
Show HN: My Personal Website from 1998 - jasonkester
http://www.jasonkester.com/
======
jasonkester
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.

------
elsurudo
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?

~~~
jasonkester
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.

~~~
elsurudo
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...

------
dpweb
..dhtml.. forgot about that term!
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=dhtml](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=dhtml)

------
matt_the_bass
What!? No <blink> tags? :)

I was way guilty of that on my first site circa '96

------
bdcravens
Was CF $50k then? I started in 1999, version 4, and I though standard was
sub-$1000 then

------
fiatjaf
The game is amazing.

------
w0m
... I like you.

------
fiftyacorn
we knew how to design sites back then

