HTML 4.01 Retro Build
This is a 1998 hand-written HTML worksheet from one of my old sketchbooks. Like a lot of my sketchbook work, it was drawn with ink and drawing nib on a 9 x 12 inch sketchbook, no pencil phase. It seemed as silly in real time as it does now, but showing this training exercise at interviews ultimately got me a three-year web designer job at Merrill Lynch.
I recently decided to use it to build an actual web page with the standards of its era: table layout, embedded font styles, optimizations for Netscape Navigator and IE 4.0, and other pre-CSS artifacts. Process details below:
Process
Building actual code as I would have in 1998 took longer than expected, mostly from not remembering pre-CSS syntax (example: background color attribute is "bgcolor" instead of "background-color"). More wasted time was spent looking on Zip drives for images that turned out to be corrupted. What lunatic would even consider that much detail for a goof? Pure development time was probably 45 minutes. Declaring an HTML 4.01 doctype minimized validation errors, but BBEdit still didn't like styles in the body tag or embedded font styles.
OS 9 screenshots
I couldn't resist a second revision with OS 9 screenshots from my trusty old bronze keyboard PowerBook G3. Running anything with 8 MB of RAM on a 333 MHz processor makes the minutes fly like hours.
Editing
BBEdit Lite 6.1.2
Adobe PageMill 3.0
Simpletext 1.4
Display
Internet Explorer 5.1.7 for Mac
Netscape Communicator 4.79
Mozilla 1.2.1
PageMill and Netscape
This only worked once I got rid of modern syntax it didn't understand, like three-letter file extensions and abbreviated hex colors. I still think PageMill was the best WYSIWYG web editor for home users and small businesses before CMS options like Wordpress and blogging technology. It was the HTML version of desktop publishing.
Adobe PageMill source mode
Adobe PageMill WYSIWYG mode
Adobe PageMill preview mode
What did we learn today?
Looking back, the process might be like building raw HTML wireframes from a designer's Photoshopped mockup. Thinking about HTML without a computer might not be crazy after all. What is crazy is embedded styles still being used for HTML emails.
Your HTML historian buddy Dave
