Ask HN: It's 1997, how do you build a website?

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  • oldweb-today

    Browse emulated browsers connected to old web sites in your browser!

  • 1. Anything that can emulate Windows 95

    2. HotDog, Dreamweaver, and/or Frontpage for HTML editing. They each have their strengths & weaknesses and work relatively well together. Normally I'd lay out pages in Dreamweaver or Frontpage and then clean up the HTML with HotDog. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotDog. Upload them with BulletproofFTP (http://www.bpftp.com/), an ancient predecessor of Filezilla.

    3. Not sure if any of the old hosts are still around. Maybe Neocities.org comes close to the Geocities of old, or else you can get barebones and very cheap but reliable web hosting from https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

    Get AOL dialup: https://getonline.aol.com/dialup and a 56k modem off eBay, no cheating with megabit connections.

    You can emulate old browsers online: https://oldweb.today/

    People generally weren't self-hosting their websites back then because phone lines weren't very reliable, and the dialup modems of the day (like today's cable modems) generally had faster download than upload speeds. After the BBS era, commercial internet hosts started becoming pretty common, but they usually used expensive ISDN or T1 lines.

    Apache was still in its infancy then, and Microsoft IIS was common.

    ---------

    Overall, I don't think the network stack is really THAT far removed from what we have today. The basics of HTTP were pretty fleshed out already (it was more the HTTPS and DNS security extensions that really evolved), along with better compression and parallelization protocols in HTTP2/3. And of there's been a huge amount of backend server optimizations, caching, reverse proxies, etc. But the old network stack would still work today and you can still run a basic barebones http daemon and firewall the same way you could back then, open up port 80, and watch your box get pwned by the bots. Hell, there are probably still zombie bots leftover from that era running on someone's basement PC, just casually scanning the internet day in and day out, waiting for its chance...

    What's changed a lot more (IMO) is more the language of the web itself. HTML was very basic then, as was JS and CSS. Making websites without modern CSS, in particular, is very painful... requiring a lot of nested tables, frames (remember those? they're different from iframes!), etc. A lot of the pain was abstracted away to backend scripting languages (Perl, ASP, Coldfusion) or frontend extensions (Java, Shockwave Flash) and people didn't really work in vanilla HTML/JS very often (because they were so weak by then). Plain HTML is for your basic Astro Marmalade site with a bunch of animated gifs and whatever, but probably real ecommerce sites (such as it were) wouldn't be written in plain HTML :)

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    Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

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