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3D Megadoodoo posted:That's because it's the 80s And the web browser was from '96...? I might not have enough coffee in me for this. Like, legit if I'm missing something here let me know. Fantastic Foreskin has a new favorite as of 18:09 on Dec 30, 2020 |
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Dec 30, 2020 17:33
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Drastic Actions posted:
Man arachne takes me back
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Dec 30, 2020 19:22
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Humphreys posted:That's where you agree and print up some little Burle stickers. It was far from the only issue with that bid. And the language around change orders substitutions were bad. Even asking after the bid was submitted meant forfeiting the bid bond. It's the first time I've ever seen a public bid like that with no bidders. Usually some dumbass trunk slammer will take a crack at it but no one touched it.
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Dec 30, 2020 19:38
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As someone who stubbornly kept using MS-DOS until sometime into Windows 98's reign, I am definitely disappointed I never knew about Arachne back in the day. I just used Lynx on my father's unused university shell account sometimes instead 
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Dec 30, 2020 20:40
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Some Goon posted:Looks hopelessly uncool to me. Turn on your god da- Pham Nuwen posted:turn on your monitor 
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Dec 30, 2020 21:45
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Dr. Quarex posted:As someone who stubbornly kept using MS-DOS until sometime into Windows 98's reign, I am definitely disappointed I never knew about Arachne back in the day. I just used Lynx on my father's unused university shell account sometimes instead In the early 90s me and my friend group where big into BBSes. We discovered the FDA had a toll-free BBS. But it went straight into Lynx displaying their website at the time. Going to a URL however was disabled. But! One of us figured out that you could dig into the website and find a link to the Library Of Congress' website. Once there, they had a link to the Webcrawler search engine. On the web crawler search engine you could type in any URL and it would take you directy to it when you selected search. So for quite some time, we had text based internet access for free. They must have been onto it though, even couple weeks the li nk to the LOC website was moved. We would have to dig around and find it again. Nothing like "browsing" the internet via Lynx at 2400 baud.
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Dec 30, 2020 22:13
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Humphreys posted:Careful! Remember when lowtax perma'd someone who was using a WebTV device browser to access the forums. It was Radium, not lowtax. E: poo poo, at least I'm pretty sure it was radium
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Dec 30, 2020 23:00
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Pretty sure you're right
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Dec 30, 2020 23:32
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Drastic Actions posted:I worked on something today that might be of interest to this thread. I wrote a little Web Server that proxies SA and rewrites its HTML into something less complex so older browsers can render it (and also proxies files and has SSL off Nice! I assume there's a lot of SA-specific code there in parsing the HTML and generating new HTML, so it's not a general-purpose tool you could use for other sites without having to write more code for each site? I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned Web Rendering Proxy (https://github.com/tenox7/wrp) here before, it's more general-purpose but less usable because it actually renders part or all of the web page to a GIF or PNG image and then sends the image to your crippled browser. I haven't tried it but it seems horrible! Also I'll 3rd that it was Radium who did the WebTV ban, at least that's what I remember hearing a few times.
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Dec 31, 2020 01:41
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). Basically, it lets you access modern SA from old hardware.
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Buttcoin purse posted:Nice! I assume there's a lot of SA-specific code there in parsing the HTML and generating new HTML, so it's not a general-purpose tool you could use for other sites without having to write more code for each site? It's based on a forum parser I've written. So I parse the site (or use the newer JSON endpoints, there's a few!) and render HTML based on it. My original plan was to take raw SA requests, strip the CSS and JavaScript, and replace them with my own. That way, I could use the same URLs but only worry about replacing or proxying where the requests go. Turns out that even stripped to nothing, the layout of the forums doesn't work well on the browsers I wanted to target, and I didn't want to use CSS and JavaScript at all if I could avoid it. And once I saw Internet Archive versions of SA from 2001, I stole the layouts from that. In the realm of "figuring out how to use old browsers today," I rather like the "create HTML the browsers support" rather than what that other project is doing by literally creating images. To me, it's more about being able to access new content in old ways, in a way you would expect for the time. That's more interesting to me. I did have an idea for creating a YouTube proxy that would so the same kind of thing: Make a smaller version of the YouTube interface, and for every video you find, proxy that through a local server that can transcode it into something old computers can understand and render. Like, if YouTube existed in 1997. Looked into transcoders but I could get anything running reliably. Eh, maybe one day.
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Dec 31, 2020 02:53
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Ooh ooh, have it do that old http content negotiation thing from back when the idea was that different browsers would support different image formats and they could advertise what they would accept and you would respond with the highest ranked variant that fit their acceptance criteria, so one browser gets a JPEG, another gets a GIF, another gets an XPM, etc And for YouTube you could have the lowest fallback be one of those deals that transcodes on the fly to animated ASCII art
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Dec 31, 2020 03:28
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Radium claimed to ban someone for using for using WebTV, but I've also seen speculation that it never actually happened. From the same thread: radium posted:Around 400 requests out of 2,500,000 were from mobile phones. For contrast, there were 1100 requests from Lynx (a text-based browser).
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Dec 31, 2020 04:43
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Drastic Actions posted:In the realm of "figuring out how to use old browsers today," I rather like the "create HTML the browsers support" rather than what that other project is doing by literally creating images. To me, it's more about being able to access new content in old ways, in a way you would expect for the time. That's more interesting to me.
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Dec 31, 2020 05:45
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The image thing is clever, but really it's just a clunky RDP client at that point (referring to the non-html method mentioned above - Rosetta Stone proxy is awesome)
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Dec 31, 2020 06:22
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Managed to get a kind-of-works proof of concept working for getting a YouTube video playing in IE 5. I can create a page with an ActiveX object embedded in it, and set the source to my server with a given YouTube video id. It calls my server, calls YouTube via YouTubeExplode, gets a lower quality MP4 mix of the video (320p usually), and uses ffmpeg to transcode it down into either WMV or Quicktime, into the earliest codecs it supports. I was hoping for RealMedia (probably the only time I would ever say that) but it only decodes.
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Dec 31, 2020 19:01
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Remember in college the matrix came out and the movie file was ginormous. like a full cd. college residential network shared a single t1. all labs shared a part of a t1, but the mainframe VAX had a t1 all its own. a terminal guru used kermit95 to pull the video over to the mainframe to a temporary disk on the vax then immediately pulled it down to the lab pc he was using. the people in charge of the vax knew he did lots of weird stuff with the mainframe but were thankful he could be reasoned with.
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Dec 31, 2020 21:03
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Sentient Data posted:The image thing is clever, but really it's just a clunky RDP client at that point (referring to the non-html method mentioned above - Rosetta Stone proxy is awesome) Definitely, I'd be inclined to just try VNC-in-a-browser or something. I suppose the only benefit is that a link to download a file probably works, so maybe you could browse https://www.microsoft.com via an image but then actually download a file to your Windows 3 machine? That might be useful if it wasn't for the fact that everyone removes their old downloads from their sites. 
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Jan 1, 2021 01:00
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Drastic Actions posted:Managed to get a kind-of-works proof of concept working for getting a YouTube video playing in IE 5. Absolutely you should @ LGR with that on twitter. He'd get a serious kick out of that.
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Jan 1, 2021 16:37
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Oh Jesus, that "8% downloaded" is just 
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Jan 1, 2021 17:11
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ishikabibble posted:Absolutely you should @ LGR with that on twitter. He'd get a serious kick out of that. https://twitter.com/drasticactionSA/status/1344840040187355136
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Jan 1, 2021 17:55
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This is the kind of thing where if you make it modular enough people would start competing to build parsers for every big modern website
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Jan 1, 2021 18:05
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What would be the dumbest most obtuse way to browse the forums in this day and age and could we get Jeffery to add better support for it?
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Jan 1, 2021 18:13
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Warbird posted:What would be the dumbest most obtuse way to browse the forums in this day and age IDK I think Apple still makes computers?
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Jan 1, 2021 18:17
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I miss the old internet.  It just felt more hand made, artisanal even.
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Jan 1, 2021 19:08
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Because it was. Notepad was the way to make pages, and javascript only did the most basic touchup stuff and was absolutely nonessential. Sure there were things like activex plugins for page counters because people had no idea what server-side scripting was and the occasional flash video used for a site's logo because the flv was only 5kb instead of a 20kb jpeg, but it was a place of beauty. The entire internet was behind a mild gateway, and it was nice because the only real limiting factor was some base knowledge which brought everyone closer together
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Jan 1, 2021 19:15
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Jan 1, 2021 19:20
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Omg I remember the first time I saw under construction gifs and thought, well I better check back later....those sites never got fully built, ever.
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Jan 1, 2021 19:22
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Every new day brought a new feature that browsers supported. Background colors. Background images. Tables. Frames. Javascript. CSS. One day when Java Applets became supported I put one at the top of my site to display crossfading text: WELCOME TO / MYSITE.COM It was important to use every feature
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Jan 1, 2021 19:25
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Data Graham posted:It was important to use <blink>every feature</blink>
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Jan 1, 2021 19:44
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The World Wide Web peaked with imagemap navigation. We should have stopped there.
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Jan 1, 2021 21:33
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Drastic Actions posted:Managed to get a kind-of-works proof of concept working for getting a YouTube video playing in IE 5. If you have a good networking hardware, can you force the connection that system is using to 56k speeds? For anyone else wanting to feel the days of long load times again, Chrome lets you create network throttling profiles.  I put in 46kbps for download because I never EVER saw 50kbps+ on a commercial line unless everyone else on the dialup line happened to not be using it.
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Jan 1, 2021 22:33
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Dr. Quarex posted:The World Wide Web peaked with imagemap navigation. We should have stopped there. Because I had a deadline of about an hour I built something for work using imagemap in 2020.
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Jan 2, 2021 07:01
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GutBomb posted:Because I had a deadline of about an hour I built something for work using imagemap in 2020. I built a complete website for a big Real Estate company using Macromedia Director.
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Jan 2, 2021 07:19
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Fuckin assholes convinced everybody that frames are bad and you should never use them and now every fuckin site I go to has a hundred fuckin lines of css and js to make sticky header menus instead of using one single html tag
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Jan 2, 2021 10:06
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do-ZBPWhhbQ
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Jan 2, 2021 11:25
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flavor.flv posted:Fuckin assholes convinced everybody that frames are bad and you should never use them and now every fuckin site I go to has a hundred fuckin lines of css and js to make sticky header menus instead of using one single html tag "considered harmful" articles have this effect where people remember that "thing is bad" but they don't remember why so they just reinvent thing anyway when they run into the situation thing was intended to solve. After a brilliant career dijkstra's legacy will forever be "while (true) { switch". Stack Machine has a new favorite as of 19:51 on Jan 2, 2021 |
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Jan 2, 2021 18:08
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I guess frames messed up bookmarks or something. Surely there was a better way to fix that then having to use a million div tags to make things look right. Same thing as not using tables for page layout. Then make the layout tags easier to use by default. When I can use the wrong thing to get exactly what I want in the first try and the "correct" method takes endless trial and error, you hosed up.
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Jan 2, 2021 18:37
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Cojawfee posted:I guess frames messed up bookmarks or something. Surely there was a better way to fix that then having to use a million div tags to make things look right. Same thing as not using tables for page layout. Then make the layout tags easier to use by default. When I can use the wrong thing to get exactly what I want in the first try and the "correct" method takes endless trial and error, you hosed up. Browsers have different ideas what the current window is when it comes to frames. Is it the URL that you came in on or the frame you have selected or the last frame updated? I do web application security/programming and some of the random implementations each company did make me grind my teeth. loving internet explorer just going down a road of batshit insane caching security headers that only IE used is usually the one that I always have to question.
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Jan 2, 2021 20:50
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Humphreys posted:I built a complete website for a big Real Estate company using Macromedia Director. In high school, my technology teacher heard about this statewide contest for students to build a website about their high school. I knew very basic HTML, which impressed the teacher, so I was in the contest. We attended the little celebration thing for it when they announced the winners. a) There were only about 10 high schools in the state participating. b) Somebody knew Shockwave, which blew everything else away. This was long enough ago that I got to use my first digital camera, which used a 3.5 floppy for its storage.
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Jan 2, 2021 21:12
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flavor.flv posted:Fuckin assholes convinced everybody that frames are bad and you should never use them and now every fuckin site I go to has a hundred fuckin lines of css and js to make sticky header menus instead of using one single html tag Why would you use a complicated rats nest of frames when you can do two lines of CSS now code:
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Jan 2, 2021 23:09
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