The bad old days

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Clean­ing off my files on my ISP as I’m like­ly to be mov­ing my sites when I move my self, and I found this:

http://www.p90.net/mockups/rev_0906/

It’s a DHTML mock­up of a web­site that was nev­er launched. As far as I can tell, it’ll only work on MSIE, but I’m look­ing on a Mac, you might have bet­ter luck on the Win­dows side of things. OTOH, it may have been com­plete­ly bro­ken by MSIE 6. I was pulling all-nighters try­ing to get my busi­ness off the ground when Sep­tem­ber 11th happened.

Part of me is real­ly glad not to be doing any client-side pro­gram­ming any more. When­ev­er my boss wants a pull-down menu for a site we grab some­thing off the shelf for $20 instead of putting a few thou­sand dol­lars of devel­op­ment time into it. Of course, they’re usu­al­ly bloat­ware and slow our sites down so bad­ly that they won’t load on any­thing slow­er than a T1, but on the oth­er hand, they usu­al­ly run on most of the browsers we throw at them.

Still, I got­ta admit I smile with a lit­tle pride at those green arrows for scrolling up and down. They aren’t per­fect, but they do work, don’t they?

And even though I used the heinous “frame­set to make the page fit a par­tic­u­lar pix­el size” trick, the pages work out­side the frame­set too. A lit­tle tweak­ing and this site could run with­out frames.

http://www.p90.net/mockups/rev_0906/history.html

See?

I think I need to make anoth­er ver­sion where the text fades out at the top and bot­tom. Screw Flash. My ver­sion is read­able in Lynx.

Published by splicer

3 Replies to “The bad old days”

  1. Nice look­ing site. Looks
    Nice look­ing site. Looks just fine in Opera.

    It’s pret­ty func­tion­al for a “mock-up.” Nice con­tent. Made me wist­ful to be remind­ed that the Bay Area was once so agricultural.

    Lib­by’s still had a plant in Sun­ny­vale when I lived there briefly 20 years ago. Shut down by now, I’m sure. They had a big water tow­er next to the tracks that was paint­ed to look like a can of Lib­by’s fruit cock­tail, except it had fad­ed, and looked like “ran­dom pale veg­etable cock­tail” or something.

    San Lean­dro, which is now a rather plain (okay, ugly) South East Bay town along 880, used to be the cher­ry capi­tol. It was known for cher­ry orchards, and they had those places where you’d get a buck­et and pick your own.

    Nice to see a devel­op­ment at least acknowl­edg­ing the past a lit­tle. I won­der how they did.

  2. Yeah, it’s got the
    Yeah, it’s got the heinos­i­ty, all right. In Fire­fox, the frame bor­ders are big split­ter bars, and the green arrows don’t show up at all.

    But in IE6, the arrows work, and in fact they work bet­ter than the ones in my ex-com­pa­ny’s client-side script­ed prod­uct, even though for most of its life cycle it was tar­get­ed at IE only. (I got it to sup­port recent Mozil­la ver­sions in my last few weeks there.)

    How do those white lines drawn over the pic­tures work — is that some CSS absolute posi­tion­ing trick?

    On my own web­site I chose to use delib­er­ate­ly invalid HTML when the oth­er alter­na­tive was to use a fixed pix­el width. The one brows­er it’s known not to work in is Amaya, the W3C test­bed. That design has got to be replaced now with some­thing less cheesy…

  3. yeah, the white box­es are
    yeah, the white box­es are just DIVs with 1‑pixel white bor­ders, posi­tioned absolute­ly. I did­n’t want to do any of that crap with chopped up images, which is part of why the page­load is … well, not quite rea­son­able, but not too bad.

    Not too sur­pris­ing that Fire­fox chokes on it, although I did a lot of my test­ing in Mozil­la M18.

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