My first brush with HTML was in 2001 when I was 11 and my friend Ryan was 12.
He had a book on HTML, CSS, and Perl and was happy to teach me. Together we made a website that was decent for the time despite using far too many iframes. I’ll never forget feeling my brain melt when a CSS class was applied to an element. Magic.
It wasn’t until much later that I realized how strange it was to have a 12-year old computer science teacher and now, decades later, I’m a software developer in large part because of my middle school friend Ryan. Thanks Ryan.
“Which was the style at the time” is a reference to The Simpsons, I think. At least I read it with grandpa Simpsons’s voice in my head.
Had the same experience ! I had imagined onions on belts
Haven't read anything from Meyer in quite a while now.
For younger and newer devs, back in '07-'08, Eric Meyer created one of the first popular CSS resets which helped normalize differences between browser vendors.
I run into a lot of front-end devs now who aren't aware of this history. Probably worth mentioning at this point now.
I was thinking more of him authoring those original O'Reilly CSS books (with the trout or salmon covers) that really dug into understanding box models etc and distinguished it's readers from those who just aimlessly prodded around.
Yep. I remember him being called a CSS guru at the time, which I'm sure is what allowed his reset to take off.
I saw someone else mentioned his books, but he also was one of the main people behind the CSS 1 test suite (1998) that gave browser manufacturers tests they could target to ensure they were properly rendering to the CSS spec. That went on to eventually evolve into or inspire (can't remember) the CSS acid test that was used for CSS 2 and 3.
My first Internet experience was email in 1990.
Gopher was a big deal in the early '90s. Someone at the San Jose Mercury News had set up a daily list of news articles, which was important to me as I lived overseas. It was tedious to navigate but it let me access information I couldn't otherwise read.
Around that time the WWW was making mainstream inroads, thanks in part to the Oklahoma City terrorism attack. I remember watching a TV news report that found an early militia website with Timothy McVeigh's personal profile on it. It was a shocking revelation - anyone could publish anything for the world to see. Traditional gatekeepers did not have as much power in this new environment.
Not long thereafter, I downloaded Mosaic onto a gigantic Windows 3.1 laptop with a black and white LCD monitor, found an MIT HTML tutorial, and I was hooked.
The early days before gigantic scripts and inscrutable CSS took over were a joy. It felt possible to do so much with so little - even coding in a simple text editor and the basic Mosaic/Netscape tools.
I had my first brush with HTML in 1995-1996, learning via computer magazines that arrived a month late in the tiny part of that lousy town. There was no Internet, but I read about it and heard stories from an eccentric cousin who had visited the cities.
However, I had computer access whenever I wanted because I helped the local printing press and publishing houses with computers. I will always remember that one IDE/Editor that started me - HotDog[1]. I had saved the files and the work on many floppy disks.
Unfortunately, I left everything behind when I decided to leave my town. The first thing I did after landing in the new city that very afternoon was to go to a cybercafe to create my Hotmail and Yahoo! IDs.
Oh. I actually remember that marked up version of the MST3K ep guide! Around the same time I worked at Convex and marked up a few of our text-based online documents. We didn't have a web server at the time, but you could use gopher or FTP to download a compressed tar file that included "experimental" HTML you could open as a file in Mosaic.
My first endeavours live on at least partially thanks to the wayback machine; https://web.archive.org/web/19961230152148/http://www.tangen...
We had a 3d mol viewer and RealAudio :)
*fist bump* for fellow Demon user lol
1999 for me. My friend Brian showed me view source in IE and there went my social life. It’s amazing how things have progressed (with the web platform in general). Thank you Tim.
Mine was around then too, mostly because the geocities page builder applet was such a dog.
Geocities, a blast from the past. My first web host.
I remember that revelation! “Holy s**t, what if I click ‘Save’ now?”
Wow, that made me notice I'm 30 years this month too!
I barely touched the Web for the first few months I was online. IRC, FTP and Usenet only. Even email didn't hold much value at the time.
Most of the Web in 1993 was just tutorials on how to write your first web page.
My earliest surviving HTML pages are from about 1997. If I could get hold of the guy, Dustin, who has been maintaining this web site continuously since before 1996, then I could probably find the earliest fragments of my web coding from when I was using that MUD to DM my gf so I could help with the web design/Java applet course she was enrolled in:
http://resworld.eolith.net/res.html
(that's also my first registered domain there, eschaton.net .. I was bummed because NSF had just finally started charging for domains so I had to drop dozens of awesome one-word dotcoms)
Loads fast here on Orion RC and gets full marks on performance with the google.
I still use his https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/color-blend/#:::hex on localhost.
Christ, the memory of the color blend tool was completely lost to me until just now. Thanks for the throw back!
Reading this made me realize that I wrote my first web page 22 years ago. Unfortunately I have no backup of anything from that time. Also, I remember having a book by Eric Meyer about CSS not too long after that. That a lot of memories coming back from this post. Thanks for sharing!
i recently recovered my password from my first ever published html website (with under construction, and 404s), http://www.davinder.8m.net
I'm pretty sure I played with ViolaWWW web browser in late '92 - certainly at some point in '93 we were writing web pages and trying to work out how to connect them to simulation programs.
My first reaction on reading about Mosaic is, on reflection, quite amusing - when I read it I thought "Nice browser but why would anyone want to load a document over a network?" :-)
Wow. I'm still about 4 years away from the 30th anniversary of the first web page I ever created. Unfortunately I don't have it anymore.
The oldest webpage I have found decent archives of was from 1998-1999. It was "Works Best in IE" and all sorts of TABLE layout and weird magpie bits of JS madness. I based my current blog look in part based on what that 1998/1999 version of me thought would look cool for a webpage and couldn't quite pull off with TABLEs and GIFs.
I know I was building them years before that, but I'm not sure if I could tell you exactly which year I started. I do remember that a lot of my first web pages were hosted on the 1MB (then 2MB) AOL "MyPlace" (which was before AOL Hometown and before the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive). I remember at one point using up all of the AOL account's profiles just to have web pages on them. It was supposed to be a family account, but I was the one most (ab)using it.
My recollection of it, and that recollection is probably all sorts of wrong at this point, that 1MB version of "MyPlace" was one of the launch features around the time of Eternal September (in 1993 or 1994), so it is very possible I was "hosting" web pages as early as 1993. As I recall it, I was building web pages even before that AOL hosting, and mostly "hosting" them just on floppy disks I'd take to school. (Which is the reason I can't rely on my recollection too well here: I was a very precocious 9 in 1993.)
Remember how there was a hosting company called "50 Megs" because that was a huge amount of storage back in the day.
I know what mine was:
<html><body>
<h1>hello</h1>
</html> <!-- missing /body -->I don't believe you. Where's <marque> or <blink>?
if you didn't have frames you weren't shit
animations with the <title> tag
Ahh my first web pages were so full of errors! I'd say that was about '95-'97.
I made my first webpage back in 1996 for a project in my high school CS class. I don't think I have it either, but from what I recall of it, it was pretty corny.
I remember I bought a book, Instant HTML Programmers Reference by Wrox, in 1998 and I poured over every page, used it so much the cover then all the pages fell out - very little online HTML reference at the time. Seeing the cover design now still gives me a strange sentimental feeling.
I discovered HTML in 1998 when I was 12. I was fascinated. I wanted to build my own website, but on what topic? I didn't have much imagination. So, I built an HTML tutorial website, in HTML. Fun times.
I remember my first HTML was built by Microsoft Frontpage 97 on my Intel Pentium mmx 166hz + 8mb edo memory + s3 Savage gpu, and the ie3.0 was keeping crashing.
I found a book teaching HTML at a library somewhere in 1995. It was in a visual format explaining what the markups do.
My favorite was the one that made words blink.
I typed things into Notepad, meticulously tabbing and aligning the little tags to make sure it's okay.
Next year I stumbled upon a Taiwanese website somehow, with a call to action for submissions to their design contest.
I made something and sent it. For some miracle I won. They called my jr. high school for it too for some reason and got confused when I answered thinking I was a student in a fancy college in the Americas.
For the award ceremony my mom had to go accept. She was on the way home grocery shopping and didn't understand what the Internet or World Wide Web was. They congratulated her with her shopping bags in hand.
What a wild 30 years to the whole world getting connected.
Wow, HTML has really stood the test of time!
oh wow, this site is _really_ slow on latest firefox. >99% CPU time on graphics according to the profiler, haha.
I wonder what's going on, tried turning of JavaScript but I could still barely scroll.
Can't say I've had that experience on Linux Mint
Css reset ha
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