Crthuky

We nostalgia fans were all treated to a nineties-esque page on the various Stack Exchange sites, complete with guest books, obnoxious tiled backgrounds, Comic Sans, etc.

However, when I went to view the source code, I was expecting to see tables and frames and the other stuff web developers considered "advanced" at the time, but instead I saw the usual modern inclusion of CSS, JavaScript code, and all the rest. But then I got thinking, maybe it still might have worked to a degree, possibly in the late 1990s anyway, possibly some of the more advanced web developers had moved beyond the old tables and frames.

Could this page have worked on a browser from the 1990s, assuming a monitor with a good enough resolution, computer with enough memory, etc?

And if not, would it have been possible to create this page using whatever HTML code, etc. was available at the time? And if so, would it still work now considering a lot of features may have been deprecated / changed?

_{After thinking about what page I could post this question on, I figured that this might be the most appropriate so apologies if it isn't...}

People have actually tried this. The answer is "No".

In particular, you may notice, if you scroll all the way to the bottom, an old-timey "Best viewed in Netscape 3.0" bug. It does not in fact work at all under old installs of Netscape 3.0.

As near as I can tell, the main hang-up seems to be SSL compatibility, but likely if that issue were solved there would be other HTML/Java/JavaScript issues, as Mr. Burnap posits.

Obviously most of us, unlike the poster in the linked question, aren't running on Windows 95 with old browsers. So rather than make it work using actual period web code designed for actual period web browsers that few could appreciate, they made it work on modern web browsers, but with a 1990's look-and-feel.

As someone who was using web browsers since the NCSA Mosaic days, they did a pretty impressive job. My only big complaint is the mouse pointer fiddling they did didn't hose the pointer's responsiveness nearly enough. There are other little touches that could be added (e.g.: the blink tag), but it really does look amazingly like the real deal. 

No. The glitter falling off of the mouse was not possible in 90s era HTML.

No, not possible.

So my question is, could this page have worked on a browser from the 90s assuming a monitor with a good enough resolution, computer with enough memory, etc?

You're looking at Mosaic, and very early versions of Mozilla and the Internet Exploi... Explorer. Those browsers cannot handle modern CSS.

Computer technology has changed considerably. What was a huge internal memory back then is not even sufficient to meet the lowest acceptable requirements today. I have an Asus EEE 700 PC (just for fun). That's a lot more advanced than what you are referring to. That little Asus has now difficulty running smaller versions of Ubuntu on it.

But then I got thinking, maybe it still might have worked to a degree, possibly in the late 1990s anyway, possibly some of the more advanced web developers had moved beyond the old tables and frames.

Not with the tools used. Keep in mind, there was no CSS back then.

Could this page have worked on a browser from the 1990s, assuming a monitor with a good enough resolution, computer with enough memory, etc?

Simply no. No CSS, no standardized way of interaction with the backend and so on.

And if not, would it have been possible to create this page using whatever HTML code, etc. was available at the time?

Yes, I belive it could be made - of course it requires esentialy a whole recoding. Layout wise next to all parts could have been made look like it, ofc, including the star spread and comic sans fonts (at least on some OS/browser combinations).

Now getting all interaction to work might be way more of a problem. It can be solved and might even be fun - more so as the backend had to be reworked as well.

And if so, would it still work now considering a lot of features may have been deprecated / changed?

While many features are official deprecated, browsers still support quite a lot. So far, I didn't notice any optical feature of the 'new' design that couldn't be easy done with a late 90s browser. The biggest hurdle might be the notification system.

So yeah, if I get drowned in tons of money (or migrate to some beautiful remote island - all inklusive), it would be a nice task to waste time :))