

20 years old: Microsofts first website recreated - guardian5x
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/discover/1994/

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pavlov
One huge server-side imagemap. Yep, this is authentic 1994!

Whatever happened to imagemaps anyway? I guess they just went completely out
of fashion sometime around 1998. Before that, they were quite extensively used
to create webpages that resembled HyperCard at its simplest.

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wlesieutre
If you only use one image how will your navbar have JavaScript hover
substitutions?!

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ianstallings
Swap out huge images with each state highlighted of course. If we get really
fancy we can preload these images on body load.

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chrisbalt
Some good notes on its reconstruction can be found in the readme:
[http://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/discover/1994/readme.html](http://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/discover/1994/readme.html)

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daveslash
I checked the http headers - hoping to see them serving this up with a time
era webserver (EMWAC). Nope, IIS-8. Still, pretty neat.

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xxxmadraxxx
Gotta hand it to 'em. They've always had an eye for design.

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davidy123
Is it a coincidence it looks like a CD-ROM?

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usingpond
I'm going to keep asking every time a Microsoft website is posted:

Why don't they embed their fonts? Indifference? Laziness? Ineptitude?

Obviously I don't mean this retro landing page, just click through to any
other page of theirs. It's all Times and Arial.

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ianstallings
Why would they embed fonts that are standard on Windows? Chances are good you
already have the font. And if you don't use Windows, why would they care?

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usingpond
By that logic, Google should only care about their sites working in Chrome?

Also, any web developer should be thoroughly embarrassed if their
unintentionally have Times on their site. That is an unequivocal "something
got fucked up" error, especially because it means you didn't care enough to
make a fallback.

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ianstallings
See that doesn't really apply to basic fonts like Times and Arial though. If
you we were talking about rare fonts I can understand why you would want to
embed them. But with these two all systems will have an equivalent font to
render. For instance on Mac it will use Helvetica. On Linux it will probably
have Arial or Helvetica depending on user's choice. And this applies for every
OS I can think of.

What I'm saying is not that they should ignore user's but that it's probably
not an issue in the first place. They use basically boilerplate Serif and
Sans-Serif fonts.

