YAHEW!
A FIELD GUIDE TO THE OLD WEB
★ PLATES FILED: 22 OF 31 ★ DRAWERS OPEN: 6 OF 6 ★ STATUS UPDATES: 26 ★ DAYS RUNNING: 22 ★ NEW PLATE FILED MOST DAYS THROUGH AUGUST ★

0 · Ancestors 3 / 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 · Decoration 4 / 6 filed

  • The 88x31 button recovering
    GeoCities, 1997, an ad unit that became a friendship token
  • The blinkie recovering
    150 by 20, three colors, two frames. Shelved by color, never by subject
  • The tiled background endangered
    Forty-two patterns drawn for this page, 3,586 bytes for all of them
  • The custom cursor 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 · Discovery 5 / 6 filed

  • The webring recovering
    1996. A circle with no index and no owner, routed through one script
  • The directory extinct
    Yahoo!, 1996. 33 headings on one page, 13 of them shortcuts out of it
  • Site awards extinct
    A badge has no bottom. A score out of 100 does, and Lycos evicted it
  • The blogroll recovering
    Movable Type, 2003, a feed you curated yourself
  • Search before Google newNEW extinct
    AltaVista, 1997. Stuff the keywords yourself and watch the page climb
  • The hit counter endangered
    One number, on your page, that you and every visitor could see at once

III · Conversation 3 / 4 filed

  • The guestbook endangered
    Perl CGI, 1995. Comments you owned, spliced in at an HTML comment. Sign it, it's real
  • The tagboard extinct
    A 250 by 200 room in somebody else’s margin. Auto-refresh cost $20 a year
  • The forum & the BBS endangered
    ANSI terminal, reputation as a visible number
  • The stats page extinct
    Somebody’s real 1995 traffic, at a guessable URL, with no login

IV · Construction 5 / 7 filed

  • The table layout extinct
    Nested tables and spacer GIFs, the old way to build
  • The frameset extinct
    1996. Persistent navigation, and no address for the page you are on
  • The image map endangered
    Navigation as a picture
  • <marquee> & <blink> extinct
    One is in the standard today. The other is a 404. It was not about merit
  • MIDI & site music extinct
    A twenty track arrangement in 7.6KB, and your machine played it
  • The splash page extinct
    Eight real doors, rebuilt. A timer, a threshold you clicked, and a gate that checked you first
  • View source endangered
    No stylesheet, no script. Press Ctrl+U and you can read all of it

V · Extinction 2 / 5 filed

  • Link rot endangered
    A link is a promise somebody keeps paying for. 38 of every 100 stopped
  • The GeoCities deletion extinct
    Real pages, recovered and held here. Then you keep five
  • 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