I found an Ask HN this morning about googling yourself, so I did. And found that my old personal site was proper broken.
No surprise, since it was written in Cold Fusion and built to run on Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 3, and thus relied heavily on document.all and such. So I fished most of it out of the wayback machine and taught it about document.getElementById() and some other things. I thought it might be fun to have a look back at what passed for cutting edge back in the day.
Surprisingly, many of the demos ran faster on a Pentium 1 running IE4 than they do today in Chrome or Firefox on the fastest machine you can buy.
I'll stick around to answer questions, though sadly I lost the source for the real-time networked version of the Joust game, so I won't be able to take anybody on head to head.
Quite impressive for 1998! As someone who's been doing it for so long, what are your feelings about where web tech currently is, and where it is headed? Did you expect it to be farther along at this point? Replaced entirely?
Developing for the browser feels very much the same now as it did then. Regardless of how "standard" everything claims to be these days, I still find myself coding separate paths for each browser (and platform) for anything remotely cutting edge.
If anything, it's worse in this respect. Back then you had two wildly divergent browsers you had to switch for, with their own way of doing pretty much everything. Now, while you only need switches for a handful of things, you need to support 20 combinations of browser/platform/input device. And every new way they try to standardize anything just adds another dimension you need to multiply by. (See mouse/touch/pointer events for an example) (or Audio vs WebAudio support across 11 iOS versions for another).
That's the gig we signed up for, though. I don't expect it to be any different in another 20 years.
This is kind of the answer that I expected, doing some web dev myself. It's sad, isn't it? One would think we would be solving _different_ problems 20 years later...
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 39.4 ms ] threadNo surprise, since it was written in Cold Fusion and built to run on Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 3, and thus relied heavily on document.all and such. So I fished most of it out of the wayback machine and taught it about document.getElementById() and some other things. I thought it might be fun to have a look back at what passed for cutting edge back in the day.
Surprisingly, many of the demos ran faster on a Pentium 1 running IE4 than they do today in Chrome or Firefox on the fastest machine you can buy.
I'll stick around to answer questions, though sadly I lost the source for the real-time networked version of the Joust game, so I won't be able to take anybody on head to head.
If anything, it's worse in this respect. Back then you had two wildly divergent browsers you had to switch for, with their own way of doing pretty much everything. Now, while you only need switches for a handful of things, you need to support 20 combinations of browser/platform/input device. And every new way they try to standardize anything just adds another dimension you need to multiply by. (See mouse/touch/pointer events for an example) (or Audio vs WebAudio support across 11 iOS versions for another).
That's the gig we signed up for, though. I don't expect it to be any different in another 20 years.
I was way guilty of that on my first site circa '96