This is amazing, reminds me of a colleague's personal site: http://bitfission.com/. He built it as a bit of de-stressing after a really long work week many years ago dealing with a major AWS outage. I believe he even combed through the geocities archives to be historically accurate.
I seem to recall that Western or Latin-1 encoding was more common (or at least, Netscape would assume) than UTF-8 in 1995. This resulted in some sites not displaying Russian characters correctly when you visited a site that didn't specify the encoding. Manually setting the encoding at times would be required.
I always enjoy these old school style sites. DHTMLConf had a fun one a while back[0].
What is a little strange is that I'm starting to see these sites as fun and refreshing as opposed to annoying and obtrusive. I wonder if we are getting close to a flip in design tastes away from making UX as minimal as possible.
Yes, but as an adult I can also appreciate why things alluding to the time before I was born are funny. Marvels current target audience will probably not because most of them(not all) lack the required maturity at this stage in their lives.
- National Comics (the predecessor to DC) made Superman comics
- Fawcett Comics made Captain Marvel comics, inspired by Superman
- Fawcett's Captain Marvel and spinoffs became more popular than Superman
- National sued Fawcett, and in the lawsuit it came out that some Captain Marvel stories were direct copies of Superman stories with the characters swapped
- Fawcett settled the lawsuit and shut down Captain Marvel production
- Over a decade later, Marvel Comics started publishing their own Captain Marvel (a different character aside from the name) and got the trademark on the name
- DC, as successor to National, licensed and later bought out the Fawcett Captain Marvel, then added him to their own universe alongside Superman
That's how you get to a Marvel movie titled "Captain Marvel" featuring Captain Marvel, and a DC movie titled "Shazam!" featuring the other Captain Marvel, even though the now-DC one came first.
There's a fork in this history arising from the British publishing of Captain Marvel - i had a go at summarising the wikipedia entry [1], but gave up, because it's too bananas.
The gist is that when Captain Marvel was shut down, the British publisher came up with a knockoff called Marvelman, who then went through a comparable set of rights battles and name changes, becoming Captain Miracle, then Marvelman again, then Miracleman, then Man of Miracles (when eventually bought up by Marvel, weirdly enough).
Along the way, there was a really disturbing run in the '80s written by Alan Moore, which was out of print for years because of the rights battles, and also bits from Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison. Oh, and a villain called Young Nastyman, who turns up in a Tenacious D song.
Man of Miracles is actually another tangent, where Todd McFarlane, the guy who make the Spawn comics, incorrectly believed he'd purchased the Miracleman rights and featured the character in his comic, then had to pivot and retcon the character into something else entirely when sued by a new company formed by Gaiman to arrange republishing of the Moore/Gaiman/Morrison stories.
Interesting how even this throwback apparently requires JavaScript to run. Guess your devs couldn't stay away from the SPA setup for a single site then?
Wasn't javascript the main way to get moving elements in webpages? Here they're using css animations, which definitely weren't around in those days. So I guess the style is throwback, not the implementation...
I remember applets as often being fun but also a huge source of instability. On my family’s Mac in the mid-late 90s, any time we started playing Java applet games, Netscape and/or System 7.5 would inevitably seize up and we’d have to reboot. Applets and “Sorry, a system error has occurred” were almost synonymous.
Translating this kind of thinking back to the 90s it'd be something like, "I run random executables I get emailed." As all those browsers expose more and more hardware directly the security evaporates. It's already bad.
There’s a lot of Javascript on the Internet. If you disable it in your browser, there’s going to be some content you can’t use. It’s a trade off. Not every website has no-JS users designed in mind. I’m not defending the lack of accessibility. It’s just a reality at this point.
Of course. Not every application running in a browser is a website just because it runs in the browser. However, here we're talking about a very websitish website, with its websiteness even being the central point of its websitey existence... and yet it doesn't work as a website ;)
> I’m not defending the lack of accessibility. It’s just a reality at this point.
Some unrequested advice on ethics:
I really understand your pragmatism, but in defending the way things are at this point, you are indirectly defending the consequences, even if you don't directly support these consequences.
This sounds weirdly stern (we're talking about web development, not, say, the Middle East) but I think this applies to everything we do.
When you choose to use a tool or a technique because everyone else is doing it, you are endorsing the status quo and its harmful or positive side effects, to some degree. Defending the way things are right now isn't wrong by itself, but it is not a neutral action.
It is reality for businesses and large institutions. I can accept that they don't care about anything other than making (or saving) money which drives their managers to drive their coders to make shitty sites that encourage unsafe practices.
But when those same coders come home and defend the practice just because they have to do it for work I'm a bit confused. It shouldn't be controversial that this is a bad thing. I'd guess it's sunk costs type thinking.
Keep telling yourself that as more and more hardware and low level networking functionality is directly exposed due to the demands for 'apps' that can equal the abilities of native applications.
The browser security model is actually granular, as opposed to the desktop model of granting complete access upon running an app. Sensitive information like location or hardware access sits behind contextual permission prompts.
> The technical implementation details not being historically accurate don’t matter IMO.
Same, it doesn't matter. If anything, the fact that both this page and the movie itself use modern techniques to convey '95 style and setting just adds to the experience.
CRTs were very bad for your eyes - literally. There are laws for “monitor operators” here in Europe that used to be very strict about breaks every hour or so, with mandatory eye-healthchecks every few months and subsidies for glasses. Without the switch to flatscreens, I expect I would have been almost blind by now - the improvement was massive and noticeable.
I believe it, I used a CRT for the first time in years the other day and I couldn't believe how much I felt the eye fatigue. I don't want to know how much damage I did back in the day on those things.
Blank space at the bottom - just so when you page down through the page and reach the end, the last readable content would correctly shift up the same amount as the previous shift.
87 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] thread"Is anyone else concerned about Y2K?!?" :D
Viewing a real 1995 site on a mobile device is not as pleasant.
Я0XX0ЯZ!!1
I seem to recall that Western or Latin-1 encoding was more common (or at least, Netscape would assume) than UTF-8 in 1995. This resulted in some sites not displaying Russian characters correctly when you visited a site that didn't specify the encoding. Manually setting the encoding at times would be required.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1
What is a little strange is that I'm starting to see these sites as fun and refreshing as opposed to annoying and obtrusive. I wonder if we are getting close to a flip in design tastes away from making UX as minimal as possible.
[0] http://dhtmlconf.com
It's my first year as faculty and I already make cultural references that go over their heads. Not a good sign...
(NB: Look at the guest book)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Marvel_(Marvel_Comics)...
The version in the upcoming film is also called Ms. Marvel.
- National Comics (the predecessor to DC) made Superman comics
- Fawcett Comics made Captain Marvel comics, inspired by Superman
- Fawcett's Captain Marvel and spinoffs became more popular than Superman
- National sued Fawcett, and in the lawsuit it came out that some Captain Marvel stories were direct copies of Superman stories with the characters swapped
- Fawcett settled the lawsuit and shut down Captain Marvel production
- Over a decade later, Marvel Comics started publishing their own Captain Marvel (a different character aside from the name) and got the trademark on the name
- DC, as successor to National, licensed and later bought out the Fawcett Captain Marvel, then added him to their own universe alongside Superman
That's how you get to a Marvel movie titled "Captain Marvel" featuring Captain Marvel, and a DC movie titled "Shazam!" featuring the other Captain Marvel, even though the now-DC one came first.
The gist is that when Captain Marvel was shut down, the British publisher came up with a knockoff called Marvelman, who then went through a comparable set of rights battles and name changes, becoming Captain Miracle, then Marvelman again, then Miracleman, then Man of Miracles (when eventually bought up by Marvel, weirdly enough).
Along the way, there was a really disturbing run in the '80s written by Alan Moore, which was out of print for years because of the rights battles, and also bits from Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison. Oh, and a villain called Young Nastyman, who turns up in a Tenacious D song.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvelman#History
https://twitter.com/loriabys/status/1094032684630925312
Some unrequested advice on ethics:
I really understand your pragmatism, but in defending the way things are at this point, you are indirectly defending the consequences, even if you don't directly support these consequences.
This sounds weirdly stern (we're talking about web development, not, say, the Middle East) but I think this applies to everything we do.
When you choose to use a tool or a technique because everyone else is doing it, you are endorsing the status quo and its harmful or positive side effects, to some degree. Defending the way things are right now isn't wrong by itself, but it is not a neutral action.
But when those same coders come home and defend the practice just because they have to do it for work I'm a bit confused. It shouldn't be controversial that this is a bad thing. I'd guess it's sunk costs type thinking.
The technical implementation details not being historically accurate don’t matter IMO.
It’s about the aesthetics and the spirit.
I feel at home.
See also Prof. Dr. style which is related though a bit more toned down. http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/
Also, fun thing I noticed, if you google for <marquee> a part of the results page scrolls side to side, like marquee would!
I imagine you might be able to pull off <marquee> tags without additional markup, but I'm not sure.
https://nippy-candle.glitch.me
Same, it doesn't matter. If anything, the fact that both this page and the movie itself use modern techniques to convey '95 style and setting just adds to the experience.
https://www.warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm
PS: Plz join my webring ;)