How do I make a site like doomkid's doomshack.org

[Maes]

On 6/30/2021 at 1:25 PM, Murdoch said:

 

Nice seeing a designer who knows how to code. Too many designers just use templates these days. I get annoyed when one of my clients tells me they had their site designed by whoever and I can tell in two seconds looking at the code they just bought a template from somewhere and most likely do not understand their code at all.

Then again, I often wondered if knowing how to read/write raw HTML was an important or even relevant/necessary skill for a "web designer", at least since FrontPage came to be, and, later, templates and those countless "build your own site" engines. Knowing just HTML didn't get you very far, at least not after 2000, and,  in theory, one could design web sites for a living without knowing any.

 

BTW, FrontPage has its own lore of infamy in the annals of the Internet. It's both a 1990s as it is an early 2000s thing, and it did allow everybody and their cat to become "web masters" overnight.

[Murdoch]

6 minutes ago, Maes said:

Then again, I often wondered if knowing how to read/write raw HTML was an important or even relevant/necessary skill for a "web designer", at least since FrontPage came to be, and, later, templates and those countless "build your own site" engines. Knowing just HTML didn't get you very far, at least not after 2000, and,  in theory, one could design web sites for a living without knowing any.

 

As Doomkid said, the handwritten code is almost invariably cleaner. Cleaner code loads faster and is less error prone (assuming the coder knows what they are doing of course). Cleaner code tends to help your search engine rankings too as they consider load times when assigning ranking. Though SEO of course is equal parts science and voodoo so that could be taken with a grain of salt.

[Annunakitty]

On 6/30/2021 at 12:52 AM, Dark Pulse said:

Like the 90s, eh?

• Comic Sans is your font of choice
• Animated GIFs everywhere
• An embedded MIDI is mandatory
• Some of those GIFs, by law, must be of fire and the dancing baby
• Your site properly loads in Internet Explorer ONLY - fuck Netscape
• Webpage must contain at least one Blink or Marquee tag

Am I missing anything here...?

You're missing autoplay at full volume on the MIDI, but sadly that's actually quite difficult to accomplish anymore without some heavy duty scripting.  (But not really sadly, because ouch)

[Maes]

TBQH, if you want to get into the REAL 90s website making experience, just follow the following "golden" rules"

 

• Use nothing more sophisticated than a very basic introduction to HTML as your textbook. Something actually from the mid 1990s would work best. Anything that goes into details about what should go into <META> tags is probably too advanced. Same if it implies that there are newer/different versions of HTML or non-static pages to worry about. What we want here is really the bare-bones of the basic tags for static layouts, and nothing else, because there is nothing else, right?
  
• If you encounter a website that looks more advanced/prettier that yours, just look at its source code and rip whatever you can figure out with your limited, bare-bones HTML knowledge. Besides, someone else may rip  your site, later on, so be kind and play along ;-)
  
• Javascript may be a bit too advanced....but there were early examples of it. If you have to use it, don't pretend that you're a spoiled 21st century kid with tons of online resources to refer to. Just rip enough for e.g. a cool snow effect or that annoying "right click blocker" that they though was so cool, but don't bother learning/go into greater detail over how it works, or pretend that you can understand how it works.
  
• No directly viewable picture should be larger than 200 x 100 or so. 640 x 480 is REALLY luxury (besides, where you'd find something that big, unless you have a scanner?), and should be linked indirectly, with a warning that the link leads to a large picture.
  
• Include download sizes next to every link. Bandwidth was expensive back then, and downloading 2-3 MB all at once with no error was no joke!
  
  

 

 

 

[cybdmn]

On 7/15/2021 at 12:17 AM, Maes said:

Then again, I often wondered if knowing how to read/write raw HTML was an important or even relevant/necessary skill for a "web designer", at least since FrontPage came to be, and, later, templates and those countless "build your own site" engines. Knowing just HTML didn't get you very far, at least not after 2000, and,  in theory, one could design web sites for a living without knowing any.

 

BTW, FrontPage has its own lore of infamy in the annals of the Internet. It's both a 1990s as it is an early 2000s thing, and it did allow everybody and their cat to become "web masters" overnight.

 

Frontpage was famous for producing bloated files. Back then, when people had 56k modems, pages created with FrontPage were a horror. Not only because of the eye-cancer inducing visuals, but for their loading times as well.

[Maes]

1 hour ago, cybdmn said:

 

Frontpage was famous for producing bloated files. Back then, when people had 56k modems, pages created with FrontPage were a horror. Not only because of the eye-cancer inducing visuals, but for their loading times as well.

 

TBQH I don't know how much of the bloat was due to the sheer text/html size (I mean c'mon, on readable text parity, how much more inflated could it be), and how much due to the layout complexity. Modems were pretty good at transmitting natural text (modem compression could do near-miracles with ordinary text files, giving you way more effective bandwidth than your nominal one), so HTML size alone couldn't be it. Multiple server requests and images OTOH...

 

Let's also not forget that most browsers of the era wouldn't render a page at all unless EVERYTHING had loaded. No partial renders, no scrolling during loading, no dynamically changing layout etc 

[cybdmn]

As far as i remember, FrontPage bloat was massive back then, it created a massive header with a vast amount of useless "branding" stuff in every document.

[Dark Pulse]

11 hours ago, cybdmn said:

As far as i remember, FrontPage bloat was massive back then, it created a massive header with a vast amount of useless "branding" stuff in every document.

Even then we're probably only talking on the order of a few extra hundred bytes. Not entirely insignificant, I know, but it's not like it made the page 1.5 MB bigger.

 

And anyone who had even a vague idea of HTML could always strip that crap out.

[Maes]

To break out of FrontPage, I remember a PPT presentation floating around which basically was a "DIVs vs TABLE" layout lecture, educating about the evils of TABLEs, and how it was bad etc. etc. BUT, in the end, it did have one caveat, one particular situation, where the TABLES layout would be preferable. Only that I don't remember which one it was O_o

 

Then again, without DIVs, you cannot really even begin to talk about "WYSIWIG" HTML editors, since you cannot really place a pixel o any other element exactly where you want it (and, well, even if you do, who knows how it will render on Browsers X and Y...)