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| Author | Web development on retro Macs (Read 35036 times) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Bolkonskij
Administrator 1024 MB  Posts: 2023 
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on: September 18, 2021, 14:19
System 7 Today is 100% HTML 3.2 compliant after I backported the original codebase. (sans the forum) I strive to keep all my websites HTML 3.2 compatible for maximum compatibility with browsers as old as Netscape 3. I'm now working on doing that with Cornica and the upcoming Mac Garden redesign by fogwraith will also adhere to HTML 3.2 standards. Because I'm doing this for fun, I'm using my Power Mac 8600 / 200 for web development. Ever since I sat down the first time I discovered a lot of useful tools, from software validators to editors to optimizers that helped me to get going / optimize my workflow. I wished I could find a comprehensive guide about writing HTML 3.2 pages on an older Mac instead of having to dig into various sources. So I thought about writing a guide for S7T that explicitly shows how to develop a retro compatible website on System 7. You could use your old LC III for that :-) Thanks to the Garden's free hosting you can have it up on one weekend and may learn a thing or two. Besides, the web needs more personality and great fanpages instead of social media crap, clickbait and salesmen. Is there any interest in such a guide? |
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Last Edit: November 10, 2021, 14:22 by Bolkonskij
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68040
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512 MB  Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #1 on: November 01, 2021, 22:52
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I plan on doing just that for my new book series. I think a story about medieval adventures deserves a retro looking website, don't you agree? :-)
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #2 on: November 02, 2021, 17:26
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Absolutely! Great to see there's somebody else other than fogwraith and me into coding according to HTML 3.2 / 4 specs. "Lean and mean"! Mac OS has everything you need (BBedit or PageSpinner for writing HTML), Transmit for FTPing files to the webserver, iCab with inbuilt validation ... and lots of tools & utilities that fly "under the radar" but are really useful. Besides, it's great fun to do it on Mac OS 
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #3 on: November 03, 2021, 01:21
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I got all those tools installed already (and more). Just never got around doing much with them - yet.
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mac-cellar
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128 MB Posts: 176 Gotta love System 7
Reply #4 on: November 03, 2021, 04:00
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Count me in... I tinker with a simple page I have running on the G4 Mini I use as a home server. I know just enough HTML to be dangerous
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #5 on: November 06, 2021, 15:38
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Very cool! We need a thread in which everyone can showcase their sites ;-)
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #6 on: November 10, 2021, 14:29
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Just moved this thread to our software board so we can use it share our works and maybe some tips as well. I came across an interesting tool today that goes by the name "GIF Prep". The problem: It's next to impossible to know the true size of your GIF and JPEG graphics created on Mac OS because the "data fork" containing your GIF or JPEG file is accompanied by the "resource fork" which blows up the file on your desktop but not on a webserver. But you do want to know if you managed to optimize that gif down to 5kb. You could upload it via ftp and check the size ... or use GIF Prep. Drag & drop your GIFs and JPEGs onto GIF Prep before you check their size in the Finder's Get Info dialog to make sure that the file size you see is the correct one. All it does is striping off the resource fork and keeping the data fork. If there's some interest, I can upload it for ya'll. As I'm trying to squeeze more performance out of my Cheat Emporium site, this has become helpful.
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mac-cellar
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128 MB Posts: 176 Gotta love System 7
Reply #7 on: November 10, 2021, 20:09
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Quote from: Bolkonskij I came across an interesting tool today that goes by the name "GIF Prep". I'm interested
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mac-cellar
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128 MB Posts: 176 Gotta love System 7
Reply #8 on: November 10, 2021, 21:08
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Just got my Garden web hosting account setup, and I'm working up a web page. I wanted to go old school to create the page. I've used Claris Home Page before, which I liked but found a little quirky. I also have an old version of DreamWeaver which had a bit of a learning curve for which I really don't have time. I know I have a copy of Adobe PageMill floating around somewhere, and somewhere else I've got a copy of GoLive 5 I came across in my travels. What to do? So last night, sitting in front of the TV, I fired up the Titanium G4 to see what I could do in Classilla's Composer. I'm so pleasantly surprised by how easy Composer is to use, and what I, a novice by any measure, can do with it. Granted we are talking simple stuff here, but that's all I'm interested in to get started. Layout is simple, tweaking elements in tables and images is easy to do in the settings given, and I can experiment with editing the raw HTML if I feel so inclined. Makes me wonder why I didn't try my hand at this years ago. I should have something up and running soon. Hope folks will check it out and let me know what they think.
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #9 on: November 11, 2021, 09:30
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Grab it while it's hot I just used GIF Prep to check on a GIF graphics I worked on for S7T. Finder showed its size to be 60k. After GIF Prep threw out the resource fork and suddenly it was just 4k anymore - a good size to upload :-) Frankly, I wasn't aware of Composer in Classilla. Does it create valid HTML 3.2 code or is it at HTML4 or even XHTML already? You may be losing retro compatibility if you advanced to much. HTML 3.2 is a safe bet, as even old old Netscapes can deal fine with it. The problem with WYSIWYG editors is that they usually create very messy code. System 7 Today was partly created using Dreamweaver and it showed when I looked at the sources. It was a lot to clean up :-) What exactly was quirky with Claris Home Page? I only looked at it like 20+ years ago but it looked competent at the time? I know Dan from Low End Mac used and loved it for more than a decade. I'd be interested in hear your evaluation of these programs because you haven't worked with them yet. Might be interesting for us old-timers as to what recommend newcomers to coding old websites.
Last Edit: November 11, 2021, 09:33 by Bolkonskij
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mac-cellar
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128 MB Posts: 176 Gotta love System 7
Reply #10 on: November 11, 2021, 15:47
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Looks like Composer does HTML4. I need to try Claris Home Page again - admittedly it’s been a while since I tried it. I think it was the WYSIWYG editing itself in Home Page that was at issue - I vaguely remember preferring to work directly in the HTML source to get what I wanted. I’d also like to dig up Pagespinner, a very simple WYSIWYG editor, which I remember from a demo years ago. The clean vs messy code thing is very interesting to me - how can I tell the difference? Can you give me an example? And thanks for GIF Prep!
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #11 on: November 11, 2021, 19:05
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Claris Homepage is very old - and that is both its strength and weakness. It does create HTML code that'll run even on a 68k Mac with Netscape 3. But then its not very sophisticated UI forces you to learn to think like the CH makers. Examples of what WYSIWYG editor do ... one typical thing is that they add empty tags at insertion point. Like: <UL> <LI><B></B>bulletpoint <LI>bulletpoint </UL> Or declarations that overwrite themselves because the user switched fonts and every time that happens it inserts the font tag. For example: <font SIZE="2" FACE="Geneva"><font FACE="Helvetica, Arial">HelloWorld</font></font> Especially that can lead to code that is terrible to read. The problem is that these editors are not "smart". Whatever you click or do, it inserts the appropiate HTML tags into the code. You can probably avoid a lot of this clutter if you know HTML and understand how these editor work (but then, why not write it yourself? More accurate and faster). Nonetheless, the editors serve a purpose - and that is to enable those to create a website who couldn't otherwise. So I don't want to discourage anyone from creating a retro website with an editor. It's not like it'll be total rubbish. It's just not using the full potential :-)
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mac-cellar
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128 MB Posts: 176 Gotta love System 7
Reply #12 on: November 12, 2021, 07:33
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Bolkonskij - thank you for that answer! Makes perfect sense, especially given an experience I had at work recently. I work for a benefits administrator here in the US. The site my company provides to clients for enrollment has a number of short sections that are customizable by client managers (like me) using a little WYSIWYG editor embedded in the administrator module. It looks like a mini MS Word window with an HTML source view (that nobody uses... except me). This little editor gives most of my fellow managers fits because it does exactly what you said - it adds tags where needed, but whenever a change is made it just puts in more tags without taking out the old ones. The trouble is, the output in the editor looks like what you want, but it's only when you save to the actual page that you see the havoc all of those stray tags can do. And heaven forbid some unsuspecting soul pastes something into the editor from a Word document - yikes what a mess! I got so frustrated with this thing that I learned a few HTML tags so that I could make blocks of HTML for each customizable section - I only have to update the visible text, then cut/paste into the editor.
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #13 on: November 12, 2021, 08:34
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What you describe is a typical issue. Add MS Word to the equation. At my day job at a bank I had an intranet under my wings. Users would create content using these "tiny MS Word" editors (TinyMCE in my case). Initially, we had a lot of trouble with copy + pasting from MS Word. What looks like plain text in Word isn't - there's tons of formatting in the background which one will unexpectedly copy over and create an even messier document. Until I had an import-from-Word function ready, one easy workaround was to paste the text into textedit or some other plain-text editor and from there to the editor. Not perfect, but at least less of a mess. But I digress ... It's cool to hear you have some touch point with HTML at your workplace! Even more reason to tinker with retro projects and learn HTML from it - you'll be "The HTML guy" at work, haha ;-) By the way, for anyone looking to answer "how do I write this or that in HTML 3.2", there's a great page to look things up: http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/index.html Works fine from System 7 / Netscape 4 too!
Last Edit: November 12, 2021, 08:43 by Bolkonskij
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mac-cellar
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128 MB Posts: 176 Gotta love System 7
Reply #14 on: November 12, 2021, 22:17
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So I’ve completed an initial run at my macintosh.garden site at http://home.macintosh.garden/~mac-cellar/ Created this in Classilla’s Composer, but last night after checking it in Netscape 4 and kinda cringing, I go curious about HTML 3.2 and making this a bit more friendly to browsers older than Classilla. I found a terrific HTML 3.2 document at https://www.htmlhelp.com/distribution/ for a reference, and then I decided to revisit PageSpinner 2, which I had used briefly many years ago (actually paid for). This is a great little editor! It took me a little while to get the hang of it, but by the end of the night I was humming right along. PageSpinner isn’t WYSIWYG - it just makes it easier to pick the right tags with menus and a very neat little HTML Assistant. It does something else too - it gives you the option to select tags for HTML 3.2 or HTML 4.0. This was incredibly helpful to me and allowed me to take the time validate the tag syntax in the reference I was using. PageSpinner also has a number of other features, most of which I’ve yet to explore, but one that I found interesting was a menu item that opens a W3C HTML validation site in a browser. I was able to upload my HTML file and find errors and issues in the code. To make a long story short, I had my home page redone in PageSpinner with HTML 3.2 code in one evening. Looks much better in Netscape 4. Just have to upload this to the Garden tonight, then start in on some other pages.
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