YAHEW!
A FIELD GUIDE TO THE OLD WEB
★ PLATES FILED: 5 ★ THE FIRST WEBSITE ★ HYPERCARD ★ TELETEXT & MINITEL ★ THE 88X31 BUTTON ★ THE CUSTOM CURSOR ★ New plate filed most days through August ★

0 · Ancestors3 / 3 filed

  • The first website recovering
    NeXTSTEP, 1990. The browser that could also edit every page it showed you
  • HyperCard extinct
    1-bit Macintosh, 1987. The authoring tools were already installed
  • Teletext & Minitel extinct
    Ceefax, 1974. A network with no address bar

I · Decoration2 / 6 filed

  • The 88x31 button recovering
    GeoCities, 1997, an ad unit that became a friendship token
  • The blinkie recovering
    LiveJournal, 2003
  • The tiled background endangered
    Netscape defaults, 2KB filled a whole screen
  • The custom cursornewNEW extinct
    Windows 98, 2001. A page could take your pointer, and usually should not have
  • Adoptables & pixel pets extinct
    Neopets petpage, 2001
  • Stamps & fanlistings endangered
    deviantART, 2006, affiliation before the follow button

II · Discovery0 / 6 filed

  • The webring recovering
    Discovery as a graph you walk, not a feed you're served
  • The directory extinct
    Yahoo!, 1996, the thing this page is pretending to be
  • Site awards extinct
    Peer review with no ranking signal
  • The blogroll recovering
    Movable Type, 2003, a feed you curated yourself
  • Search before Google extinct
    AltaVista, 1997, keyword-stuff it and watch it win
  • The hit counter endangered
    Analytics you owned, and its limits

III · Conversation0 / 4 filed

  • The guestbook endangered
    Perl CGI, comments you owned. Sign it, it's real
  • The tagboard extinct
    Cbox, 2004
  • The forum & the BBS endangered
    ANSI terminal, reputation as a visible number
  • The stats page extinct
    Raw server logs, published on purpose

IV · Construction0 / 7 filed

  • The table layout extinct
    Nested tables and spacer GIFs, the old way to build
  • The frameset extinct
    The original SPA, and every problem it introduced
  • The image map endangered
    Navigation as a picture
  • <marquee> & <blink> extinct
    Netscape vs IE, how a tag dies
  • MIDI & site music extinct
    A whole song in 30KB
  • The splash page extinct
    The site as a threshold, not a landing page
  • View source endangered
    Brutalist, no CSS, the lesson argues its own thesis

V · Extinction0 / 5 filed

  • Link rot endangered
    The default state of a link is broken
  • The GeoCities deletion extinct
    2009. 38 million pages. What got saved
  • The death of Flash extinct
    What ended on 31 December 2020
  • The platform turn endangered
    How the trade got made
  • The revival recovering
    Where we are now, and the source drop