[HN Gopher] Three Decades of HTML
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Three Decades of HTML
        
       Author : tosh
       Score  : 71 points
       Date   : 2023-12-07 17:34 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (meyerweb.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (meyerweb.com)
        
       | OhMeadhbh wrote:
       | Oh. I actually remember that marked up version of the MST3K ep
       | guide! Around the same time I worked at Convex and marked up a
       | few of our text-based online documents. We didn't have a web
       | server at the time, but you could use gopher or FTP to download a
       | compressed tar file that included "experimental" HTML you could
       | open as a file in Mosaic.
        
       | andrewmcwatters wrote:
       | Haven't read anything from Meyer in quite a while now.
       | 
       | For younger and newer devs, back in '07-'08, Eric Meyer created
       | one of the first popular CSS resets which helped normalize
       | differences between browser vendors.
       | 
       | I run into a lot of front-end devs now who aren't aware of this
       | history. Probably worth mentioning at this point now.
        
         | antod wrote:
         | I was thinking more of him authoring those original O'Reilly
         | CSS books (with the trout or salmon covers) that really dug
         | into understanding box models etc and distinguished it's
         | readers from those who just aimlessly prodded around.
        
           | andrewmcwatters wrote:
           | Yep. I remember him being called a CSS guru at the time,
           | which I'm sure is what allowed his reset to take off.
        
       | tambourine_man wrote:
       | "Which was the style at the time" is a reference to The Simpsons,
       | I think. At least I read it with grandpa Simpsons's voice in my
       | head.
       | 
       | https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yujF8AumiQo
        
       | knose wrote:
       | oh wow, this site is _really_ slow on latest firefox. >99% CPU
       | time on graphics according to the profiler, haha.
        
         | abbe98 wrote:
         | I wonder what's going on, tried turning of JavaScript but I
         | could still barely scroll.
        
       | irrational wrote:
       | Wow. I'm still about 4 years away from the 30th anniversary of
       | the first web page I ever created. Unfortunately I don't have it
       | anymore.
        
         | fnord77 wrote:
         | I know what mine was:                    <html><body>
         | <h1>hello</h1>          </html>  <!-- missing /body -->
        
           | richbell wrote:
           | I don't believe you. Where's <marque> or <blink>?
        
             | latchkey wrote:
             | animations with the <title> tag
        
         | WorldMaker wrote:
         | The oldest webpage I have found decent archives of was from
         | 1998-1999. It was "Works Best in IE" and all sorts of TABLE
         | layout and weird magpie bits of JS madness. I based my current
         | blog look in part based on what that 1998/1999 version of me
         | thought would look cool for a webpage and couldn't quite pull
         | off with TABLEs and GIFs.
         | 
         | I know I was building them years before that, but I'm not sure
         | if I could tell you exactly which year I started. I do remember
         | that a lot of my first web pages were hosted on the 1MB (then
         | 2MB) AOL "MyPlace" (which was _before_ AOL Hometown and
         | _before_ the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive). I
         | remember at one point using up all of the AOL account 's
         | profiles just to have web pages on them. It was supposed to be
         | a family account, but I was the one most (ab)using it.
         | 
         | My recollection of it, and that recollection is probably all
         | sorts of wrong at this point, that 1MB version of "MyPlace" was
         | one of the launch features around the time of Eternal September
         | (in 1993 or 1994), so it is very possible I was "hosting" web
         | pages as early as 1993. As I recall it, I was building web
         | pages even before that AOL hosting, and mostly "hosting" them
         | just on floppy disks I'd take to school. (Which is the reason I
         | can't rely on my recollection _too well_ here: I was a very
         | precocious 9 in 1993.)
        
         | bcrosby95 wrote:
         | I made my first webpage back in 1996 for a project in my high
         | school CS class. I don't think I have it either, but from what
         | I recall of it, it was pretty corny.
        
       | tudorw wrote:
       | My first endeavours live on at least partially thanks to the
       | wayback machine;
       | https://web.archive.org/web/19961230152148/http://www.tangen...
       | 
       | We had a 3d mol viewer and RealAudio :)
        
       | mediumsmart wrote:
       | Loads fast here on Orion RC and gets full marks on performance
       | with the google.
       | 
       | I still use his https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/color-
       | blend/#:::hex on localhost.
        
       | qingcharles wrote:
       | Wow, that made me notice I'm 30 years this month too!
       | 
       | I barely touched the Web for the first few months I was online.
       | IRC, FTP and Usenet only. Even email didn't hold much value at
       | the time.
       | 
       | Most of the Web in 1993 was just tutorials on how to write your
       | first web page.
       | 
       | My earliest surviving HTML pages are from about 1997. If I could
       | get hold of the guy, Dustin, who has been maintaining this web
       | site continuously since before 1996, then I could probably find
       | the earliest fragments of my web coding from when I was using
       | that MUD to DM my gf so I could help with the web design/Java
       | applet course she was enrolled in:
       | 
       | http://resworld.eolith.net/res.html
       | 
       | (that's also my first registered domain there, eschaton.net .. I
       | was bummed because NSF had just finally started charging for
       | domains so I had to drop dozens of awesome one-word dotcoms)
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-12-07 23:00 UTC)