Why does this website exist
4.1.22 | Author: Ying
I have a .com domain with my name lying around, and I didn't know what to do with it at first. I used the .dev domain name for my actual website/portfolio. April 1st was approaching, and I came up with the idea of making a late 90s - early 2000s looking website as a joke. And to make it worse: my goal was to make it look like the work of a 13-year-old.
I had a blast making this website. Although I would rather not see another website that looks like this in the modern days (I can name at least 5 bad practices on this website, whether done intentionally or not), it sure was nice to let myself loose and create some passion projects!
I tried my best to limit this website to:
- HTML 4
- CSS 2
- ES5 JavaScript (which means I can't use let, const, and my favorite arrow functions)
- No frameworks or libraries. I am doing this the old-school way!
(There might be a few newer tags other than <iframe>that slipped through the crack, but I tried my best to check whenever I felt uncertain.)
These mean accessibility tags added in HTML 5 and responsive designs are off-limit. You have no idea how much I was itching to use display: flex to center everything vertically.
I developed this for a 4:3 screen, and it is untested on mobile or any other screen size, which means if you're on anything but desktop... good luck navigating it. (My apologies for making this abomination as a joke.)
And to double down on the madness, this website is partially formatted using the table elements. That's how you do it the old-school way! (Don't do this on modern websites, Please. We have flexbox and grid now)
I could've made my life easier using for the navbar and footer, but I put the "campaigns against frame" button there at the beginning of the project, and I decided to commit to it.
One last thing: I could've gone further to have the authentic experience by using Notepad to write all this code, but I decided against it and stuck with VS Code. Not letting myself use flexbox was already torture on its own.
Further Reading
GifCities - The GeoCities Animated GIF Search Engine (Where I found most of the assets)
