fonts to get the font size down to a readable 10px to squeeze in text navigation where icons didn't cut the mustard.<p>Having said that the default grey background was there for a reason - it was a sane readable default. I find many modern sites still difficult on the eyes compared to their unstyled counterparts.<p>The lack of an underline and visited colour change on links disorientates me. It's all mystery meat navigation.<p>Mystery meat navigation is a whole other section of history missing. Some websites were made entirely in flash. Others just had a splash page. And many of these flash sites required you to hover and click about like a lunatic trying to find web content.<p>Oh the good old days...
Loved the office space reference. Marquee one of the feature I learnt which made others go crazy. Back in days it's all about HTML not about JavaScript.
This page should be the first site on the History of the WWW Webring.<p>Reminds me of the homepages I used to design with frames and image maps, wierdly-tiled backgrounds, and tons of <FONT> tags of course. Good times were had by all.
The best part is:<p>> (while writing this article, I discovered that if you Google for the phrase "blink tag", you get... well...)<p>You should definitely do this.
Status bar abuse. Back when web browsers (and most other applications) had a status bar across the bottom of the window, there was a JavaScript API that could manipulate the text displayed there. A common trick was to "scroll" a message in the status bar by constantly updating it with all the letters shifted to the left by one.
I got dizzy when looking at the bottom of the page where the space (stars etc..) background is used. I'm quite glad sites aren't made like that anymore. I also love to be reminded of the following:<p>"Moving items attract the visitors' eye. This is a well-established UX principle."
Well, some things don't change. Back then we had a ton of misinformation on poorly done personal home pages and fan sites, now have a ton of misinformation in poorly done news articles and social media posts.<p>Always fun to look and see which of the 226 different ways to get Mew a Pokemon site would post, or which of the equally large number of ways to get the Triforce in Ocarina of Time you'd see on a Zelda site.<p>Topsites were another big thing there too. Bit like webrings, except clicking on the button would vote the site you're on up the rankings and make it more likely to appear on others. These fell apart about as quickly as webrings did, especially when people gamed the hell out of them.<p>There was also:<p>Awkward Javascript animated objects moving around with the mouse cursor. Those were pretty big at one point.<p>The inevitable blink tags, which got so annoying that browsers dropped all support for them.<p>Jokey 'I agree to proceed to this site' splash pages, where the other link would send you to Google. Or perhaps something like the Barbie website.<p>Sites hotlinking to images and resources on other sites. Which then made a comeback for a while on Myspace, and still remains a large issue on internet forums. Bonus points if the original webmaster got so annoyed with the bandwidth costs, he replaced the image link with a porn picture instead.<p>Various awkward ways to try and 'block' right clicking, as if this could 'protect' the content from thieves.<p>Songs or sound effects playing in the background, which usually gave you quite a shock if you speakers were up and you moved to another site:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM1BJVN8zD0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM1BJVN8zD0</a><p>Various extremely basic HTML tutorials that basically said how to add bold text, italic text, underlined text, images and links.<p>Javascript used for 'password protection' (in the slightly later days). You can probably guess why this wasn't the best idea in the world.<p>Oh, and fanlistings. Where you had a big old list of people who liked something (a series, a game, a celebrity, a band, etc), and you could send an email with a name and contact address to be added to it.<p>It was certainly a different era then, though a surprising amount of stuff common then is actually still around. For example, this site still seems to offer webrings:<p><a href="http://www.webringworld.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.webringworld.org/</a><p>And sites like Bravenet still offer everything that was popular in 1996 or so.