Showing all posts about history

Classic Web, a Mastodon page that explores the web of old

16 July 2025

Specifically, the time frame encompassing the dot-com boom (late 1990’s), Web 2.0 (early twenty-first century), and the 2010’s. The 2010’s don’t seem that long ago, but then again it’s been nearly six years since. Six years is close to thirty internet years (LinkedIn page), if you subscribe to the idea.

Classic Web features screenshots of websites from this period, and is curated by Richard MacManus, creator of Cybercultural, which documents the history and cultural impact of the internet, and founder of defunct tech blog, ReadWriteWeb.

I feels a certain ambivalence looking back at some of these old websites, particularly those of the dot-com and Web 2.0 eras. The web had a bit more character back then — certainly from a visual perspective — but there were downsides. Lack of accessibility, and even a sense of aesthetics, among them. But while we might have more accessibility today, visually the web appears more generic.

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Tables, nested tables, tables to the centre of the Earth, website interface design before CSS

8 July 2025

United Kingdom based web frontend architect Den Odell:

HTML tables gave us something no other element did at the time: control. You could create rows and columns. You could define cell widths and heights. You could nest tables inside tables to carve up the page into zones. That control was intoxicating. It wasn’t elegant. It definitely wasn’t semantic. But it worked.

It worked, but you could spend hours, days even, building a table structure, then slicing up an interface mockup, so the often numerous components would fit together perfectly.

The process was tedious, to say the least. It required placing sometimes minuscule images, both GIFs and JPEGs — being two of the main web image compression formats of the time — side by side, depending on the best optimisation method for each part of the interface.

See here an image of a page constructed thusly from disassociated circa 2001, when this was more website, and less blog. It felt wrong working this way — both on personal and commercial projects — but in the early years of the twenty-first century browser support for CSS was woeful.

Eventually, reasonable support for CSS arrived, but then the next challenge emerged: encouraging tables-layout-accustomed web designers to work with CSS for layout instead of HTML. But that’s a story for another day.

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Living like it is 1993 for a week, no digital technology allowed

3 July 2025

Nathan Drescher, writing for Android Authority:

For one week, I lived without modern technology unless it was absolutely necessary for work and emergencies. I carried a Discman, scribbled in a paper planner, and made phone calls instead of texting. It was chaotic at first, but oddly calming by the time it was all over.

It can be argued 1993 was pretty much the last pre-digital era year. The internet was around, but was hardly mainstream. Digital phones had just arrived in Australia, though were confined to a select few users. And that was about it. But really, I think 1993 can be left in the past, hopefully as a pleasant memory. Same goes for those (cumbersome) Discmans.

I’m all for screen-free time, digital detoxing for a few hours here and there, but otherwise often feel I belong precisely in the time I presently live in, for all its flaws. No golden age thinking here. You won’t catch me feeling sorry about the demise of the landline phone, nor feeling nostalgic for their absence. Besides, I’d much rather text, or email someone, than call them.

I could go for a paper planner if pressed, I suppose. But websites (and blogs) weren’t quite with us in 1993, though they weren’t far away, and they would be something I could not live without.

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Firefox arrived with a bang, will it die with a whimper?

20 June 2025

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing for The Register:

As for Firefox itself, users are reporting a growing number of technical problems that have eroded the browser’s reputation for reliability. In particular, even longtime users are reporting that more and more mainstream websites, such as Instagram, Salesforce, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp Web, either fail to load or function poorly in recent Firefox releases. In particular, Firefox seems to be having more trouble than ever rendering JavaScript-heavy sites. Like it or not, many popular sites live and die with JavaScript these days.

According to Statcounter, Firefox’s market share peaked at almost thirty-two percent in December 2009. Statcounter’s numbers only go back to the beginning of 2009, so perhaps uptake of the Mozilla made browser was even higher earlier on. I migrated to Firefox the minute it launched in late 2004, at a time when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) all but had the browser market cornered.

People desperately wanted an alternative to IE, and Firefox delivered. Despite the experiences of others today, I’m not presently having many problems. WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and Salesforce are not websites I visit. I do use the web version of Instagram (IG), where I have occasional problems logging in. Sometimes I’m greeted by a blank white screen after entering my credentials, but this is usually resolved by reloading IG and trying again. Up until now, I’d attributed this difficulty to IG.

At the moment Firefox is the only browser I’m using on my Linux Mint setup, as the Flatpaks for Opera and Chrome remain unverified (I’m aware I can still install and use the browsers nonetheless). For whatever reason I was running Firefox, Opera, and Chrome simultaneously on my old Windows 10 setup. Little point my explaining why, suffice to say each browser served different purposes.

Firefox’s market share today, again, according to Statcounter, hovers at around the two to three percent mark. It’s a sorry state of affairs for a once popular browser, and I can only wonder if Mozilla will attempt to turn things around.

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Astronomy Picture of the Day website turns thirty

19 June 2025

Administered by NASA, the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) website started posting images in June 1995. This is a time, that in 2025, feels positively prehistoric, when it comes to the web.

I’ve been looking at APOD on and off for maybe twenty years, and as far as I recall, the website has barely changed during that time. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect APOD has sported the same “Web 1.0” design since debuting thirty years ago. While the interface may not be much to look at, that’s not what we go there for: we’re there for the stunningly awesome images.

You can’t follow APOD on any socials channel, but you can subscribe to their RSS feed.

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Canva catches the AI coding assistant vibe

13 June 2025

Simon Newton writing on the Canva Engineering Blog:

Yet until recently, our interview process asked candidates to solve coding problems without the very tools they’d use on the job. Our interview approach included a Computer Science Fundamentals interview which focused on algorithms and data structures. This interview format pre-dated the rise of AI tools, and candidates were asked to write the code themselves. This dismissal of AI tools during the interview process meant we weren’t truly evaluating how candidates would perform in their actual role.

The Australian founded online graphic design platform is now mandating candidates for coding roles be proficient with AI tools, and will be expected to demonstrate as much during coding interviews. Given many Canva employees (to say nothing of the industry as a whole) are using AI assistants in their coding work, the move is hardly surprising.

Canva is an app I’ve to tried to pickup, but to date with little success. Several years ago I went along to the Canva offices in Sydney — I’m pretty sure they were located in the suburb of Surry Hills at that point — to give the then iteration of the app a try.

With again, er, limited success. I was kindly told long-term users of Photoshop tend to struggle more than others with Canva, so that was some consolation.

Proficiency with Canva is still on my to-do list, but at the moment getting my head around GIMP is the priority. I’ve not been able to sandbox Photoshop on Linux Mint, so when it comes to image creation and manipulation, GIMP it is.

Still talking of Canva, I learned in quickly looking up the company, that Cameron Adams is a co-founder. Yes: have I been living under a rock or what?

Adams might be better known to some earlier (I’m talking prior to 2010) web creative people as the Man in Blue, being his website/blog, which is still online. In 2011, Adams created a data visualisation of the music of Daft Punk, which is likewise still online, and something I linked to back in the day.

There’s some oldies, but goodies, in the mix, including Da Funk, Television Rules the Nation, Alive, Face to Face, and One More Time. And how good is the pre-loading popup, this using Firefox 139:

If you are going to view this site in Firefox, it is recommended that you use the latest version (Firefox 4).

That’s quite the trip back in time. Firefox 4 came out in March 2011. A good year before Canva was founded, and what seems like a lifetime before AI as we know it emerged in spectacular fashion.

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If you knew David Siegel, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Jakob Nielsen, you were an early web designer

31 May 2025

Richard MacManus, writes about three of the best known web designers of the late 1990’s. All three were influential (yet were not influencers), though by way of their individual approaches to web design, were sometimes at odds with each other:

With the rise of Flash and CSS in 1997, three web design philosophies emerged. David Siegel advocated for ‘hacks’, Jakob Nielsen kept it simple, while Jeffrey Zeldman combined flair with usability.

It was the thing during those Web 1.0 days to completely ignore Nielsen. It was only later we came to realise he was onto something.

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Your time machine breaks down at the worst times in history

24 April 2025

Despite what you might think, the worst possible time for your time machine to breakdown is not 2025. Instead, in this Kurzgesagt imagining, you are variously trapped in three periods of time, some several million years after three separate mass extinction events.

The time machine taking you to the early Triassic Period (two-hundred-and fifty million years ago), the late Carboniferous Period (three-hundred-and_twenty million years ago), and finally, the early Devonian Period (four-hundred million years ago) is not so much broken down, as it acting with a mind of its own. Why else hone in on some of the worst times in the far distant past to visit?

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After 25 years we still don’t know what the web is, what it could be

18 April 2025

Here’s some web history trivia for you: it’s been twenty-five years since A Dao of Web Design was published at A List Apart (ALA). Written by Australian product developer, and Web Directions co-founder John Allsopp, the article explored how the web, still seen then as an online variation of print, could find its own path, and evolve into something entirely different.

Reflecting on his ALA article earlier this week, John made the following comment:

The Web is its own thing — but we’ve still yet to really discover what that is. Don’t ask me, I don’t know what that is either. But a quarter of a century on I’m still just as interested in discovering what that is.

I think what we can say now though, is the web is no longer a child of print.

For additional historical trivia, see this article I wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald/The Age, about John and Westciv, a company he established with Maxine Sherrin. Westciv developed tools to assist web designers create compliant CSS, and web pages.

That was twenty-years ago — yes, mind blown — and was one of several articles I wrote for print publications, before becoming more focused on writing online. And while talking of ALA, it sadly appears only to be publishing sporadically nowadays.

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The origins of the Linux operating system, by Lars Wirzenius

3 March 2025

A 2023 article about the early days of the Linux operating system, written by Lars Wirzenius, who worked with Linus Torvalds, in the early 1990’s to develop the Linux kernel:

After finishing the game, Linus started learning Intel assembly language. One day he showed me a program that did multitasking. One task or thread would write a stream of the letter “A” on the screen, the other “B”; the context switches were visually obvious when the stream of As became Bs. This was the first version of what would later become known as the Linux kernel.

A kernel is an integral component of an operating system, which has complete control over everything in the system.

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