Web 1.1 - Building The Renegade Net

[z970]

Welcome to The Renegade Net

Tired of the modern Internet's seemingly endless supply of ads, trackers, popups, and bloat? Don't you wish to go back to a simpler time, before the Web got fat, noisy, and monetized? Well, we do too. Enter Web 1.1, the modern revival of the legendary Web 1.0.


What is Web 1.1 / The Renegade Net?

The Web 1.1 / Renegade Net collaborative initiative is not only a set of technical standards to build websites under for the best efficiency, performance, and accessibility when visiting them from environments with extremely limited resources, but also a volunteer-supported network of websites built with different values in mind than what contemporary sites have traditionally pivoted towards.

Web 1.1's design standards are structured as follows:

o HTML 4 or lower

o CSS 2 or lower

o Frugal or optimized use of embedded images, video, and other media *1

o Heavily limited use of basic JavaScript, if at all *2

o No TLS encryption

*1 Utilizing various methods to optimize content delivery for better rendering performance is encouraged.

*2 Derivatives such as AJAX, React, AngularJS, Node.js, Vue.js, etc. aren't fun for anyone and are thus strongly discouraged from use.

Designing websites in accordance with these standards ensures that the site will not only perform well everywhere, but also be accessible from anywhere - even browsers like Internet Explorer 5, Netscape 6, and older.

We believe that this practice better meets the Internet's original founding concept for information being made freely available to all, including those with very little bandwidth to spare, those who cannot afford newer phones, tablets, or computers, or perhaps even those who simply enjoy using their beloved older devices in favor of newer platforms whenever possible.


Get involved

If you don't yet know your way around the HTML and CSS markup languages, Khan Academy has published an excellent series of short, easy-to-follow tutorial videos detailing the basics.

Once you've practiced for a while and have gotten the hang of things, the World Wide Web Consortium has provided certain Content Accessibility Guidelines in order to provide the best navigational ease-of-use to visitors of your site. While designing your website, adhering to its guidelines is recommended (but not required).

Next, it is suggested to double-check the quality of your site's HTML and CSS code to ensure the best performance and compatibility with all visiting clients, available from the following links:

The W3C Markup Validation Service

W3C's easy-to-use markup validation service, based on SGML and XML parsers.

validator.w3.org

The W3C CSS Validation Service

Afterward, choose a domain registrar that supports plain HTTP addressing (like Namecheap), and then pick out a cost-effective hosting provider (suggestions). Once that's done, and provided the above design standards were followed, your site is now ready to rock and roll in The Renegade Net!

Alternatively, there are some content management systems available today (such as that provided by the wonderful Sloop) that prioritize compatibility with legacy systems, if a more streamlined and modernized website creation experience is desired.

The following websites are a list of sites that (mostly) adhere to the above standards, intentionally or otherwise. If you have built a site that does as well, please add it here for public reference (a MacRumors account is required).

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Site Directories

Web Directory
Another expansive directory of vintage browser-friendly websites sorted into many different categories. Curated by Sloop.

OoCities
A museum-like network and archive of every original GeoCities website at the time of the service's shutdown in late 2009, preserved indefinitely for public observation.


Search Engines

FrogFind
A search engine that converts both search results and websites to basic HTML, and consolidates images in order at the top of each page.

Old'aVista
A search engine that attempts to exclusively return personal websites from a specified era, in addition to a second search index of the Internet Archive's records.

Wiby
A search engine that exclusively returns user-submitted sites that are naturally frugal on JavaScript, CSS, and ad use, and can also optionally filter out HTTPS-only sites for use on an older browser. A key player in the modern revival of the classic Web.


News and Information Sites

FrogRSS
A simple RSS aggregator heavily inspired by the FrogFind search engine. Registration is quick and easy.

68k News
A news site that converts Google News stories to basic HTML.

Wikipedia Proxy (The Old Net)
The Old Net's proxy to read modern Wikipedia pages with dated browsers.


Specialty Websites (with Message Boards)

Macintosh Garden
A Mac-centric site that preserves a seemingly endless list of abandoned Mac software, provides infrastructure for several other New Old Websites, and is home to a lively community of warm and friendly people.

System 7 Today
A System 7-centric site that hosts articles, tutorials, and forums for Classic Mac OS discussion.

Mac OS 9 Lives
A Mac OS 9-centric site that offers downloads, information, and a dedicated forum focused on using Mac OS 9 in the modern day.

NeXT Computers
A NeXT-centric site that hosts software, files, magazine articles, and an active forum surrounding the continued use and discussion of NeXT workstations.

IRIX Network
An SGI-centric site that boasts an expansive library of software, hardware information, and a knowledgeable forum for the continued use and maintenance of Silicon Graphics visual workstations in the 21st century.

Cheapskate's Guide
A minimalist website centered around the sharing of ideas and opinions relating to technology and the Internet, as well as frugally procuring computers.

SpaceHey
A simplistic revival of MySpace circa 2005, where users can socialize, befriend others, create discussion points, and show off their own custom profiles. Requires TLS.


Specialty Websites (without Message Boards)

PowerBook Information & Resource Archive
A PowerBook-centric site that serves an enormous amount of hardware documentation, software, and media.

Classic Mac Networking
Everything you always wanted to know about classic Mac networking.

Mac-Classic
A quaint site that provides tips, guides, and other resources for making use of the Classic Mac OS decades on.

Rhapsody Resource Page
Learn all about installing, using, and configuring Rhapsody, Apple's early prototype of Mac OS X.

sgistuff.net
Some guy's website boasting a thoughtful variety of Silicon Graphics stuff, like a detailed expanse of hardware information, software information, fun stuff, and loads of other cool stuff.

retro remotecpu
A retro-specific website hosting hoards of software for DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Classic Mac OS.

Starring the Computer
A TV and film-centered website cataloging every computer appearance in movies and TV shows from every different manufacturer.

The Cyber Vanguard
A millennium-themed website with hoards of nostalgic components and memorabilia from the typical late 90s to early 2000s Internet, like a massive collection of 88x31 GIF badges, guestbooks, images, rudimentary blogs, and interesting UNIX utilities.

TULLNET
A treasure trove of downloads for loads of classic PC software, as well as an expansive video library featuring content that would have been common in the early days of YouTube.

Apple Repair Manuals
A site containing 100's of official Apple manuals for iDevices & Classic Macs

Multimedia Websites

Bryce5.com
An interesting 3D image sharing site displaying various types of indie artwork, backdrops, objects, and more.

Cornica
A QuickTime movie sharing site for watching user-submitted QuickTime movies on vintage hardware.

reFlash
A Flash content sharing site for playing performance-optimized Flash games and videos on vintage hardware.

Iteroni
A simple YouTube front-end built on the Invidious framework for watching videos on vintage hardware (download video MP4s and watch in your favorite media player if the embedded player is not working or is too slow).


Personal Websites

Europa's Macintosh Mansion
RogerWilco6502's personal website.

Floodgap Systems
Cameron Kaiser's personal website.

ame.lmao.rip
Doq's personal website.

Legowelt
Danny Wolfer's (Legowelt) music website.

jonandnic dot com - classic edition
codepoet80's personal website.


Other Websites

Macintosh Garden Web Hosting
A website / file hosting service provided by Macintosh Garden that allows anyone to upload their own websites or files, resulting in a brand new GeoCities-like online neighborhood.

Macintosh Garden Image Hosting
An image hosting service provided by Macintosh Garden that allows anyone to upload their own images for sharing elsewhere.

The Macintosh Archive
An online directory dedicated to preserving a plethora of useful websites, documents, files, and applications.

The Old Net
A jack-of-all-trades hub offering Wikipedia proxy services for old browsers (see above), a Wayback Machine front-end, chat room, BBS, and an in-browser primitive 3D model viewer, among other things.


Website Wish List

None at the moment ...


Promotional Badges

If you have a Web 1.1-compliant website and you'd like to raise awareness in support of the Web 1.1 initiative, please feel free to embed any one of the following badges into it, preferably linked to this address:

Also, feel equally free to add to this guide as new sites (or ideas) are born.

 

[B S Magnet]

Added this WikiPost to the PPC SuperWikiPost under “BROWSERS & BROWSING”.

Suggestion: renaming the WikiPost’s title to something like “‘Web 1.1’: A Comprehensive Guide to the New-Old Web”. Cheers.

 

[AL1630]

I'll be able to test out some sites on a Blueberry Clamshell using OS9 with Classila (and maybe IE just for fun). If a site works on that it should be fine on pretty much anything newer, right?

 

[AL1630]

Should I put reports in a separate post rather than adding to the wiki directly? Just in case someone else has a different/older setup that does work when mine doesn't?

 

[z970]

@AL1630 I would start with individual posts for that. Most of the websites listed here are supposed to be fully compatible with very old versions of Netscape (and are usually just as compatible with Firefox 90) anyway, so reports that they work with Classilla, Safari, or what have you, would probably just end up consuming a lot of space in a short period of time.

 

[AL1630]

All right, it seems that from my quick look, most/all the sites on the list load just fine on my Clamshell using both Classilla and IE5. Classilla seems to have an issue with theoldnet wikipedia proxy, it throws up error messages saying it cannot communicate with upload.wikimedia.org. IE just doesn't load the images and doesn't show an error message.

 

[AtaruBarreau]

All right, it seems that from my quick look, most/all the sites on the list load just fine on my Clamshell using both Classilla and IE5. Classilla seems to have an issue with theoldnet wikipedia proxy, it throws up error messages saying it cannot communicate with upload.wikimedia.org. IE just doesn't load the images and doesn't show an error message.

In this very case try to use Classilla with either TenFourPEP or foxPEP; in previous Classilla version it used to help with this kind of error.

 

[Astralis56]

Having had my first web surfing experience during the Windows XP era, I must say the concept of a new old web intrigues me a lot!
Unfortunately, I only started creating web sites in the new web and all the bloat that is common to newer websites is starting to irritate me. I would like to jump in and help building the new good ol' web.

Thus, I don't know much about the earlier practices.
Is there some sort of guidelines to follow to create old-looking website (i.e. Website size, font, float-layout only, <HTML4.0, etc...)?

 

[z970]

@Astralis56 I recall there being a small discussion in another thread that there should be a standard that all websites of this caliber (in this case, the so-called "New Old" variety) try to adhere to. I also recall someone remarking that it probably won't happen. Well, it looks like this might be an opportunity for creating such a standard after all, right here and now.

Having said that, the obvious route of action here would probably be to return to the standards of the late 90's and early-to-mid 000's, which would be to limit use to HTML4, CSS2, and a very small amount of simple JavaScript, if any, as the maximums of their respective layout and styling standards. Otherwise, I think the Web developer should be given the freedom to choose any standard at or below those hypothetical limitations, which would allow for an ideal mixture of platform flexibility and targeted era authenticity, as well as minimal resource consumption.

But perhaps there could be additional restrictions in place as well to further improve performance on all devices? For instance, to keep embedded images to a certain agreed maximum size, handle video playback and distribution a certain way, disallow use of ad / analytics / tracking servers, etc.

I think everyone should offer their inputs on what this standard ought to be, and if the aforementioned examples might be a good fit. In the meantime, I will establish a poll to gather public opinion...

EDIT: Poll is up.

 

[Astralis56]

@Astralis56 I recall there being a small discussion in another thread that there should be a standard that all websites of this caliber (in this case, the so-called "New Old" variety) try to adhere to. I also recall someone remarking that it probably won't happen. Well, it looks like this might be an opportunity for creating such a standard after all, right here and now.

Having said that, the obvious route of action here would probably be to return to the standards of the late 90's and early-to-mid 000's, which would be to limit use to HTML4, CSS2, and a very small amount of simple JavaScript, if any, as the maximums of their respective layout and styling standards. Otherwise, I think the Web developer should be given the freedom to choose any standard at or below those hypothetical limitations, which would allow for an ideal mixture of platform flexibility and targeted era authenticity, as well as minimal resource consumption.

But perhaps there could be additional restrictions in place as well to further improve performance on all devices? For instance, to keep embedded images to a certain agreed maximum size, handle video playback and distribution a certain way, disallow use of ad / analytics / tracking servers, etc.

I think everyone should offer their inputs on what this standard ought to be, and if the aforementioned examples might be a good fit. In the meantime, I will establish a poll to gather public opinion...

EDIT: Poll is up.

I looked up the post you linked. Is it me or people are mostly pessimistic? I mean, I do agree that we cannot break the web as it is today. Nobody would have enough ressources for this task.
I thought about a metaphor :
A cool place with no noise. Much like what rural area looks like. You live there, people are lively and keen to talk with everyone in their village. At the opposite, urban area are noisy and people are more stressed. Life is more rude and dangerous there.

Now, what if the new old web got to look more like this rural area. Of course, it may not be dominant, but it would be a great place to go. After all many urban people like to go to the rural place as an escape: the same thing as the old web.

 

[fourbirds]

teddit.net: reddit without the ads and simplified UI.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Building a standard here - why not. Heck no better place really. Hash out the basic framework here and then put it out there to the masses via platforms like macyak, connect the effort to patreon or gofundme etc so individual's time that benefits everyone is potentially rewarded and can be reinvested into web 1.1v (hosting & dev costs etc.). I can see the effort really being embraced by many of the vintage mac Youtubers & live streamers who focus on old, classic and OSX macintosh. Besides, those cats need something new to talk about. One can watch only so many livestreams of recapping, tearing down classic macs. Aye dios.

From the opposite end of things, a browser that has the option to dumb down any website to the very basic basics - similar to what Sean @ Action Retro was talking about on the last MacYak episode (last Thursday 4-1-2021) would be a fantastic corner stone of web1.1 browser functionality. In this way, even the most robust modern fatboy websites are accessible (albeit potentially incompletely & crudely) via machines utilizing web 1.1v.

Fun idea worth pursuing. Brings back memories of gaming clan website rings of the late 90's and early 2000's, geocities communities (& that wicked GC website editor - anyone remember that thing lol?) etc.

 

[B S Magnet]

I thought about a metaphor :
A cool place with no noise. Much like what rural area looks like. You live there, people are lively and keen to talk with everyone in their village. At the opposite, urban area are noisy and people are more stressed. Life is more rude and dangerous there.

Now, what if the new old web got to look more like this rural area. Of course, it may not be dominant, but it would be a great place to go. After all many urban people like to go to the rural place as an escape: the same thing as the old web.

It’s, well, a creative metaphor, sure, and it’s deeply inaccurate (particularly the perception that cities are somehow immanently more dangerous than small towns and rural township — criminological data do not support this “common sense” myth.)

A more fitting metaphor:

“The ‘new’ net is what a neighbourhood becomes once excessive new money enters (VCs); devours properties (domain names, hosting); parks that excessive money by developing closed communities (FB, etc.); tears out the variety and accessibility which made living there what it was before their arrival (geocities, LJ, DIY web sites, etc.); then invokes exclusive standards (HTML5, closed browser standards) to maintain this new baseline; and in so doing, prices to push out anyone who hadn’t been living there previously to capitalize on simply… living there.”

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Umm, I'd like to propose that all development in the web1.1 be completely inclusive and devoid of making any personal monies and or property. Moving forward, all monies made & property acquired (physical and intellectual) shall be deposited into my bank account and holdings firm - the Central Bank of the Cyber government of Excellence (Man, I love the sound of that) so I can decide for you how to most equitably disperse all of your hard earned money and property to our collective rainbow of citizenry in web1.1 society.

Let's make that requirement 1 of our standard. Nothing is yours; it's everybody's yay. Most importantly, I will do it for you so you wont have to worry yourselves with such trivial functionality of our great web1.1 rainbow of inclusivity society

Ohh man, I can not WAIT to talk about how and in what ratios we build our great web1.1 society's rainbow of inclusiveness. Remember kids; Equality is not achieved through opportunity. Equality is achieved through outcome and I, the Cyber government of Excellence (the CGE for short) knows best when it comes to establishing what those societal constructivist ratios of equality should look like and how my money ... I mean our collective wealth is redistributed for the betterment of all of our citizens.

I cannot wait to dive into this. Big plans ahead my friends

 

[B S Magnet]

Umm, I'd like to propose that all development in the web1.1 be completely inclusive and devoid of making any personal monies and or property. Moving forward, all monies made & property acquired (physical and intellectual) shall be deposited into my bank account and holdings firm - the Central Bank of the Cyber government of Excellence (Man, I love the sound of that) so I can decide for you how to most equitably disperse all of your hard earned money and property to our collective rainbow of citizenry in web1.1 society.

Let's make that requirement 1 of our standard. Nothing is yours; it's everybody's yay. Most importantly, I will do it for you so you wont have to worry yourselves with such trivial functionality of our great web1.1 rainbow of inclusivity society

Ohh man, I can not WAIT to talk about how and in what ratios we build our great web1.1 society's rainbow of inclusiveness. Remember kids; Equality is not achieved through opportunity. Equality is achieved through outcome and I, the Cyber government of Excellence (the CGE for short) knows best when it comes to establishing what those societal constructivist ratios of equality should look like and how my money ... I mean our collective wealth is redistributed for the betterment of all of our citizens.

I cannot wait to dive into this. Big plans ahead my friends

Y… you don’t want to live in a society. Good news is you don’t have to. You can live in your own private, walled network, funded entirely by your own unscathed revenue Windfall of Excellence — the Intranet of Excellence, at 192.168.1.1.

No, wait… the Ten of Excellence, at 10.0.0.1!

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Don't listen to this guy. Friends, my way is the FUTURE. An inclusive & collectivist society where ALL are valued. Where everything is everyones. We can do it with web1.1v !!

 

[z970]

Here's a good read of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines that the World Wide Web Consortium put together for the original Web 1.0 back in 1999:

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

Perhaps Web 1.1 developers should scan through it in order to have a better reference for period-correct site designs?

It's a start, I suppose.

 

[B S Magnet]

Don't listen to this guy. Friends, my way is the FUTURE. An inclusive & collectivist society where ALL are valued. Where everything is everyones. We can do it with web1.1v !!

Excuse me, I’m not a guy. But please, continue to amuse us with your gated little society on your private network of Excellence by mocking everyone else in the process.

 

[AL1630]

I guess we need to consider what computers these sites should be accessible to with regards to the poll. Are we trying to focus on PPC era machines or should older machines (early 90s/68k) be included as well? That's what I'm curious about with JS and embedded media.

 

[B S Magnet]

Here's a good read of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines that the World Wide Web Consortium put together for the original Web 1.0 back in 1999:

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

Perhaps Web 1.1 developers should scan through it in order to have a better reference for period-correct site designs?

It's a start, I suppose.

For pre-existing web sites, perhaps one task worth exploring is implementing a subtractive approach — for example, by striving to remove or roll back HTML5 elements, AJAX and other asynchronous JS polling functions, and APIs from a site’s architecture. It is possible for a web server to still serve dynamically-generated, low-overhead, and lightweight web pages from a SQL database in a straightforward, HTML 4-compliant capacity, and it can still do so with the low-overhead aspects of HTML 3-era static web pages. HTML 4, building from HTML 3, worked very well for a very long time and a lot of legacy gear could keep up throughout much of when those standards were still dominant across the web.

This low-overhead, front-end tack played a significant part with what I was still doing during my earlier career as a web developer (up through about 2004, before I changed directions). In other words, sites I helped develop then, which sometimes featured embedded slide shows, fly-out menus, or even randomized header images, could include DHTML elements with very light, non-AJAX JS code (in other words, not sending back input to a server), and it still managed to avoid bogging down a browser or a system with slower hardware or low onboard memory.

What this approach does mean, in a contemporary context, is the removal of the HTML5 elements, the AJAX functionality, and so on would remove the dynamic mechanics of, say, a responsive front-end design (which requires a lot of scripting). But developing sites for low-overhead browsing wouldn’t necessarily be striving to accommodate all screen sizes across purpose-built web appliances (like tablets and phones) in the first place.

This subtractive approach to web design also requires web developers to be a lot less sloppy, to be a lot more careful at the granular level of front-end design, and to retreat from a reliance on frameworks and feature-rich plug-ins which force the heavy-lifting of basic page generation on only the hardware which can handle it. Such sites, without all this, well, bloat, would better accommodate for systems best suited for low overhead, simple display, and even easier to parse for accessible devices (like screentext readers). And the wonderful thing is a web page can pull up quickly on vintage hardware and still look aesthetically pleasing! Designers managed to do it for the better of two decades and without all the present-day bloat.

In short, a subtractive design ethos disrupts the trend of developing front-heavy, user analytics-driven sites with a less-bloat-to-reach-more-systems approach.

Anyway, I’m mostly thinking aloud here.

 

[Astralis56]

I guess we need to consider what computers these sites should be accessible to with regards to the poll. Are we trying to focus on PPC era machines or should older machines (early 90s/68k) be included as well? That's what I'm curious about with JS and embedded media.

I think every machine with a web browser from the early 2000s and access to Internet should be supported

 

[z970]

@B S Magnet An excellent interpretation.

@AL1630 Well, let me be clear here that the standards being raised are maximum usages. Hence, the usage of the < (lesser than) and =< (equal to or lesser than) prefixes.

As in, Web developers don't have to make all of their sites in HTML4 and CSS2 with minimal JS and embedded multimedia if they don't want to. But rather, the most they should be able to pack into their site is a combination of HTML4 and CSS2 with minimal JS and embedded multimedia. Otherwise, they are perfectly free to make a site to their own specification with HTML2, CSS1, and minimal JavaScript but no multimedia, or HTML3 with no JS or CSS, but minimally embedded multimedia.

As for the target clientside computers, in my personal opinion, 68k machines should not be accounted for as most of them were never designed to go online, so even some late 90's / early 2000's sites would have run slow on them at the time. Also, if more sites are curated for them, that might excessively simplify sites that would have been able to both look and function better on newer machines, thus inadvertently not tapping the potential of a much larger chunk of future hardware that was actually designed with the Internet in mind. And as another point, this may also remove some authenticity from a recreation as it's possible that Web 1.1 sites curated for 68k environments could end up looking even simpler than many sites actually did during the turn of the millennium.

Concerning what standards should be made usable on which machines, I think sites with minimal JS and multimedia usage should aim for good performance on mid-to-late 90's systems (PowerPC 604, Pentium Pro), while sites lacking any JS or multimedia usage should be made satisfactorily usable on at least early 90's architectures (PowerPC 601, Pentium).

Personally, I voted for option 2, because if something close to the 90's Web is settled on as a maximum standard, then that might leave early to mid 2000's machines unaccounted for, because they would then be effectively stuck between the unusable modern Web, and the entirety of Web 1.1 that would not be able to seamlessly fit in with their era (given of course if web developers wish to align with the final Web 1.1 standard). Which would be a shame, because these machines were notably intended to connect to the Internet; and to an even higher degree than prior systems too.

-

Added a Website Wish List for Web 1.1-like sites that don't exist yet but you'd like for someone to make, or are currently planning to build yourself.

Removed the browser compatibility details because individual compatibility requirements become irrelevant if a universal standard exists. Also removed the 'Notes:' prefixes because standalone descriptions are self-explanatory, save space, and look much more elegant.

 

[Macbookprodude]

In this very case try to use Classilla with either TenFourPEP or foxPEP; in previous Classilla version it used to help with this kind of error.

Does this even work under OS 9 Classila ?

 

[Macbookprodude]

I guess we need to consider what computers these sites should be accessible to with regards to the poll. Are we trying to focus on PPC era machines or should older machines (early 90s/68k) be included as well? That's what I'm curious about with JS and embedded media.

At this point, all should be included.. It seems there is a revival, major revival for 2000's internet - so my prediction came true. Now, OS 9 can be used fully.

 

[Macbookprodude]

Having had my first web surfing experience during the Windows XP era, I must say the concept of a new old web intrigues me a lot!
Unfortunately, I only started creating web sites in the new web and all the bloat that is common to newer websites is starting to irritate me. I would like to jump in and help building the new good ol' web.

Thus, I don't know much about the earlier practices.
Is there some sort of guidelines to follow to create old-looking website (i.e. Website size, font, float-layout only, <HTML4.0, etc...)?

Welcome back to 2000's internet standards. I too would like to design a couple of simple HTML sites dedicated to our PowerPC machines. BTW, I used to be a computer technician during the WINXP/WIN2000 era. Windows XP wasn't that bad of a system, but NT 4.0 and 2000 were really nice. This was before I became a Mac user.