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The first post of this thread is a WikiPost and can be edited by anyone with the appropiate permissions. Your edits will be public.

What standard of design should The New Old Web, or Web 1.1, ideally adhere to?

  • < HTML4, CSS2, no JS, no embedded media (Closer to 90's Web)

    Votes: 14 16.5%
  • =< HTML4, CSS2, frugal JS, frugally embedded media (Closer to Early 2000's Web)

    Votes: 67 78.8%
  • Something else (Post an alternative)

    Votes: 4 4.7%

  • Total voters
    85

fourbirds

macrumors member
Jan 12, 2019
66
74
How about an extension for TenFourKit that changes the web address of certain links so they are automagically accessible to our old browsers. Click on a Wikipedia article and get redirected through http://theoldnet.com/. Click on a reddit article, and get redirected to teddit.net or old.reddit.com. Open a Google news article, and get redirected using 68k.news. Etc...

No need to reinvent the web to match a rosy coloured image of the early web. Unfortunately that version of the internet is mostly dead, killed off by marketing money.
 

Certificate of Excellence

macrumors 6502a
Feb 9, 2021
922
1,432
You certainly got the mocking part right Ms.Magneto...well more like jokingly poking the bear in jest than outright mocking. Anyhow, I wasn’t sure if I was being too subtle or not. :) It is great to see the fundamental natural energies of the free market alive and well within the primordial ooze of web1.1v.
 
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eddjedi

macrumors 6502a
Sep 7, 2011
631
853
Nice finds! It's a shame 68k News doesn't have any images, I use iBrowse on my '060 Amiga and that can render small images just fine, and I think a text-only internet is a bit too primitive even for me. I can live without CSS, videos and interactivity, but giving up images is a step too far.

I'm not expecting it, but I would love to see a backlash against this 'modern web.' I hate it with a passion. I was a developer for over 20 years, and as soon as all this nodejs etc nonsense came along I jumped ship into management. I still have to play with code now and again, and am yet to see a single example of all these 'dependencies' making things faster or easier. It's lazy, bloated, boring-looking cr*p.
 

Dronecatcher

macrumors 603
Jun 17, 2014
5,238
7,870
Lincolnshire, UK
I can live without CSS, videos and interactivity, but giving up images is a step too far.
Sounds like you need Links2 :)

Links2.png
 
You certainly got the mocking part right Ms.Magneto...well more like jokingly poking the bear in jest than outright mocking. Anyhow, I wasn’t sure if I was being too subtle or not. :) It is great to see the fundamental natural energies of the free market alive and well within the primordial ooze of web1.1v.

Drag those knuckles, little boss. :D
 

Bruninho

Suspended
Mar 12, 2021
354
339
The first website I ever built was just a two page site about a certain Ayrton Senna, around 1996/1995. Had very little content and I was just 14/15 years old at that point, using cyber cafes to upload/download stuff.

It's pretty simple for a start, just check if the browsers of that era supported certain CSS/HTML properties or not. For example, most of mid nineties browsers did not support display: inline-block...
 

Bruninho

Suspended
Mar 12, 2021
354
339
I voted for option 2. Most browsers can deal with the kind of web described in this option. Plus, it's easier to do a fallback for even more older browsers, if you apply the same principle used for responsive web sites as of today (mobile first); Just start building them as if they were for the option 1 browsers and then start adding the features for option 2 browsers. When a browser can't handle the features of option 2 browses you can always fall back to option 1.

It's likely that these "features" are dependant of some vanilla JS so not much difference between the two options apart of Javascript usage. Oh, and yes, no AJAX, please.
 
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Bruninho

Suspended
Mar 12, 2021
354
339
btw, https://isp.netscape.com still works. I tried it with netscape 9.0.0.6 on Win98SE, but if Netscape 9 can handle it, surely other vintage browsers with https support can.

EDIT: Also like to add that some very simple youtube mirrors can be done with their API. Not sure how and how much can be done with that API for vintage browsing. But I know that there are very old videos on youtube that still have their low resolution/low quality versions, unless for some reason youtube starts deleting them...
 
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Macbookprodude

Suspended
Jan 1, 2018
3,306
898
This is so so cool.. Now, i have a reason to use os 9..The above websites I tried under IE 5.1.7, Classila, and Netscape - they all work. Even Wikipedia works, well, the older backdoor version of it works. When I asked it to look up Big Sur, it did just that, and under OS 9. Now, if we can somehow... get youtube to do some light videos, then maybe OS 9 can be useful again. Has anyone got Outlook Express to work ?
 

Bruninho

Suspended
Mar 12, 2021
354
339
This is so so cool.. Now, i have a reason to use os 9..The above websites I tried under IE 5.1.7, Classila, and Netscape - they all work. Even Wikipedia works, well, the older backdoor version of it works. When I asked it to look up Big Sur, it did just that, and under OS 9. Now, if we can somehow... get youtube to do some light videos, then maybe OS 9 can be useful again. Has anyone got Outlook Express to work ?

I think Outlook will work if you set up a MITM proxy with stunnel and if your email server supports less secure apps. I remember that a few years ago I managed to make OE 5.0 on Windows 3.11 talk to my office365 account to send and receive emails through stunnel from my 25 yr old @hotmail.com account, while my modern mac was the MITM and Windows was emulated by QEMU. I had even documented it on VOGONS forums.

What version of Netscape are you using?
 

Macbookprodude

Suspended
Jan 1, 2018
3,306
898
I think Outlook will work if you set up a MITM proxy with stunnel and if your email server supports less secure apps. I remember that a few years ago I managed to make OE 5.0 on Windows 3.11 talk to my office365 account to send and receive emails through stunnel from my 25 yr old @hotmail.com account, while my modern mac was the MITM and Windows was emulated by QEMU. I had even documented it on VOGONS forums.

What version of Netscape are you using?
I believe its Netscape 7.. under OS 9. MITM proxy ?? I do have enabled with all my email address, use less secure apps.. Outlook Express should connect and allow me to send/receive email. Do you know the imap settings for gmail ? If I recall, I did enable use less secure, so it should work.
 

mmphosis

macrumors regular
Jan 3, 2017
219
298
Html without all the warts and boilerplate. No cascading stylesheet. No ribbon. No hamburger menu. No drop downs. No frames. No cruddy forms, no javascript, No modes, No show codes. Just live layout and editing with plain, bold, italics, links, underline, strikeout, and text formatting that I used to see built into pretty much every Application on the Mac. The "browser" needs to be a full fledge editor. It needs to provide sensible defaults and guides for layout of text, charts, graphics, animation, and interaction. We had all this before the web. The good parts of retro we want. The bad parts of the web, we can do without.
 

Dronecatcher

macrumors 603
Jun 17, 2014
5,238
7,870
Lincolnshire, UK
EDIT: Also like to add that some very simple youtube mirrors can be done with their API. Not sure how and how much can be done with that API for vintage browsing. But I know that there are very old videos on youtube that still have their low resolution/low quality versions, unless for some reason youtube starts deleting them...

As far as I can tell, the last video format readable in OS9 was flv and they removed all of those years ago.

OS9 could be tricked into playing 3gp but youtube have removed those too (or at least made them inaccessible to anything but a real low end mobile device.)

The formats remaining would require playback libraries being written from scratch on OS9.

EDIT: 3gp definitely gone - just tried on my Nokia E72 with Opera Mini which could play them last year.
 
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z970

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Jun 2, 2017
3,585
4,529
@Starfia NPR's text-only site does not work on IE 5.2.2 (2001), unfortunately. But it does work on Camino 1.0.6 (2007) without issue. Part of me wonders if another section could be carved out for low-bandwidth versions of modern sites to list these examples as well? But then again, that might cloud the end-goal of what Web 1.1 will probably try to set out to accomplish, so maybe not...

@Bruninho Camino 1.0.6 (2007) and Firefox 2.0.0.20 (2008) will display Netscape News after spitting out a truckload of errors, but curiously enough, Safari 4.1.3 (2010) can't connect at all, citing the 'secure connection' error. And neither will IE 5.2.

Needless to say, I don't think it's very practical to include sites that can't even be accessed on IE 5. So a minimum browser requirement should probably be established to address this.
 
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