
Web Dark Ages - jslakro
https://pavellaptev.github.io/web-dark-ages/
======
subir
Imo, those were the times of unbounded creativity. With the limited, primitive
tools, devs (webmasters?) of that era achieved great results.

A big chunk of modern websites lack character and look nearly the same to me.
I know - consistency, principle of least surprise, et al. Maybe it is just me,
but designing a website engaged more of my creative juices and certainly felt
like more fun 20y ago.

Say what you will about the Flash website boom of the early 2000s, creative
design did peak at the time. Discovering a new site and wowing over the unique
design and interactions is an experience lost in time.

------
datalus
Lately, I've been having thoughts about this a lot. I've yearned for a simpler
age in technology. I grew up on the internet around 96/97ish, mostly because I
wanted to play games over dial-up. In those formative years, I forged a
lifelong fascination with wanting to know how all (most? some?) of this
worked.

Things have changed a lot for me personally and for technology. In general, I
feel my enthusiasm has dwindled somewhat in the way tech's role has played out
in society. In my opinion the big "Web 2.0" and social rush was more about
bending the Internet to the wills of private enterprise rather then private
enterprise bending to the wills of the Internet. Or maybe I'm just an old
curmudgeon now, a salty junior level graybeard.

I do have hope, though. It's probably that my youthful enthusiasm has given
way to cautious optimism.

------
factorialboy
Some might say we are in the dark ages now. With the centralized web
representing the feudal structure.

------
ascotan
There's a lot missing from here but a pretty nice site.

\- Java applets

\- metacrawlers

\- IE conditional stylesheets

As a side note, I've never understood "tag clouds". They're definitely not
"dark ages" because they're still used unfortunately. I think they're the
intersection between business-speak gibberish and graphic design and the
represent the dangers of mixing product managers with graphic designers.

------
tomphoolery
haha "dark ages"...in my opinion, these were the GOOD TIMES! the only thing
you needed to know was HTML, and you could just "view source" and see how
everyone else was doing it.

but yeah...a lot of people got paid a lot of money to do things that are so
trivial nowadays, that there's a whole industry of workers who get paid to NOT
do them.

------
hnlmorg
Really enjoyed this but I feel it missed a trick at the end where it says:

    
    
       To be continued?
    

...to have an "under construction" GIF a la
[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CvHFU_zXEAAVUNd?format=jpg&name=...](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CvHFU_zXEAAVUNd?format=jpg&name=large)

~~~
sp332
[http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/](http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/)

------
buboard
Well they look like a lot of fun for dark ages. If anything that was the
spring of the web, nowadays things have moved to mobile and web is neglected.

And i dont get the hate for tables, they are really handy to center stuff
vertically/horizontally, and to scale an interface gracefully (e.g. image
column takes up 15% of width), in a way that 12-grid systems fail. HN is
tables.

One thing that responsive design does is it makes the zoom out/in gesture
useless, while tables can preserve that.

------
GekkePrutser
The aspect ratio is wrong for the 2 middle resolutions, really bothers me :D

PS: I don't think tables are a bad layout option. It's not as flexible as CSS
obviously but you could make it scale really well to vastly different UI sizes
with a combo of fixed and percentage based dimensions. Most "modern" sites
just dump everything in a column in the middle. And scale everything as if
everyone is on a fat-finger touch interface.

And I do miss the gradient button designs, I hate today's obsession with
flatness. Bt that's a matter of taste I suppose. Maybe I don't have any :)

PS It should realllly have mentioned the <marquee>!

~~~
duxup
I have to deal with table layouts now and then.

What css will work on what element of a table or won't work and why feels like
an endless rabbit hole for me.

------
basicallydan
I appreciate the celebration retrospective on what the web used to look like.
However I take issue with the name. Since this is Hacker News, I hope you're
okay with this kind of unimportant semantic argument.

From Wikipedia:

> The "Dark Ages" is a historical periodization traditionally referring to the
> Middle Ages (c. 5th–15th century) that asserts that a demographic, cultural,
> and economic deterioration occurred in Western Europe following the decline
> of the Roman Empire.

If you're trying to keep with how "Dark Age" I don't think the periods you're
referring to are at all "Dark". The cultural output of the web back then was
_massive_, novel, and growing. It's even more massive now, and growing at a
faster rate than before. Whether that output is quite as novel now is up for
debate, but what I'm saying is that if there is such a thing as a "Web Dark
Age", we haven't seen it yet.

Back then, it was the early days and things were still being worked out. It
wasn't a deterioration, since there was nothing to deteriorate.

Nonetheless, I like the website and it's a nice snapshot of some design trends
of the time.

------
danilocesar
You mean golden ages, right? </joke>

It's an exaggeration, I know. The web was visually unpleasant those days.
Techwise too. Flash?! IE-only? OGM... But almost all information was opened
and text-search-ready.

Now information is behind walls (facebook, google) and hidden in videos.
Websites lost control with amp-fication of the web, and we're seeing more and
more Chrome-only signs.

Ads? everywhere. I remember long time when people despised the idea of using a
computer with always-on ads display if it was cheaper. Now we have exactly
that.

The web did evolve, but mainly in the wrong direction.

------
shrew
The Web 2.0 section with the ultra shiny, shadowy buttons and stickers was
particularly amusing to see again.

I'm certainly glad a standardised way of handling custom fonts emerged though,
I remember SIFR being particularly painful.

That said, this site could almost do with a "Best viewed in Chrome" sticker,
as the removal of -webkit-font-smoothing does some weird things to text in
desktop Safari for me.

------
ImaCake
As a follow up on this website's name. What does "web dark age" mean to HN
people? I've seen political comments but no consensus yet.

For a long time I have thought of it as a period where all our data was stored
in decaying media that would be lost to future historians, much like the real
dark ages. My source for this idea comes from sci-fi author Charles Stross:

>In the future, the 20th century will be seen as a dark age — while previous
centuries left books and papers that are stable for centuries with proper
storage, many of the early analog recordings were stable enough to survive for
decades, but the digital media and magnetic tapes and optical disks of the
latter third of the 20th century decay in mere years. And if they don't decay,
they become unreadable: the original tapes of the slow-scan video from the
first moon landing, for example, appear to be missing, and the much lower
quality broadcast images are all that remain. So stability is important, and
I'm not even going to start on how we store data and metainformation
describing it.

From here: [https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2007/05/shaping...](https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2007/05/shaping-the-future.html)

~~~
dgb23
I had this discussion with my partner while hiking last weekend!

Our consensus was that the persistence of digital information is extremely
fragile compared to physical media and oral tradition.

This is kind of scary. Our biological niche is very much dependent on culture
and passing on information.

~~~
tannhaeuser
For the web as a medium it would be especially tragic since SGML (on what HTML
is based) is explicitly designed for long-term archival of digital text and
other media (gave a tutorial about preserving HTML sites using SGML just last
year [1]).

[1]: [http://sgmljs.net/docs/sgml-html-
tutorial.html](http://sgmljs.net/docs/sgml-html-tutorial.html)

------
irrational
This is missing the main reason we used Flash: it was basically the Java of
the web. Or maybe the jQuery of the web. Since no browser were standards
compliant (or rather every browser adhered to their own version of a standard)
writing web pages that were cross browser compatible was a pain (hence all the
Best Viewed in Netscape Navigator or IE messages). Flash, on the other hand,
took care of the cross-platform mess. You could use Flash and be reasonably
sure it would look and work the same on every browser and OS that had a Flash
player.

------
cromwellian
I’d say the real problem is that social media platforms became the predominant
publishing mechanism now. There was a time when millions of people had their
own home pages, and now they’ve been replaced with templated social network
posts.

Even tumblr and blogger were better in the sense that there was some diversity
and of course GeoCities while centralized, allowed people much greater content
control.

The Dark Ages are the fact that Twitter and public Facebook pages eT al, won’t
be backed up by Archive.org and decades of human culture will vanish one day
when these sites go the way of GeoCities.

The rising appification of everything behind app stores also mean the death of
content preservation. I can still load the first Web page ever published, I
can still run spacejam.com, but tens of thousands of 32bit apps have
disappeared from app stores never to be runnable again.

I can run 8bit and 16bit apps on emulators from my childhood, but can’t run
games I enjoyed on iOS just a few years ago. Death of culture.

------
a_t48
By Dark Ages, you mean Golden Age, right? (:

Bronze Age might be better, I guess. Nothing wrong with it, just a simpler
time.

------
TedDoesntTalk
What about sites that actively tried to prevent you from leaving their site?
Messing with the back button, browser history, modal dialogs...

~~~
jansan
And how about dialing malware that connected your modem to a very coslty phone
number. Was that a thing in other countries? in Germany quite a few people got
ripped off this way and I always disconnected my modem whenever I wasn't
online.

~~~
TedDoesntTalk
Interesting, I never heard of that before (I’m not in Germany)

------
mitch-snipline
Seeing those stickers and buttons definitely gave me flash backs (no pun
intended) to when I was first discovering the web.

I have vivid memories of making websites during secondary school. First for
free on Geocities and then later on my first paid hosting (Lycos if I recall
correctly) so that I could host my PHP projects. At some point I started
making websites and animations in Macromedia Flash and those glassy buttons
easy but cool to make at the time.

------
rvz
Adobe® Flash® Player != Adobe® Flash® 8/CS/CC (Authoring tools)

Those icons are for the Flash authoring tool which isn't the one being killed.
The _flash player_ is.

------
DarkWiiPlayer
Ironic, isn't it? Here we are, on a site that uses tables for layout, laughint
about using tables for layout...

~~~
pjc50
Unpopular opinion: there never was much wrong with the table layout, and
subsequent standards efforts never really managed to properly support a lot of
use-cases. You can still see people using display: table and display: table-
cell for exactly this reason.

Where's my vertically centered div? Where is my elastic newspaper column
layout? How much Javascript exists because people couldn't figure out how to
position things the way they wanted?

And many websites have the div version of the "table nightmare", especially
Facebook and Instagram. It's also popular to put a transparent div over images
to prevent people casually saving them.

~~~
DarkWiiPlayer
CSS Grid and Flex Box solve all of the use-cases of tables; it's only a matter
of browser support these days. For a page created 3 years ago, it might still
make sense to be using tables because some users are on older browsers, but
for any website created from now on, it gets harder and harder to justify
still using tables.

------
guerrilla
I really love this. Aside from the nostalgia, it was actually somewhat
relaxing to view this. It was just easier to pay attention to for some reason.
I wonder if the sterility and conformity of today has some measurable effect
on attention.

~~~
josephg
I suspect part of me knew I didn’t have to worry about a barrage of popovers
telling me about my cookie policy options, begging me to join the mailing list
or to install an app for some reason.

It was just content. Blissfully simple, visually compelling content.

------
stelonix
I thought this would be a post of what the web has become (big corp bubbles)
and what's to come in the next years, but was pleased to find a shout out to
90s web, specially since some 12 hours ago I was showing a friend how the web
looked like when she was just 2 years old.

And then I found some things I forgot to mention, like Guestbooks (wow) and
Sitemaps. Gonna tour her right now!

------
jccooper
I found it useful as well as entertaining. Convinced me to drop the "Home"
link in the header of one of my sites.

------
gglnx
Are sitemaps really dead? Still a good way to fulfill the WCAG requirement of
providing multiple ways to locate a page [1].

[1]
[https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/G63.html](https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/G63.html)

~~~
chrismorgan
Yes. “Site map” links in the footer of business or government sites are _much_
less common than they used to be, and those that are still there are regularly
just an auto-generated list of URLs or of links with their page names, which
in most cases is atrocious. The idea of it was that it present _structure_ ,
and be curated.

For most sites, I’d say the near-ubiquitous mega footer pattern has supplanted
the site map.

------
wackget
It's ironic that this site doesn't work without enabling third-party external
JavaScript.

------
amelius
Well done, but I think this should be called "Web _Design_ Dark Ages".

In a broader sense, I'd like to see sections on Altavista, Lycos, Geocities,
the rise and decline of Myspace and how Paypal and IE sucked.

~~~
flyinghamster
Not to mention the evolution of Google from "a better search engine than the
others" to "a lumbering behemoth that's competing with Facebook to gobble up
the web."

Or, conversely, the evolution of Facebook from "bulletin board system for
college students" to "a lumbering behemoth that's competing with Google to
gobble up the web."

------
TedDoesntTalk
JavaScript alert() boxes!

------
oedmarap
Very nostalgic, now all that's needed is a conspicuous <marquee> element
somewhere at the top, a custom cursor image, and background MIDI music.

~~~
classified
I had a large pink mouse cursor on one of the pages. So romantic. But, yea, no
MIDI music.

------
vladoh
Reminds me of my first website attempts... :-D

It is missing some <marquee> elements and flashing ad banners...

------
dreen
Not a single <frameset>!

~~~
jccooper
Nor image maps, my favorite antique web technology.

~~~
tomjen3
I have seen it put to decent use on Wikipedia where you could click on a
person in a group painting and go directly to that persons article.

------
bluedays
lol, this is awesome. You're missing the under construction gifs.

I was talking about this to someone the other day. In fact I wrote a script
after the conversation to simulate loading porn as a joke.

[https://hastebin.com/fuvixuxeqo.rb](https://hastebin.com/fuvixuxeqo.rb)

------
quyleanh
What a pretty recall. I haven't known some of theme.

------
chadlavi
perhaps ironically, huge parts of this site don't work for me. All the images
are broken, some of the clickable things don't do anything.

------
hanaq
interesting. However dancing baby was scary for me! Why it does not have 2020?

------
m4r35n357
Brilliant!

Historically, this was the start of an important process. That of turning a
fully functional multimedia access and delivery network (the WWW) into a
money-extraction system.

But Web 2.0 was just around the corner to solve that problem . . .

------
k__
I had the impression we went from 1024 to full HD without any steps in between

~~~
mywittyname
We had the transition to 16:9 before full HD. 1366x768 was a pretty common
interim resolution used in low/medium-spec laptops.

~~~
k__
Yes, you're right.

I even had one such notebook myself, but it always felt to me like a one-off
thing, because I already had full HD displays on desktop for years.

------
Jaruzel
> Popular Screen resolutions

Is completely wrong; Even today the most popular desktop screen resolution by
a country mile is 1366x768. All the budget laptops sold in supermarkets etc.
still use that resolution and most people simply can't afford to drop ~1,000
GBP/USD on the 'family computer'.

Fun fact... 1366x768 exists because it was trivial for far-east manufacturers
to switch from 1024x768 4:3 to 1366x768 16:9, as the latter could still use
90% of existing LCD controller design, thus making it really cheap to switch
their fabrication over.

~~~
ketzu
This prompted me to look around a bit and found this:

[https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-
stats/](https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/)

It's super interesting to look at and filter for various categories. For
desktop 1366x768 wins out slightly ahead of 1920x1080. But for mobile, devices
report a lot of 360x640. Fascinating.

Here's the mandatory stackexchange discussion on why that is:

[https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/98985/why-
the-360x640...](https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/98985/why-
the-360x640px-resolution-is-currently-the-most-used-one)

~~~
pmlnr
> 360x640

I'm curious of that's a 2x, 4x, etc version of high ppi devices; it's not
impossible.

~~~
mywittyname
That is the resolution of the cheapest smartphones sold in India. Also, IIRC,
the resolution sent to GA does not correct for orientation, zoom, or anything
of that nature, it's raw pixel values. This may have changed in recent years.

If you filter to the US, the most common resolution is 1920x1080.

------
fsiefken
i know it's more modern but i want dejanews back so bad

~~~
tannhaeuser
I was positively surprised to find new on-topic usenet content lately in
comp.lang.* (and not just formal announcements). As you know, DejaNews was
just a web interface for usenet before they were bought by Google to lead
audiences towards Google Groups, like they did with XMPP and a couple social
sites such as Orkut.

~~~
flyinghamster
Maybe I should check out what's going on in some of the newsgroups I hung out
in, and if anything worthwhile comes up, get back on. I kind of quit bothering
after Comcast killed off their news servers.

I don't want to bother with the binaries groups, though.

~~~
tomjen3
If you don't want binary groups, you can get free access:
[https://www.eternal-september.org/](https://www.eternal-september.org/)

------
tannhaeuser
You know when the Web Dark Ages are? They're upon us _right now_. With Google,
Fb extracting all value out of the extant web, github & co having "educated"
developers what to expect from software download sites and depending on
network effects, StackExchange and a couple other sites covering "How To"
material (not meant as a SE critique) and ad prices going down, the only
"rational" incentive for new content is to publish polarizing clickbait. In
the 1990s and 2000s, all kinds of Wikis and collaboration sites emerged; in
the early 2010s, the nascent mobile web prompted a vibrant web design
community, but when was the last time you went to a new web site? The web was
once meant as an easy way for self-publishing, bypassing middle-men. Turns out
we've just exchanged one middleman with another. I'm especially pissed at the
staged HTML5 campaign to yield power over web standards to Google. HTML5 chose
a shield as a logo, but who's going to shield us from Google and WHATWG
destroying the web?

~~~
GordonS
Facebook is perhaps the most frightening for me, because for many people
Facebook _is the internet_!

Something I absolutely hate is when I want to learn more about a local
business and search for them on Google, but all I find is a Facebook page with
minimal info - what happened to websites?!

~~~
xtracto
> Facebook is perhaps the most frightening for me, because for many people
> Facebook is the internet!

This reminded me the times of Mozilla Netscape, IE and Firefox. I remember
having conversations in /. about how for "normal people" the big blue E icon
is the Internet and that grandmas of the world cried that "the internet was
gone" when that icon disappeard.

Then it was Google, and now it is Facebook.

~~~
GordonS
At least then it was the means of accessing the web, rather than the web
itself.

------
mard
I think the Web Dark Ages are yet ahead of us. I've grown extremely
pessimistic with the state of modern web, with corporate censorship and
disinformation on ad-driven social media, dissolution of many open Web
standards and WebKit/Blink hegemony that is impossible to topple. A decade ago
I expected Web to become more open, but instead it has become a hellscape of
closed gardens where maintaining even reasonable amount of privacy is nearly
impossible.

90s web was a wild west, but it was a far cry from its "dark ages".

~~~
TedDoesntTalk
Trends like using medium.com as blog replacements are also troublesome. These
companies own your content. When they go away, so does your content. When they
want to censor you, then can.

~~~
kyriakos
why did medium.com become so popular? I never understood

~~~
Nextgrid
It used to be a very good experience, both for the blogger and the reader.
Unfortunately, they took on lots of VC funding (as if building a blogging
platform was _that_ difficult) without a clear and ethical path to profit and
now have no choice but to be nasty to try and make money.

~~~
ghaff
And, somewhat related, there was period when I think a lot of people assumed,
however incorrectly, that content on Medium was somehow differentiated and
could be taken more seriously than content on a random individual web site.
Anything I ever put on Medium was always mirrored elsewhere, but I did use it
for a time--mostly for professional content that my company wanted to link to
from newsletters and so forth.

~~~
Nextgrid
There was a period during which Medium was a signal of quality, probably
because it was a niche platform only known in the tech circle and I believe it
was invite-only for a while as well.

Now that every marketer, "growth hacker", "entrepreneur" and their dog are on
there it's the opposite. Medium is now a signal that some idiot is trying to
build credibility in an unrelated field by rehashing basic facts/existing
content and peppering it with stock images and "sign up for my newsletter"
forms.

