18 thoughts on “Testing WP-Web1.0 theme

  1. You have reply function, so this is Web2.0

    Just joking, this is fun, but probably a little bit too primitive.

      • But it loads so damn fast!

        Too bad I don’t have a machine with ancient browsers on it to test at the moment.

        • It certainly is fast! Not so high on the usability.

          Since many of the images are PNG and JPEG, with seemingly insane sizes it will render very poorly on anything ancient.

          Look at that UnixWare 2 post, and imagine one of the images of the 2010 MacPro in that tiny window.. it’d be unusable.

  2. I think the general notion of this is pretty great.

    However, people nowadays tend to browse with very wide browser windows, so it might be good to add a max-width and auto margin to limit its width to something reasonable.

    • Indeed, it really needs tweeks… Nothing I can do on a cellphone…

      The look is too 1991 actually for my tastes.

      I’d still rather something more 1997 to be honest, but the lack of time…..

      Oh well let’s see if I can do 12 more hours

  3. Forget to mention, I run a website called “cnVintage”, which is a retro-computing forum in Chinese. I designed a “legacy” version of it (http://legacy.cnvintage.org), aims to be viewable on old (but not too ancient, like IE 3.0+) browsers yet looks nice (enough) on modern browsers. I did some optimizations:
    * Surely all the contents are rendered by server, no client side JS is required to load the data.
    * The page layout is done with , which was the mainstream of that era. (But surely replaced by CSS5 nowadays)
    * Automatic image resizing. All images will be downscaled by server so they are viewable on slow machines.
    * Images will be replaced by a link to a popup window if old browser is detected (actually implemented as, if not any of whitelisted new browsers is detected). Full page of images will cause serious slow down on machines before Pentium II. (Including many Windows CE based devices)
    * Max width limitation in CSS so it looks nice on 1080P displays. This would be simply ignored by old browsers.
    I also open-sourced this engine at github.com/cnVintage/cnVintage-legacy, written with Node.js (Surely this won’t run on an ancient server)

    • Vintage computing in China? Where? I’m in Hong Kong, and I travel from time to time in SE China, and I haven’t seen anything vintage!

      Where do you find stuff? Do you do meetups and events?

      So many questions!

      • So many good questions!
        Shamefully, China is one of the biggest e-waste import country, this include industry equipments, measuring instruments, old cellphones, old computers. Many of them get disassembled, parts get “recycled”, which means being refurbished and sold as “new”. Which is mostly a bad thing for us, it is increasing hard for us to buy good quality parts, even on large distributers like Mouser or Element14, but this do give us some nice advantages. For example, we can easily buy used 8086 chips online. Also, as I have mentions, many of them get disassembled, but not all. In China you can buy all sorts of old computers from all over the world with relatively low price. PC98 from Japan, SPARCstation from the U.S., all sorts of these things.
        Yes, we were planning to have a meetup last year in SE China, but it was aborted due to lack of support.

  4. Amazing what you read here. Vintage computing in China is new for me too, but Im deep in the heart of Europe and not likely to come over there too soon. Anyway, the theme is … well .. I get very nostalgic when looking at it, but the usability would be horrible.

    Those were the days, yes… but we have made some progress since then. Maybe something a bit nicer? To explain my meaning, Im a fan of the Commodore 64, but I would not try to program on it today. Not for my living, anyway…

  5. You can’t fool me, this site isn’t from the mid ’90s or it’d have a sandstone texture background image or something like that!

    The link to the comments doesn’t really stand out. Maybe that’s what bbslovag/dolan was trying to say 🙂

    • sandstone texture, with frameset and animated gifs anyware, like good ol’ geocities!

      Well, keep in mind that this theme tried to look more like really early websites, even before than when they started to play with bgcolor=””, frameset and table elements everywhere!

  6. Oh, hey, I wondered if anyone else was going to try it.

    So, this definitely isn’t finished, but part of my goal here is… semantic markup is OK, but styling should be kept to a minimum, and ideally handled by the client. So, basically, the idea is… design as if a stylesheet is present, and then just… don’t apply a stylesheet. (OK, really, it was yank the stylesheet off of an existing theme and tweak it to work better without it.)

    Table elements are OK – they’re representing tabular data, which would’ve required a <pre> tag before <table> was introduced – but note that even in the late 90s, a lot of sites kept to the plain, unstyled aesthetic.

    I’m even OK with using some modern HTML features to enhance the experience for newer clients, as long as old clients aren’t missing out. (For instance, I’m fine with using srcset to give HiDPI clients a higher resolution alternative image.)

    The biggest weakness of the theme is… I need to manually make sure images are narrow enough. This means I actually have to edit older posts to fit. (And, if you’re on an actual HTML 2.0 client, some of them don’t respect height and width attributes in an <img> tag, IIRC, so you actually need to rescale I think…)

    • Can php resize? I think stuff like breaks and lines would go a long way, and or imagemagick to convert down to low JPEG and GIF…

      I’d love for something like system7today.com just a bit more HTML/css that mosaic.. but I like the vibe.

      • I’ve already done some work on manually inserting some breaks and lines where appropriate (fun fact: <hr> is considered a semantic element nowadays… just one that every browser treats as a presentation element), but yeah, it does need some work in that respect.

        • I tried a while back to at least get a quote on something to read WordPress data and make it IE4 friendly… I didn’t care if it’d only run on IIS/ASP on NT 4, but I was either told 30,000 or people ran for the hills… I should almost do it myself, but it’s frankly too much effort lol

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