My Second Website HTML from 1995
Created //
TL;DR // This is the second website I ever built, and it was for a client. It's an internal real estate marketing tool built way back in 1995. It still works!
Let's continue down the nostalgia path. Previously I wrote about the first website I ever built, made in 1994 as part of a university project.
This time, I'll show the first website I built for an employer.
Background
In 1995, I was working for a company that managed and developed large real estate portfolios in Canada. A key project was downtown Toronto adjacent to the CN Tower.
Previously the area had been known as the "Railway Lands" because it the a huge rail yard. But the plan was to redevelop all of this into a mixed use residential neighbourhood. The project was called "CityPlace".
Part of the marketing effort involved producing an interactive CD-ROM (for the flashy 'sales' side of things) as well as an internal informational tool to provide important development information about each block of land.
The website was built as the informational tool.
What did it look like?
Well, it's incredibly simple and plain, but it was also 1995. We didn't have a designer, developer, UX team, etc. Just me -- an architecture student -- playing around with this HTML thing.
Also... Neither CSS nor Javascript had been invented yet.
Here's the full interactive site below:
Or, you can just visit the site directly.
It has very little in common with today's websites, other than a main header with a log and primary navigation.
When you look at the source code, there are also some oddities (from a modern perspective).
For example:
- no
<!doctype>declaration - all tags and attributes are uppercase (e.g.,
<A HREF>vs<a href>)
Layout is primarily implemented via:
<table>and<center>tags for position<font size="x">for text sizing
I also clearly didn't know how HTML comments were supposed to work. I see many instances of things like:
<!IMG SRC...>instead of<!-- <IMG SRC...>
I probably thought it was ok because the browser just didn't show broken things it didn't understand.
Behind the scenes
Tech context (1995)
The website was built using the basic HTML that was available in 1995. Or, at least my minimal understanding of it. (Remember, this was effectively brand new stuff at the time.)
I remember it being built on the DOS and Windows machine I had at work, which also explains the 8.3 all-uppercase filenames.
There was no web server. The site was accessed over a network file share, using (I think!) Netscape.
User interface and design
Well, there wasn't really a design. There was no designer.
It's mostly plain text with some informational images. There's common navigation in the top right corner. That's it!
Also remember that this wasn't designed for public use on the web. It was an internal tool to help someone (familiar with it) present the information to someone else.
Audience and presentation
Due to the nature of this site, all variables were under our control.
This was to be used internally, by people who were already familiar. They'd been "trained" to use the website. We knew the computer, OS, browser, and physical machine, where it would be used and presented.
That made most of the website challenges we're used to these days non-existent. There was only 1 browser we were going to use (Netscape). All computers were running the same OS. We controlled the network connection. And we trained the "operator" who would demo things.
Does it still work?
It still works the same way that it did ~28 years ago. No updates required. Of course, there's virtually no functionality. It's basically a bunch of static HTML pages with links and images.
The thing is -- resurrecting this project is trivial. Trying to resurrect projects with a nodejs build system from 5+ years ago (and getting them to build) can be... painful.
There's something to learn there.
Anyways... that's enough nostalgia for now.
// ka
