
18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated - fbn79
http://www.fmboschetto.it/
======
geocrasher
These simple sites show us something profound: If you want something to last,
don't base it on something that won't last. There are a some technologies that
will never allow somebody to build a site and leave it unchanged for 20 or 25
years. Cold Fusion comes to mind. Almost nobody hosts it anymore for one. Can
you imagine running the same WordPress version for 25 years? The version of
PHP it runs on will be EOL long before.

I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to build a site to last 25 years
without numerous redesigns, build a static HTML page.

Looks like Web 1.0 got something right after all :)

~~~
ath92
While this website still works fine, the actual HTML that Frontpage generated
isn't exactly easy to maintain if Frontpage stops working for whatever reason.

The author of this website is basically stuck using whatever version of
Frontpage supports the markup of his website. And I bet there have been plenty
of people who used <some other WYSIWYG webpage editor> who are no longer able
to maintain their website because their editor no longer runs on their system.

~~~
randomdude402
I know a person who is maintaining a few sites she built in like 2005 with a
version of Dreamweaver a little older than that, so never dares to upgrade the
Dreamweaver version.

The whole thing is terrifying and horrific to me, but they keep paying her to
do the work so she's fine with it.

~~~
wolco
You would just edit the html pages lol. I still use dreamweaver for the visual
editor if I need to copy and paste from a pdf and want perfect html. No one
has made anything like it. No current editor has a quick sftp that allows you
to connect/edit move on.

~~~
vraivroo
Coda does.

~~~
SyneRyder
As does HTMLPad 2020, the closest I've found to a Coda clone on Windows. (It's
not as good as Coda but it gets the job done.)

That said, neither app has the WYSIWYG editing that DreamWeaver had. But I've
always preferred to hand ode my HTML anyway.

------
jgrahamc
My 23 year old web site: [https://jgc.org/](https://jgc.org/) It's still
updated from a Perl script that generates static HTML.

~~~
StavrosK
So I wanted to link _my_ 23 year old website, but precisely _because_ it's
still updated, it looks like this:
[https://www.stavros.io/](https://www.stavros.io/)

It's gone through many renames and redesigns, but, in true Japanese style,
it's still the same website. I do have an old snapshot, though:
[https://anonymoussoftware.stavros.io/](https://anonymoussoftware.stavros.io/)

~~~
readhn
>> Greek. Amateur F1 driver. Technology enthusiast. Single parent. Liar.

thats quite a conversation starter...

~~~
StavrosK
Yes, everyone always has lots of fun trying to spot the lies.

Hint: "Liar" is the lie.

~~~
ta999999171
Long time listener, first time caller: You're into auto racing?! Link some
stuff?

~~~
StavrosK
No, it's a joke! Because it says "liar" afterwards. And the previous post was
also a joke, ie that I was lying about being a liar, which is a paradox.

I am a below average driver, alas. I am Greek, though, and some would say
that's _more_ exciting!

~~~
ta999999171
Oii, what the fuck, hahahaha....

From what I've heard, you might as well smash your side mirrors off at the
dealer when you buy a car, aha...so, yeah, checks out.

~~~
ta999999171
(In Greece, to be clear)

~~~
StavrosK
That is a vile and noxious rumor. My mirrors have never been touched in the
twenty years I've been driving.

~~~
ta999999171
Good to know! Will scratch that from my list of stereotypes, haha - be well,
man.

~~~
StavrosK
You too! It's interesting, though, my friend who now lives in the US always
remarks on how, in the US, you can just drive mindlessly on autopilot, whereas
here you need to be paying 100% attention at all times due to people always
swerving in and out of stuff.

I hate driving here.

------
dwheeler
My personal site was posted on September 12, 1999, is still updated, and has
no problems. It;s a static site that mostly uses straight HTML/CSS. There are
a few scripts that generate pages, but generating HTML/CSS pretty easy.
[https://dwheeler.com](https://dwheeler.com).

Geocrasher said:

> I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to build a site to last 25 years
> without numerous redesigns, build a static HTML page.

Yes. I don't get paid to maintain my personal site, so simplicity and
longevity are most important. If I have to rewrite things because of
incompatible changes in the infrastructure components (e.g., Python2 to
Python3), or because proprietary company C has decided to stop supporting
product P that I depend on, then I have to spend time that doesn't actually
provide any new value. Keeping things simple, and minimizing dependencies, can
be useful. Like everything else, there's a trade-off.

~~~
smush
No kidding. Already, I've found some interesting articles to read.

I'm taking a look at [https://dwheeler.com/essays/easy-cross-platform-
gui.html](https://dwheeler.com/essays/easy-cross-platform-gui.html), which has
references to XULRunner etc. which since 2009 have fallen out of favor.

Would you continue to recommend those wanting to invest in (for the 80% of use
cases) wxWidgets for FLOSS cross-platform GUI apps? BoaConstructor et. al look
interesting.

Thanks for taking the time to look at this comment. If it helps give you some
context, I'll throw in that I currently am most familiar with WinForms .NET
apps or very small Win32 native applications, and have avoided JS successfully
so far.

~~~
TingPing
wxWidgets is a poor platform abstraction that just results in the lowest
common denominator of UI.

~~~
aasasd
I haven't seen any cross-platform widget APIs that allow you to build a MacOS
toolbar, for example―at least among the popular APIs. You mostly can only
specify that the titlebar and the toolbar should be merged. Qt can draw
_something_ , but it will look like a Qt toolbar, not a Mac one.

So I don't see how WxWidgets is an outlier here.

------
mattkevan
Once worked on an enormous, very popular site built by hand in Frontpage.

It had millions of pageviews, made over 6 figures a month in AdSense and been
updated so often and for so long that the owner didn’t actually know how many
pages there were. Had to hire someone just to index it.

Not bad for plain old html and css.

~~~
rchaud
Ah, the old days of the web, when it was possible to make money via AdSense.
Users would actually bookmark sites those days, so there was no need to throw
an email signup popup in their face when the page loaded. The comments would
have real people conversing, and not filled with spambots pushing fake Guccis
and Air Jordans.

~~~
32gbsd
Comments went a downward spiral right about when facebook got popular. It
canabolised the regular comments + the comments from other creatives/bloggers

------
dmje
As I spent half a day trying to wrangle my way through some sass grunt
compiler frontend bullshit just trying to update the colour of some links on a
client website, I find myself nodding sagely again. In the early days you
could view source, see what was going on, copy and recreate someone else’s
site, learn a whole bunch of new stuff and actually get shit done. Now, it’s
all JavaScript bullshit and 100k lines of css. It’ll last about a month before
it’s out of date and replaced by the Next Big Thing. HTML, css, a sprinkle of
JavaScript. That’s what’s proven to last.

~~~
zladuric
I'm not sure a FrontPage site would be much better. It's also a big mess of
generated markup you'd have to go through manually, if you didn't have the
proper FP version.

------
dbalatero
My favorite like this site is [http://www.burger.com](http://www.burger.com)
\- this dude has a hilarious array of hobbies and awesome beveled button
links.

~~~
dabeeeenster
Have to wonder how much that domain name is worth...?

~~~
cameronbrown
Probably expensive, but I doubt it's actually worth anything. I reckon it's
much harder to build a brand when you start with a generic word.

~~~
genidoi
Burger.com would be the brand

------
mhandley
But is it still running on Cern/3.0, installed circa 1993. Ours is:

    
    
      $ nc www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk 80
      HEAD /staff/m.handley/ HTTP/1.0                    
    
      HTTP/1.0 200 Document follows
      MIME-Version: 1.0
      Server: CERN/3.0
      Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2020 17:02:59 GMT
      Content-Type: text/html
      Content-Length: 9185
      Last-Modified: Sun, 16 Jun 2019 15:27:37 GMT
    

It's running on Sun Sparc hardware from the same era, and has been in active
use for all of those 27 years.

~~~
nonamenoslogan
I used to have a bunch of Sparc's circa-early 2000's. Sold some, recycled
some, wish I'd have kept at least one. The price of a SparcstationLX that
works is silly now-a-days.

------
webscalist
[https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fmboschetto.it%2F)
100 Points. Mobile First. Better than React Native.

~~~
stabbles
This is hilarious! Turns out 18 year old websites were mobile friendly after
all

~~~
jsaldes
Have you actually tried the site on a mobile device? It's impossible to read
the text and navigation is hell. Wouldn't classify that as "mobile friendly".

~~~
dahart
Just tried on iPad, the site works great. Did you mean ‘phone’ and not ‘mobile
device’?

~~~
joegahona
Would you also consider a laptop to be a "device" that is "mobile"?

~~~
dahart
You say that as if it’s weird to call an iPad a mobile device. Would you say
that a tablet is not a mobile device? What do you define as mobile device, and
what devices would you use to determine if a web site is “mobile friendly”?

The common definition of mobile device is phone or tablet. The common
definition of laptop is computer. These despite the fact that phones and
tablets are computers and despite the fact that laptops and even desktops can
be moved. It’s pretty easy to find lots of examples of the common definitions.
Here’s a good one:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_device](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_device)

~~~
lccarrasco
Does that definition matter if tablets are probably less than 1% of all mobile
devices?

~~~
dahart
Why Google something for two seconds when you can just speculate wildly?
Tablets are almost 10% of mobile sales via my first search hit
[https://www.zdnet.com/article/smartphone-market-a-mess-
but-a...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/smartphone-market-a-mess-but-annual-
tablet-sales-are-also-down/)

The question of whether definitions matter when one sub-category or subset is
a minority or majority... I’m not sure how to answer that. Why would a
definition stop mattering just because something different is a small subset?
I must assume that a categorical term includes everything in the category. If
you don’t mean everything in the category, then don’t use the term that refers
to the category. If you mean phone, then say phone. ?? Right? I’m confused why
you would argue anything else.

------
1_player
I'm surprised to see <marquee> still exists and works in modern browsers. And
saddened to see it updates at ~20fps, at least on Safari.

Time for a smooth, GPU accelerated 60+fps marquee implementation?

~~~
seisvelas
While <marquee> support is near universal, I was sad to find out that <blink>
has not fared so well.

I'm sure a lot of you already know this easter egg, but if you search "blink
tag" in Google, Google makes all the blink tags actually work (using JS of
course but still)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=blink+tag](https://www.google.com/search?q=blink+tag)

~~~
reaperducer
I simulate the <blink> tag on a 404 page I maintain.

But I use CSS, not JS.

------
throwaway_fbnet
Here is a life-saver maintained by a 77 year young lawyer for a lot of public
good: [http://www.drtsolutions.com/](http://www.drtsolutions.com/). Case laws
against SARFAESI, an Indian law that expedites bank recovery for non-
performing assets. He updates it manually in FrontPage even today!

~~~
jannes
Wow, that page is amazing!

I hadn't seen the old Google logo in years:
[http://www.drtsolutions.com/drtqueries.htm](http://www.drtsolutions.com/drtqueries.htm)
The search widget doesn't even use an <iframe>. Just a plain <form>.

~~~
ta999999171
Page colors are ugly as shit, but so readable - modern web devs/people who
make them do "modern" stuff, you suck compared to these sites in this thread.

Sorry, not sorry.

------
generationP
I sympathize with the author. I have built my maths site just 2 years after
this one, when I was in high school. Ever since I've only been adding
material, and occasionally moving old stuff into subdirectories; other than
that, it's the same old geocities website made with FPE, except it's now
hosted on a university server and has my academic title and office and no more
colored background. Oh, and I now edit it with notepad++ and track it with
git.

I've had plans to rebuild it for the last 8 years or so, to make it better and
slicker and easier to navigate (as it stands, my new papers are mixed together
with my scribe notes from undergrad). But I never figured out how to achieve
this without also requiring javascript or relying on tools that may not
survive the next decade and that I cannot tweak to my needs without learning a
new programming language (hello Jekyll, hi Hugo). Nor did I ever find the
Right Way how it should be structured; move one thing to the front and
something else gets harder to find. I guess it will survive me.

Makes me a lot less judgmental when I see another academic website that can
trace its lineage back to geocities and angelfire.

------
drops
One of the most prolific and well-known music reviewers - Pierro Scaruffi -
has a website built in 1995 with a design not updated much, or at all, since:
[https://www.scaruffi.com](https://www.scaruffi.com)

~~~
alexmorenodev
He even reviewed one of my favorites albums launched recently:
[https://www.scaruffi.com/vol8/bentknee.html](https://www.scaruffi.com/vol8/bentknee.html)

------
matteuan
It's impressive the amount of content inside! There are countless pages about
literature, religion and physics. It's a good reminder of the original goal of
WWW: share information.

~~~
rlv-dan
> It's a good reminder of the original goal of WWW: share information.

That is what I miss the most about the old web. We wanted to build something
better by sharing knowledge. And for a while we did. Then mainstream came and
corporates took over.

~~~
reaperducer
Well, to be honest the corporations were always there. It's just when the
marketers discovered "cyberspace" that everything went to hell.

------
dpcan
In my ~17 year career as a professional web developer and consultant, I'm not
sure that any technology has made me more frustrated and miserable than the
days when I had to help people who insisted on using Frontpage to build their
websites.

------
geocrasher
My favorite "Retro awful": Site:

[https://www.lingscars.com/](https://www.lingscars.com/)

~~~
ahmetkun
this one looks very retro but the code is actually quite modern. it has custom
fonts, css animations, gradients, etc. and no tables.

~~~
notahacker
Also, beneath the intentional craziness, it's very clever marketing.

------
DannyB2
Remember the Front Page license.

Originally, Front Page had a four page license. It specified that if you use
Front Page to create a web site, you cannot disparage Microsoft, Expedia and a
list of several other Microsoft owned properties.

So with a license like that, I can't assume that any site created with Front
Page is unbiased when it comes to a list of various Microsoft owned
properties.

After the slashdot effect (long ago) Microsoft removed this from the license.

------
0xferruccio
There’s so many italian old italian sites with this design

My favorite in High Scool was [http://ripmat.it](http://ripmat.it)

That site is the only reason I managed to learn Math school

~~~
acomjean
Those backgrounds are fantastic. Just right arrowing through them... is a
trip.
[http://ripmat.it/mate/a/ac/ac5.html](http://ripmat.it/mate/a/ac/ac5.html)

------
timonoko
My personal web-page is from 1992 and updated occasionally. This page is
preserved as it was in 1994:
[http://timonoko.github.io/alaska](http://timonoko.github.io/alaska) . It
started as Gopher-page in 1992 and I just moved those associated pictures into
it, without truly understanding formatting and all that shit. Some dudes in
Usenet told me about <p> and <img> tags.

------
Santosh83
The biggest drawback of sites from this era is they don't reflow on mobile
screens. On a desktop they still work as well as they ever did. I'm still
searching for a good WYSIWYG HTML composer that can generate clean, responsive
pages. Seems like this is a problem where there isn't sufficient incentive for
the big tech companies to tackle, and the only s/w that seems to come close is
BlueGriffon.

~~~
jacquesm
That's a client side problem, not a server side problem. The rendering and
presentation of a webpage are entirely up to the client, absolutely nothing
dictates that a page should look a certain way on a certain client.

~~~
onion2k
There are a ton of attributes in the HTML that dictates how the website should
render - it has a bgcolor and a margin on the body tag, a width and height on
the main table, center tags all over the place, etc. Suggesting that a browser
should ignore the HTML spec and do something else would completely destroy the
web.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
On the other hand, reader mode suggests that sometimes ignoring the way the
site wants to be presented is a good thing.

~~~
onion2k
That's a user derived choice. I'm not saying user's shouldn't be able to
change the way a site is laid out if they want to. I'm saying that _by
default_ it should use the HTML spec.

------
tren
My 83 year old dad has updated his website since the mid 90s, it's actually
pretty interesting to look back it in the Wayback machine, the design is
exactly the same in 97. He'd really get a kick out of it if someone commented
on one of his articles. [http://aoi.com.au/](http://aoi.com.au/)

------
oftenwrong
There is a search engine dedicated to finding "classic" websites:

[https://wiby.me/](https://wiby.me/)

Click the "surprise me..." link to see a random one.

~~~
JasonFruit
That could eat up some hours. I landed on a model airplane site and started
getting sucked in before realizing I have work to do.

~~~
batirch
With the surprise me button I found Berkshire Hathaway website.

[https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/](https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/)

This is really cool search engine :D

------
Nowyouknow
Check out my Dad's from 2002. He's still using it as an e-commerce site,
regularly getting orders and directing customers to it.

Deleted URL thanks to friendly advice

~~~
tsukurimashou
hmm you might not want people to know about your dad's e-commerce site built
in 2002...

EDIT: checked the website, "add to cart" sends you directly to paypal and
there doesn't seem to be any account system.

Still you should be careful with which communities you share this kind of
information, hint: think of the H of HN

~~~
Nowyouknow
Good point. Appreciate it

~~~
tsukurimashou
No problem, I know how it is to just want to talk about a personal story
without thinking about the information you're letting out for the "public" to
see :D

------
djsumdog
I recently did a history of my old websites:

[https://battlepenguin.com/tech/a-history-of-personal-and-
pro...](https://battlepenguin.com/tech/a-history-of-personal-and-professional-
websites/)

Most of the content is still there, but it's been shifted between static
pages, Rails, Wordpress and now Jekyll.

It's neat to see one of these gems still out there; a picture of the 90s web
that's still functional and being used. Too many of these sites are lost; only
available in the Internet Archives.

~~~
WorldMaker
I took a similar journey over the years from static pages to custom static
generators to PHP to Drupal to a custom Django-based blog engine to
Jekyll/static pages.

It's interesting because I'm sometimes sad I lost the code for some of those
old versions. Those old early PHP and custom static generator codebases would
be interesting to revisit with today's ideas, even if just to laugh about.
(But also because I know there's probably not-great blog content lost to
them.) One of the "custom static generators" I recall was actually a _really_
early not-quite-SPA JS app. I remember it ran really slowly in browsers at the
time and worse got slower with each new content added, but these days I wonder
if it would seem fine on modern JS engines. (I've got a feeling about the only
thing I'd need to change would be to swap `document.write(stuff)` for
`element.innerHtml = stuff` and it'd perform quite well today.)

------
abruzzi
My father still updates his website with Frontpage (he had a recent 6 month
outage because he inadvertently deleted the Windows XP vmdk on his system, but
I recovered that for him recently.) He’s 75, and isn’t interested in
converting or learning anything new at this stage.

The funny thing is for years his home-made site was the top google hit if you
searched for “hill's criteria” (See Hill's criteria of causation). His site is
[http://drabruzzi.com/](http://drabruzzi.com/)

~~~
Santosh83
Hmm, how do you manage to acquire a legal of copy of Frontpage (even Express)
these days for your dad?

~~~
nonamenoslogan
The later versions "Sharepoint Designer" are free from Microsoft and still
available on their downloads page.

Frontpage may be old enough to consider it 'abandonware,' a quick Google for
"free frontpage" has a lot of downloads including one from Kean.edu with an
embedded key.

------
masswerk
My website is still as of 1999, but it received some design updates (and a
blog section) two years ago. However, there's still some original content,
some even older than the particular website. E.g., see this 1998 demo for what
we may now call a single page app, entirely rendered in JS from central data
files (but using frames – well, it was the 1990s):

[https://www.masswerk.at/demospace/relayWeb_en/welcome.htm](https://www.masswerk.at/demospace/relayWeb_en/welcome.htm)

Slogan: "Microsoft keeps talking about Active Server Pages – We're offering
Active Client Pages"

Mind the charts section, rendering graphs by outputting tables with tiny
images using `document.write()`, since the canvas element wasn't even dreamt
of. (Displaying charts was a tricky business, then. Usually these were
rendered server side as GIFs, where they caused heavy load. The alternative
were Java applets, which had an enormous effect on the client load and delayed
page display quite considerably, while the JRE was starting up. Enter JS to
the rescue…) Also, note the period design, including marquee tickers, custom
fonts from GIFs, etc…

------
rlv-dan
My personal/hobby business web site
([https://www.rlvision.com](https://www.rlvision.com)) is based on code 22
years ago. It's built with tables, because that's how you did things back
then. The age shows. But I haven't found reason to rebuild it yet. Simply put,
it works. It may not be mobile friendly, but the goal is to make available my
Windows software, so my aim is desktop users.

~~~
bcrosby95
It's funny to me that one reason why people said to stop using tables was
because of file size. Now we have everyone download almost a megabyte (or
more) of javascript to render a few kb of html.

~~~
WorldMaker
I don't recall page size being a reason. I recall TABLE layouts being a lot
smaller than most of their alternatives at the time (FRAMESETs in particular
come to mind, because we knew HTTP connection overhead was a thing even back
then and needing separate files for each individual website "part" felt like a
huge bandwidth waste back then).

The big problem was always Accessibility-related semantics. Websites laid out
in TABLEs were often quite confusing to screen readers, as TABLE has a lot of
supposedly important semantics in how it should be read/engaged with and using
a TABLE for layout follows none of them. (What does a table header mean in a
layout? Most layouts wouldn't have good headers. How do you describe what a
table column is supposed to be for without a column header?) It's a shame that
narrative was never clear enough that Accessibility was always the big reason
TABLEs were considered a Bad Idea for layout.

(Speaking of downloading a megabyte of data, I recall how long I felt that a
1.44 MB floppy was the best restriction for the size of an entire website. If
it was bigger than a floppy you were probably doing something wrong. I stopped
counting floppies a long time ago; that person might be ashamed at how many
floppies a typical website downloads these days.)

------
cwoolfe
Only 520 lines of HTML. And readable! view-
source:[http://www.fmboschetto.it/](http://www.fmboschetto.it/)

------
72deluxe
This guy has a Frontpage-generated site too, and it's full of useful Win32
programming tips; he replies if you email him too!

[http://flounder.com](http://flounder.com)

Nothing wrong with readable content, regardless of the generator. In fact, I
like reading his site precisely because it is speedy to load and render, and
because it has content (unlike, for example, Apple's developer documentation).

------
lucasjans
I'm surprised no one mentioned it here: before Front Page was a Microsoft
product it was created by an independent company, Vermeer. But as many pointed
out it produced horrible code.

My favorite editor of the day was a "hand coder" called Home Site

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia_HomeSite](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia_HomeSite)

------
rhblake
My personal favorite, which is in a similar vein - an Italian, although the
site is in English; Frontpage; still updated - is
[https://www.luigicases.com/](https://www.luigicases.com/). He makes leather
straps and cases for cameras. Famous in the classic camera community. Only
active site that I can think of that still uses frames.

~~~
toyg
Those pics tell a glamorous story worth of a movie.

------
ssijak
I have a 'personal' website which is also about 18years old. It was the first
website I built while in elementary school, also in Frontpage. I uploaded it
to I think Geocities or something like that, I think it was Yahoo related
hosting, can't remember exactly, but it was free hosting.

Some 'fancy' JS effects do not work on the page now, but it is still up. I
forgot about and remembered it few years ago and checked it to find it still
up. But I can't remember where could I login to see the files and what are the
credentials so it makes me giggle that it will stay up for who knows how much
longer as a small part of my past :)

[http://dzigi.itgo.com](http://dzigi.itgo.com)

[http://dzigi.itgo.com/o_autoru.htm](http://dzigi.itgo.com/o_autoru.htm)
"about author page" with a bio and pic haha

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Geocities got taken over by Yahoo, I think there was an intermediate step, and
they added a JS widget to free pages, there was a hack to hide it. IIRC they
started allowing PHP and not just SSI at/around that stage.

------
jeremyswank
My first site is still live. It went live in 1997, hand coded (using tables).
Went through a few redesigns but the 2000 version has been left online as a
fixed digital artifact from the time:
[http://pwp.detritus.net/](http://pwp.detritus.net/)

~~~
mmmBacon
Seriously very nice design for 2000.

------
benibela
My personal website is also around 18-year-old. I actually do not remember how
old it is. I did not have a domain at first and hosted it on AOL or something.

Here it was:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20030908174016/http://www.benibe...](https://web.archive.org/web/20030908174016/http://www.benibela.de/)

But in 2005, I made a complete redesign:
[http://www.benibela.de/index_en.html](http://www.benibela.de/index_en.html)

The backend went through a few reimplementations. Individually made html files
(with front page express or something), a template tool written in Delphi,
another template tool written in Java, a complete XQuery interpreter written
in FreePascal

------
ceejayoz
I made a lot of sites in Frontpage in high school.

My favorite bit was the rollover buttons that used a Java applet to do so.

------
kylek
One of my favorite websites is clocking in at 25 years now- Marathon's Story
[0], a website dedicated to the lore of Bungie's Marathon series.

[0] [http://marathon.bungie.org/story/](http://marathon.bungie.org/story/)

------
jannyfer
Here’s an archive link in case this gets hugged to death:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200214134509/http://www.fmbosc...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200214134509/http://www.fmboschetto.it/)

~~~
pmlnr
It's actually quite hard to hug static HTML pages to death, unless on purpose,
with things like slowloris.

------
Lagogarda
This site is best viewed with Netscape Navigator

~~~
criddell
I was looking for the web ring links.

------
sabas_ge
2251 Mb size! "Qui c'è una applet Java. Mi spiace che il tuo browser non le
supporti" = Here's a Java applet, I'm sorry your browser doesn't support it
Marquee still gets animated :O "Questa pagina è ottimizzata per un formato
1024 x 768 pixel a 16,8 milioni di colori, carattere medio" = This page is
optimized for a 1024x768 pixel format, 16.8 million colors, medium sized font
Still apart from the ancient tooling, it's an example of a personal wiki as
periodically come on HN, there's a lot of content!

~~~
sabas_ge
I just wrote to the gentleman pointing him to this discussion :)

------
3dprintscanner
Another mention of this fantastic cycling website:
[https://www.sheldonbrown.com/harris/](https://www.sheldonbrown.com/harris/)

------
Phait
As an Italian, reading this is site is absolute bliss. There's just so much to
discover. I really suggest non-Italian speakers to automatically translate it
with Google and dive into it.

~~~
melq
I can't believe how well google translates this. Is there something about
Italian that lends itself to english translation or is translate getting this
good with other languages too I wonder?

------
davnicwil
I visited this on mobile expecting it to be a laugh, but was surprised to find
that it's actually amazing!

You can see the whole page in a single column, and just pinch zoom to the bit
you're interested in to read/interact. Scrolling downwards and sideways to pan
around works fine, super intuitive. The UX of this is so great, feels just
like that original iPhone demo [1].

...why don't we do this again?

[1] [https://youtu.be/vN4U5FqrOdQ?t=2530](https://youtu.be/vN4U5FqrOdQ?t=2530)

------
blakesterz
Anyone else still sad over the demise of FrontPage Express? It did everything
I needed at the time, it was free, and really easy to use. The HTML wasn't as
bad as FrontPage either.

~~~
gtk40
I got my start with web dev using Netscape Composer, which was a similar
enough tool. Seamonkey, the successor of Netscape and Mozilla Suite, still
includes it to this day and it works well!

[https://www.seamonkey-project.org/](https://www.seamonkey-project.org/)

------
Damogran6
Dude's gonna wonder why he had a sudden 6500% jump in traffic.

------
dhosek
My personal site, [http://don.dream-in-color.net](http://don.dream-in-
color.net) has been at that URL (and with this design) for over 20 years. The
reading list ([http://don.dream-in-color.net/books/](http://don.dream-in-
color.net/books/) ) dates back to a page that was originally served over FTP
and will turn 25 years old in May.

------
gerardes
If you like this? Check this one:
[https://www.gratiz.nl/](https://www.gratiz.nl/) Updated every day :-)

------
elamje
My page([https://www.towardssoftware.com](https://www.towardssoftware.com))
isn't quite that old, but it gets the job done with an incredibly simple
content manager - plain html/css editing.

There is almost no javascript, and I have to say, it's done wonderful so far.
I have tried Hugo to manage stuff, and a couple of others, but for a lot of
blog type of stuff, html just works!

------
neosat
I had this perception that those spinning gifs and moving text made pages
crazy hard to parse but I was pleasantly surprised that this site seemed
simpler and easier to parse than half the sites today with pop ups,
notifications, and blocking modals. Is it just me, or are these notifications
and modals that are getting so prevalent really degrading a lot of the web
browsing experience today.

~~~
reaperducer
It used to be fun to load the Hamster Dance page on different machines and see
how much it would slow each one. And that was just from a bunch of animated
.GIFs.

Taboola, Facebook thumbs, Twitter counters, and the like are the Hamster
Dances of the 21st century.

------
raghavtoshniwal
This is pretty cool. I had to look Frontpage up! Logic dictates that there
must have been a point in time where the prevailing opinion shifted from “Uses
ancient UI” to “Has a cool retro feel”. Probably all technologies go through
this? Like vinyl becoming cool a few years back. Has happened with Flash games
recently. Is there a name for this?

~~~
thechao
"Nostalgia".

~~~
jannes
I think they meant a name for the process of something becoming the matter of
nostalgia.

~~~
kome
time...

------
pmlnr
I started with FrontPage 98 in '99\. Moved to a self-written PHP CMS, then
WordPress, then back to static HTML.

Had I stayed with FrontPage, my life might have been simpler - porting 20
years of content is not simple - but I would have missed out on learning a lot
of HTML, CSS, PHP, Python, MySQL, character set conversion, MySQL vs UTF-8,
etc.

------
dep_b
I really have a soft spot for these kind of sites. Often people have pretty
interesting and unique content on this kind of websites. I always try to help
by keeping things very simple to maintain but just a bit better, like making a
PHP include of the menu and then replacing the top part on every page once.

------
Lucadg
I learned Frontpage in 2000 in a King's Cross (Sydney) internet cafe where you
paid 2 AUD for unlimited time...but you couldn't leave, not even to go to the
toilet.

That html went straight to Geocities.

The feeling of power part of a minority of people who could actually publish
something on the net was amazing.

------
felixg3
I generated my website at server.giessmann.net just last year using Lotus
FastSite and the geocities gif archive. I included my fax number, icq id and a
PO box. Of course there are 9/11 conspiracy theories and a banner to download
the latest Netscape browser.

------
jeena
A company in Germany called Arcor had the front page website of my band from
2001 which used frontpage serverside extensions still online about 4 years
ago. I couldn't find the FTP password to download the source code so it died
when they finally pulled the plug.

------
utahsaint365
[http://explorermag.com/](http://explorermag.com/)

My 21 year old site focuses on Windows NT and the upcoming Windows 2000
release. Back when MSFt focused on operating systems. Billg still in charge!

~~~
chaoticmass
This really takes me back, in a good/nostalgic way. That 3 column layout with
a header on top was the go-to layout for content heavy sites.

------
mk89
We are talking about a God given website. Of course it's old and still ongoing
:P

Jokes aside, the first thing I read was the sentence "here there is a java
applet, sorry your browser doesn't support it" :D Which is funny, after all.

------
cat199
Not to forget the geocitiesizer:

[https://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/](https://www.wonder-
tonic.com/geocitiesizer/)

"Make Any Webpage Look Like It Was Made By A 13 Year-Old In 1996"

------
fjfaase
Mine, in plain HTML, is almost 25 years old. I have to admit that I did change
the layout a little, through the years, but it has been rather constant,
because updating 974 HTML files, is not something that is easily done.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
It's pretty easily done? Strip out everything but body, make a wrapper to
include the pages? Any static bits you can search-replace, that's what I used
to do before discovering server-side includes.

~~~
fjfaase
I am talking about 974 HTML files of which probably more than 95% is static
content. Doing this manually, will take me about a year (considering the time
I have available). So, maybe I should develop a script/parser to process the
contents and generate them as server-side includes? But what is the benefit?
That I can change the layout more easily, while first having to learn how to
efficiently work with server-side includes? (Now I am just uploading my HTML
files through FTP to my very cheap hosting provider.) But why would I? I am
not interested in the layout, just the contents. I am not writing the website
for a broad public, it is mainly because I like to record events (big and
small) in my life. I guess, I myself am the most important user. Sometimes, I
can surprise people by telling them the exact date that I did/experienced
something.

------
cptskippy
One of my favorite pieces of software, that I still use to this day, is 20
years old version of SpaceMonger.

[https://i.imgur.com/XMwNRR3.png](https://i.imgur.com/XMwNRR3.png)

------
hieudang9
I missed the tools like FrontPage/DreamWaver and gorgeous Flash websites.

~~~
rickyc091
Agreed. The modern-day version of those would be Scratch
([https://scratch.mit.edu/](https://scratch.mit.edu/)) which kids use to start
exploring coding, but it's not the same.

~~~
rchaud
You're right, it's not the same. Scratch is too Computer Science-y for
something that can be as simple as a website. Text, images and video, plus
hyperlinks that link one page to another. That's enough for the majority of
people to share information.

I really hope something comes along that reinvigorates the public's interest
in creating content that resides on their own website, rather than a walled-
garden social media account.

------
pjc50
Another classic from an electronic music pioneer, author of the original TRON
score: [http://www.wendycarlos.com/](http://www.wendycarlos.com/)

------
dmalvarado
Also of note, this website is still running despite the HN hug of death.

------
jhoechtl
Its.So.Quick.

I love the speed of the page! And seemingly nobody is eavesdropping me.

------
hypertexthero
Simple and useful.

[https://s3.amazonaws.com/simpleuseful/index.html](https://s3.amazonaws.com/simpleuseful/index.html)

------
Kunix
One made with Word and still updated:
[http://villemin.gerard.free.fr/](http://villemin.gerard.free.fr/)

------
goshx
I love that you kept the style too. This brings back good memories. I’ve
learned HTML using Frontpage and gifs were a must in my geocities hosted
websites.

------
RdRocket16
Check out Butkus.org - my dad has had it since before 2000 and updates it
regularly, with an ancient copy of frontpage.

~~~
RdRocket16
[https://www.butkus.org/chinon/index.html](https://www.butkus.org/chinon/index.html)

------
jk7f
Another gem:
[http://www.tyrrell.de/startseite.htm](http://www.tyrrell.de/startseite.htm)

------
anacoluthe
Reminds me of
[http://villemin.gerard.free.fr/](http://villemin.gerard.free.fr/)

------
faramarz
I made my first web site with Frontpage and the big leap for me was learning
about nested tabled within tables. game changer.

------
elwell
Here's a real gem: [https://bible.ca/](https://bible.ca/)

------
nimajneb
I love the old style of (personal) website like this. It's seems both
nostalgic and maybe a bit more authentic.

------
afwaller
The content is super wholesome as well.

------
SonnyWortzik
Frontpage wow, that was my go to back in the days. Then I saw the markup it
was making, yikes!!

------
dmuhs
This is dedication in content creation and maintenance. We can all learn
something here!

------
skc
The source is refreshingly sparse and tidy which was kind of jolting for a
second.

------
shaneprrlt
You're telling me their site still works in 2020 _without_ needing to serve
the client as a server-side rendered react app with the data being provided by
several node.js microservices containerized and deployed to a kubernetes
cluster and accessed through a GraphQL interface? IMPOSSIBLE!

------
jmnicolas
Only someone with unwavering faith would maintain a Frontpage website in 2020
:)

------
aloukissas
I just love the footer "optimized for 1024x768 @ 16M colors" :)

------
retube
and it loads at light speed

~~~
jagger27
Hosted in Italy too!

~~~
galacticdessert
Which makes the speed even more surprising!!

~~~
peteretep
The mass of the Alps cause a dilation in space time

------
devalnor
<bgsound src="ue.mid" loop="-1"> is princeless

------
randogogogo
Wow that loaded quickly! I wonder what she's doing to optimize it.

~~~
netule
She?
[http://www.fmboschetto.it/autore/autore.htm](http://www.fmboschetto.it/autore/autore.htm)

------
exabrial
And loads faster than any of the crap SPOs that are en vouge today

------
ngcc_hk
Anything not text based is problematic. But beyond that it is hard.

------
EugeneOZ
"UFO's don't exist" \- untrustworthy site.

------
tdstein
It loads so fast!

------
marai2
What is the oldest website still standing?

~~~
retube
[http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html](http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html)

~~~
marc_io
Now that's a responsive layout.

------
jamesjyu
Frontpage: the original no code software.

------
mygo
does anyone know what year the <marquee> tag became depreciated? I’m surprised
my iPhone renders it

------
arm64future
Where can I find more sites like this

~~~
owlninja
Try here [https://wiby.me/](https://wiby.me/) Hit the 'surprise me' link

------
bobowzki
I had forgotten all about Frontpage!

------
kome
ahahah from Lonate Pozzolo!! I am from Bellinzago and this is just mind-
blowing.

great website!

------
theklub
I love it

------
threepio
SLAPP LIKE NOW!

------
nalesnik3000
The spinning e-mail symbol GIF evokes pure nostalgia, bro. Came here to laugh,
not to feel.

~~~
goshx
I’m looking for the little dude with a shovel “in construction”.

~~~
xxs
..."under construction"

------
callesgg
Personal websites... is something that screems mental ilness also writing
youtube comments...

