No fancy content management system or blog software — not even one that generates static pages like on my blog — just pure, basic HTML. Handwritten in a text editor.
I was inspired by Tilde.club to go back to the roots. Well not all the way — no NEdit or Netscape Navigator any more.
While this is about reliving the experience from the good old days, there are some advances in technology, both in hard- and software, even for the basics.
The charme of jagged text without anti-aliasing ist gone. So are Java applets, VRML, and Flash. And all the other browser plugins to do things like playing MIDI, MOD, or SID files.
Screens got bigger and have a different aspect ratio. Mostly 16:9 instead of 4:3. Graphic cards are not limited to palettes with 256 colors at a time and/or less than 8 bit per color channel any more. Sometimes they are not cards at all but integrated into the main processor.
So there is no need for restricting images to the websafe color palette. But it might make sense to limit the width of the text, because you get really long and hard to read lines of text in a maximized browser window on 16:9 screens.
There's still a small pocket book about HTML 3.2 on the book shelf next to my desk. We are now at HTML 5. HTML got simpler by moving many attributes dealing with the appearance of the elements into CSS.
But what is it, the „Hypertext Markup Language“? It is a language to describe the content of websites. HTML files are simple text files that can be opened and edited in any text editor.<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<title>The Title of this Document</title>
</head>
<body>
… contents …
</body>
</html>
| A | B |
|---|---|
| Foo | Bar |
| Baz | 42 |
Although the <blink> element is gone, it can be
recreated using CSS animations or JavaScript. This is like in the old days, using a CSS animation. Yep,
it's still annoying. I'll spare you the reinvention of the
<marquee> element (for now).
Surprisingly GIFs are still used for simple animations.
Theoretically it is possible to set mathematical formulas in HTML documents for decades now. Practically the capable browsers are limited.
Best viewed with any browser — that supports MathML. Which sadly aren't that many right now. It's best supported by Firefox or anything that uses Firefox' rendering engine. As of 2023 Chrome and Chromium based browsers catch up and offer at least MathML Core capabilities.
Other places you'll find me on the internet: