> Then in April 1995, right after the devastating bombing at a federal building in Oklahoma City, the Unabomber attacked again, perhaps peeved that another bomber was making headlines. A package bomb killed a timber industry lobbyist in Sacramento. Days later, Unabomber threatened to blow up a plane out of Los Angeles; and then he promised to stop the bombings if The New York Times and Washington Post published his 35,000-word, anti-technology, anti-modern-civilization diatribe.
This guy must be really disappointed to see what the world has became.
Reminds me of a feeling that the web had back then. Full of wonder, opportunity; it felt safe, friendly, cozy. I wish I could explain it better. Kind of like a party with trusted friends with shared interests and discovery.
Now it feels like a lot of work and little wonder. It feels unsafe, hostile and you know you are being watched, but not for your protection.
Contrast the load times between those 1996 pages from the current site. Keep in mind there is probably no advertising spyware in the 96 site and it may account for most of the HTTP requests on the current site.
In 1996, with a typical 28.8k modem, that page would've taken more than 20 seconds to load. I'm quite sentimental and nostalgic about the web of yore but let's not pretend everything wasn't a lot slower for most people back then.
And there are also no annoying autoplay videos. That has to help load times too.
I wish companies would understand that if I'm reading something on the web, I want to read it, not be distracted by a video that contains the same or less information and takes longer to watch than the article does to read.
Let us not forget that you're talking about a time before CSS was available, let alone well supported--let alone _consistently rendered_. This is a time when "web safe color palette" was part of the day-to-day web design lingo.
I could see this being a fun challenge, though--how pleasant of a modern-look web page can you make using only HTML <=v4.0; only 256 'web-safe' color palette; limited font choices. One could demo their work via BrowserStack.
EDIT: I totally forgot to think about the fact that "whitespace techniques" would have been quite a bit more difficult given that a good 80% of your users were viewing on screens that were either 640x480 or 800x600. On a 640x480 screen, this comment takes up half of the space above the fold.[1]
You overestimate how much these organizations cared about having any kind of website. Back then it was just a "we should have that, get some programmers to slap it together" and kids (like myself) were hired to do all sorts of things that experienced professionals and designers would do later.
There was no established design technique for the web. And it wasn't until a bit later (late 96, 97) that I remember formal graphic design becoming important. And then designers were still for a long time dependent on somehow getting web developers to translate that into something that could work in browsers of the era.
But I think folks forget that back then perhaps not even a majority of your users had a browser with 256 color support.
Honestly I kind of miss it - I found webpages far easier to get information off of quickly than today's pretty designs. The fact pretty much all webpages followed the "look and feel" of your browser was a feature, not a bug. Far too much control is given to web developers vs. users these days, and I think the exceedingly low signal to noise ratio is at least a bit caused by that.
Thing is that back then text did not really look that good on screens. The screen resolution was terrible, advanced hinting and anti aliasing techniques were cpu expensive and so on. Textures helped to hide that a bit.
Also, flat design works better when people already know that stuff can be clicked, or dragged and such. We can afford to lose some affordance now.
>It seems like the web could have been beautiful back then,
It couldn't because the first wave of HTML pages were hand-written by programmers instead of designers. It was several years later that slick HTML editors "democratized" webpage creation by empowering designers-who-weren't-programmers to author webpages with better aesthetics.
TV and magazines were big business with specialized design experience for decades (over a century, in the latter case), the public web was brand new and mostly had developers or content creators dual-hatting as designers at that point, with very little tool support even.
The problem with the web up until about 2006-2008 was that the designers responsible for websites mostly came from print design. In the absence of other alternatives, it's not a bad source of talented visual designers at all. But the principles of visual design for a fixed medium don't translate well onto web pages. Since then we've had a generation of designers who understood the web as a primary medium, which helped things.
It is interesting how pages like these are like a time capsule. For instance, I was just watching the movie Philadelphia yesterday and how many of the misconceptions/prejudices around AIDS were prevalent then. And here, in this link, there is news about some advances made there.
My recollection is the prejudices around AIDS had diminished dramatically by the time Philadelphia came out. But, the movie is (I think) depicting a past event when things would have been different. Also, movies often blow things a bit out of proportion. In the early-to-mid 80s, though, it would have been spot on.
Because they wrote it in an era when internet connections were slow. They have not necessarily moved along the time-to-load-vs-page-size tradeoff curve so much as the curve itself has shifted due to improved connections and computation speeds.
It's like looking at a newspaper from a century ago and remarking "how much cheaper it was back then!" Technically you're right, but the change in nominal price is not a useful economic indicator.
It’s around 64 KB, which means around 10 seconds load time on a modem, if I remember correctly. That’s very comparable to the current state of affairs.
Huh. Actually, it looks like they cleaned up a bit recently. As of a few weeks ago, there were far more skeletons in place (as literally scoured from robots.txt).
The question is "what amount of money would make the injured party whole again", to which the answer was "One million". To that one million, another million was added in punitive damages, summing to the total of two million.
Punitive damages are added to "regular" damages. The idea is that, for example, you may have only lost $30 when your bank fudged the numbers in their favour. But only awarding you $30 would be too low to discourage such behaviour by the bank, and it would also be too low to make it worth your time and money to sue.
[+] [-] akerro|8 years ago|reply
This guy must be really disappointed to see what the world has became.
http://edition.cnn.com/EVENTS/1996/year.in.review/topten/una...
[+] [-] Santosh83|8 years ago|reply
EDIT: removed hasty personal judgement.
[+] [-] cisanti|8 years ago|reply
His actions of course don't make sense, with all the respect to victims.
[+] [-] jlgaddis|8 years ago|reply
HTML was so much simpler back then.
[0]: http://qsl.net/n9wwv/gbook/guestbook.html
[+] [-] wallace_f|8 years ago|reply
Reminds me of a feeling that the web had back then. Full of wonder, opportunity; it felt safe, friendly, cozy. I wish I could explain it better. Kind of like a party with trusted friends with shared interests and discovery.
Now it feels like a lot of work and little wonder. It feels unsafe, hostile and you know you are being watched, but not for your protection.
[+] [-] tzahola|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austincheney|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhblake|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drewg123|8 years ago|reply
I wish companies would understand that if I'm reading something on the web, I want to read it, not be distracted by a video that contains the same or less information and takes longer to watch than the article does to read.
I like the 1996 version better.
[+] [-] eli|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r721|8 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/cnnbrk/status/906655818950553600 (10 Sep 2017)
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15210022
[+] [-] kjullien|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] everdev|8 years ago|reply
It seems like the web could have been beautiful back then, especially with flat design and whitespace techniques.
[+] [-] stinky613|8 years ago|reply
I could see this being a fun challenge, though--how pleasant of a modern-look web page can you make using only HTML <=v4.0; only 256 'web-safe' color palette; limited font choices. One could demo their work via BrowserStack.
EDIT: I totally forgot to think about the fact that "whitespace techniques" would have been quite a bit more difficult given that a good 80% of your users were viewing on screens that were either 640x480 or 800x600. On a 640x480 screen, this comment takes up half of the space above the fold.[1]
[1] https://imgur.com/x0keeI1
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|8 years ago|reply
There was no established design technique for the web. And it wasn't until a bit later (late 96, 97) that I remember formal graphic design becoming important. And then designers were still for a long time dependent on somehow getting web developers to translate that into something that could work in browsers of the era.
[+] [-] phil21|8 years ago|reply
But I think folks forget that back then perhaps not even a majority of your users had a browser with 256 color support.
Honestly I kind of miss it - I found webpages far easier to get information off of quickly than today's pretty designs. The fact pretty much all webpages followed the "look and feel" of your browser was a feature, not a bug. Far too much control is given to web developers vs. users these days, and I think the exceedingly low signal to noise ratio is at least a bit caused by that.
[+] [-] yoz-y|8 years ago|reply
Also, flat design works better when people already know that stuff can be clicked, or dragged and such. We can afford to lose some affordance now.
[+] [-] jasode|8 years ago|reply
It couldn't because the first wave of HTML pages were hand-written by programmers instead of designers. It was several years later that slick HTML editors "democratized" webpage creation by empowering designers-who-weren't-programmers to author webpages with better aesthetics.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IgorPartola|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xcafecafe|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tardo99|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvg|8 years ago|reply
http://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/150102183958-01-cnn-ho...
This is from http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/02/world/gallery/cnn-homepage-thr... which gives a better idea of how the front page evolved over time.
[+] [-] grep4master|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] savanaly|8 years ago|reply
It's like looking at a newspaper from a century ago and remarking "how much cheaper it was back then!" Technically you're right, but the change in nominal price is not a useful economic indicator.
[+] [-] zoul|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] probst|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shill|8 years ago|reply
This sentence has had a typo for 21 years.
[+] [-] astura|8 years ago|reply
CNN appears to never take anything down, here's CNN's coverage of the OJ Simpson trial from 1999 - http://www.cnn.com/US/OJ/
[+] [-] richard_todd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghostcluster|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mproud|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisco255|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandworm101|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bousaid|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _i5is|8 years ago|reply
Snapshot from their antiquated ad spaces listing- https://pp19dd.com/2013/02/attack-of-test3-from-outer-space/...
[+] [-] matt4077|8 years ago|reply
The question is "what amount of money would make the injured party whole again", to which the answer was "One million". To that one million, another million was added in punitive damages, summing to the total of two million.
Punitive damages are added to "regular" damages. The idea is that, for example, you may have only lost $30 when your bank fudged the numbers in their favour. But only awarding you $30 would be too low to discourage such behaviour by the bank, and it would also be too low to make it worth your time and money to sue.
[+] [-] campuscodi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magerleagues|8 years ago|reply