Building a website like it's 1999

This is fantastic, but not fully in the spirit of the old web. Personal pages looked like they did because they were essentially outsider art: the product of experimentation by teenagers and rank amateurs, who had no idea what we were doing. In 1999 we were using Netscape Composer and FrontPage Express, because they came with our browsers and were fun to explore. Only a web professional could use these tricks today to simulate that appearance.<p>The click-and-drag tools and absolutely garbage code generators were integral to the experience, because they brought in the weirdos who didn&#x27;t know we were doing it wrong. We learned, but lost something along the way.

A few weeks ago I realized that my personal website from 1999 is still up and unchanged, just copied from one host to another:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;anioni.com&#x2F;pauli&#x2F;site1999&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;anioni.com&#x2F;pauli&#x2F;site1999&#x2F;</a><p>I made this when I was 19, before I changed career ambitions to programming. Maybe it’s moderately interesting as an actual 1999 website time capsule.<p>There’s no CSS because IIRC it didn’t work very well in Netscape 4. Layout was done with tables and frames. The front page looks oddly tiny now, but I guess it was the correct size on a 1024*768 screen. I remember being happy about coming up with a frame trick for vertically centering that menu box. (A classic web design conundrum!)

Marquee and blink are fun. Any site that removes them for the sake of accessibility is killing the whole idea of nostalgia and a 90s vibe.<p>Go out in the world. There is marquee and blinking text everywhere, on billboards, ads, and marquees. Put real life things on the web isn’t a crime.

&gt;For my next trick, I&#x27;m drawing inspiration from an OG 90s classic: Microsoft WordArt.<p>Not sure if this is widely known. But Scott Forstall co-created [1] WordArt during internship at Microsoft.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;natbro&#x2F;status&#x2F;1339600779531833344" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;natbro&#x2F;status&#x2F;1339600779531833344</a>

Ok you got me, I feel nostalgic. What strikes me most is that those people from 90th were putting their creativity into something only handful of people will ever see, they were effectively shouting to void.<p>I would love to be still able to discover low-ranging websites like this. I remember somebody shared some alternative search engine?

I think mmm.page[1] gets at a good 2022 model of this. People can create very personal websites without learning about HTML and those sites can be conveniently viewed on mobile.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mmm.page&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mmm.page&#x2F;</a>

I really like how I can switch styles in the top right corner.<p>I&#x27;m not necessarily nostalgic for the design from the &#x27;90&#x27;s web, but the openness and sometimes weirdness of personal sites&#x2F;blogs is something that I miss (and can really appreciate if I do find it).

Side rant: I have probably looked up more about this CLS (cumulative layout shift) thing that now I hate the word &quot;just&quot;. &quot;Just&quot; do this, &quot;just&quot; do that. Bollocks. Tomorrow it will be something else. There are already at least three ways to handle image width and height. It is easy they say. Use the first approach if the image is an important of the main subject of the page. Use the second approach if the image is purely decorative and not an integral to the main subject of the page. Use the third approach if you are an idiot (I made this part up because I forgot what the third one was for).<p>I see this website does not have width and height in all of its images. For example, in the image below, the author clearly knows the dimensions of the image are 1000px x 743px. However, they didn&#x27;t include the dimensions and the CLS is green under 0.1 (0.087 mobile and 0.045 desktop in my test [pagespeed]).<p>I opened developer tools in my firefox nightly browser, set throttling to GPRS, and disabled cache in my network tab and I reloaded the page.<p>I clearly see text push down as screenshots appear. So do width and height &#x2F; aspect ratio not matter any more (did they ever)? I absolutely hate feeling like an idiot because I can&#x27;t keep up with what matters and what does not.<p>&lt;pre&gt; &lt;figure&gt; &lt;picture&gt; &lt;source srcset=&quot;&#x2F;img&#x2F;blog&#x2F;build-1999&#x2F;geocities1.webp&quot; type=&quot;image&#x2F;webp&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;&#x2F;img&#x2F;blog&#x2F;build-1999&#x2F;geocities1.png&quot; alt=&quot;A brightly coloured website that says &#x27;Welcome to Tom &amp;amp; Sherry&#x27;s Proud Grandparents page. The Proud Grandparents page was created to show pictures of our grandchildren to family and friends, and an occasional Web surfer. The grandkids, our pride and joy, and their parents have made us very proud. Okay, let&#x27;s see the pictures!&#x27;&quot;&gt; &lt;&#x2F;picture&gt; &lt;figcaption&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;geocities.restorativland.org&#x2F;Heartland&#x2F;Ridge&#x2F;1217&#x2F;&quot;&gt;The" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;geocities.restorativland.org&#x2F;Heartland&#x2F;Ridge&#x2F;1217&#x2F;&quot;&gt;...</a> Proud Grandparents Page&lt;&#x2F;a&gt; &lt;&#x2F;figcaption&gt;&lt;&#x2F;figure&gt; &lt;&#x2F;pre&gt;<p>[pagespeed] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pagespeed.web.dev&#x2F;report?url=https%3A%2F%2Flocalghost.dev%2Fblog%2Fbuilding-a-website-like-it-s-1999-in-2022%2F&amp;form_factor=desktop" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pagespeed.web.dev&#x2F;report?url=https%3A%2F%2Flocalghos...</a>

Apart from the style &amp; aesthetic, there was this great &amp; glorious period of time on the web from around 1997 to 2004 (rough estimate) where broadband was was still rare enough the web designers had to assume slow dialup connections and at least try to keep page size low.<p>During this time, if you had broadband and a moderately fast computer, browsing the web lightning fast.<p>Then came the frameworks and, especially after smartphones, the adaptive web for small mobile-first(ish, or second or whatever) screen sizes and the bloat began. Previously you only had to worry about pages that dumped flash ads or used flash for every UI element, they were still slow. Then everything became about as slow as before.<p>I still think browsing is a bit faster than the dialup days, but not as fast as the golden age from &#x27;97-&#x27;04. It seems now that page loads sizes &amp; javascript CPU load expand at roughly the pave of computing power &amp; bandwidth availability.<p>Which means it&#x27;s a pretty awful experience for anyone on a low end computer w&#x2F; broadband that barely meets the definition.

I bet you some people got really annoyed when written language was standardized and people couldn&#x27;t simply spell things willy nilly using &quot;their creativity&quot;. Every time you read a book you are looking at thousands of years of typographical standardization, but you don&#x27;t lament the fact that they &quot;all look the same&quot;. In fact, if you took a book out of the library shelf and saw it was written in a weird font (i.e. papyrus) and with weird formatting, unless it was poetry you would put it right back and never touch it again. Same happens when you read a scientific paper and you see it&#x27;s clearly written with MS Word.<p>This fetishization of the &quot;old web&quot; initially works when you&#x27;re just browsing some terse blog or personal web page from people you don&#x27;t even know, but the moment you want to actually search for information on the web this style of websites immediately becomes annoying. There&#x27;s a reason why Wikipedia has kept basically the same layout since forever, because it works. If I want to know about medieval history I can navigate Wikipedia in a matter of seconds. On the other hand, good luck navigating through the same information from the personal blog of some retired medieval professor. And what if you want to switch topic and read stuff from another blog with a completely different layout? God help you.

You left out the Java applet or maybe a Perl script in &#x2F;cgi-bin.

I remember learning how to write html w my friend when we were in middle school. The hardest part was content. We decided just on lists of things we liked and didn’t like. I remember adding things to these lists was super fun and we put a lot of thought into what was there and why.

Incidentally, my homepage in 1999 was “localghost.net”.

Ah, back before the internet had soul. Ut&#x27;s definitely terrible design, but it&#x27;s preferrable over the soulless modern minimalist web

But you still can use HTML4 and it will work on modern browsers. That&#x27;s the best thing about the web - backward compatibility (until google steps in and does something silly). Use time appropriate image formats, like gif and jpeg, probably even bmp, and re-do navigation with iframes.

Late 90&#x27;s, I was using a website framework in a no-sql object database, with an outliner for coding.<p>There was a three pass rendering system, and I was writing with CSS, but in the final filter I was string replacing font-face in in place of the classes because or poor support in browsers.

Always gotta mention hypnospace when a post like this shows up :) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hypnospace.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hypnospace.net&#x2F;</a>

The 5KB to 10KB pages of that era appear more complex than minimalist 1MB pages of today. You could save 100 or even 200 webpages on a 1.4MB floppy disk.

&gt; And for a whole generation of internet users, having a website was the cool thing to do.<p>&quot;Cool&quot; - You guys weren&#x27;t getting bullied like me?

As long as it does what it intends to do, plain old HTML would suffice.

Super cool. Another popular addition was a visitor counter.

Maybe I missed it, but the css classes and styles in the examples, this was already available in 1999?

Made with Notepad

No visitor counter?

Frankly speaking I do not understand why a blog like yours is getting so many hits , whereas surely something like this written by me or 99 percent of the users in HN can never get such traction. I understand the reason for this is that you are somebody whereas we are nobodies. That’s why I don’t think that outside this niche of people who appreciate this idea it wound really take off. We are not going to wake up tomorrow to see the internet filled with 90s style websites. Those days are gone my friend.