It was a magical time, hearing the scrambling sound of your phone line connecting you to the Internet. Launching Netscape and staring at the throbber animation while...
My guy. In the 90’s ALL browsers were non-standard. Even at the protocol level.
http/0.9 - 1991
http/1.0 - 1996
http/1.1 - 1997
html/1.0 - 1991
html/2.0 - 1995 revised in 1996, and 97.
html/3.0 - 1997
html/4.0 - 1997 revised in 1998, 99, and 2000.
Then comes all the add-ons like flash, shockwave, etc… Nothing was standard at this time-frame. We threw everything possible into browsers. Toolbars for literally everything (I remember even having winamp controls in my browser).
Between 1991-1995, these were introduced with a try-and-see approach. A server and a browser would add a feature and see if it got traction.
Literally sites and browsers would just implement stuff just to implement and see if it became used.
A lot of recent times (2010’s mostly) has been back peddling the mad rush of just shoving EVERYTHING into browsers. Now I actually fear we’re going to far though… With google removing useful backend stuff for plugins and such. I just hope Firefox never follows suit.
About try and see - I actually liked the way it was with HTML 4.0 , Macromedia Flash, no JS and no CSS.
ADD:
I remember a Shaman King fansite where I would watch all its episodes in Flash in atrocious quality.
Would like to see something like Gemini, but with tables and other formatting being more customizable in the page, like it was back then. And a choice between a link that is just a link and a link that should be displayed inline if possible.
Lemme guess, one was super buggy and the other the best browser on websites using non-standard functionality of the latter.
My guy. In the 90’s ALL browsers were non-standard. Even at the protocol level. http/0.9 - 1991
http/1.0 - 1996
http/1.1 - 1997
html/1.0 - 1991 html/2.0 - 1995 revised in 1996, and 97. html/3.0 - 1997 html/4.0 - 1997 revised in 1998, 99, and 2000.
Then comes all the add-ons like flash, shockwave, etc… Nothing was standard at this time-frame. We threw everything possible into browsers. Toolbars for literally everything (I remember even having winamp controls in my browser).
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Evolution_of_HTTP
Literally sites and browsers would just implement stuff just to implement and see if it became used.
A lot of recent times (2010’s mostly) has been back peddling the mad rush of just shoving EVERYTHING into browsers. Now I actually fear we’re going to far though… With google removing useful backend stuff for plugins and such. I just hope Firefox never follows suit.
Hokay.
About try and see - I actually liked the way it was with HTML 4.0 , Macromedia Flash, no JS and no CSS.
ADD:
I remember a Shaman King fansite where I would watch all its episodes in Flash in atrocious quality.
Would like to see something like Gemini, but with tables and other formatting being more customizable in the page, like it was back then. And a choice between a link that is just a link and a link that should be displayed inline if possible.