The splash page
A door in front of the door. Eight captures, three mechanisms, and you just walked through one.
Walk through all eight
Eight captured pages, rebuilt as doors you can stand in front of. Real hold times, real wording, real artwork. Press one and it takes the screen.
The images are the originals, pulled from the Wayback Machine and the GeoCities mirror. Five captures record their colors and those are exact; three record none, so those use the 1996 browser default rather than a palette I made up. Every timer has a stop, because an unstoppable one fails WCAG 2.2.1, and all four of the real ones do.
<title>McDonalds Splash</title>
lowsrc still, 2,524 bytes
Did you know...
...that it took three years to sell 100 million hamburgers, but by our 15th anniversary, we were selling them at a rate of 3.5 million per day?
Click on the Golden Arches to continue
<!-- Badda Bing, Badda Boom -->
470 bytes, the whole document. It is the only one of the
eight with an alt attribute, and the site is still live today.
<TITLE>America has a clear choice...</TITLE>
America has a clear choice. The
<BLOCKQUOTE>around this paragraph is nested twice and is not a quotation. It is how you got an indent.The drop cap is
<FONT SIZE=+2>on the first letter, done again for every paragraph on the page.
Welcome to my home page!
This page will take you to the main page in a few seconds.
Click here if you don't want to wait
Five seconds, and no artwork at all. This capture has no splash graphic: the whole page is the wait and the apology. The corporate pages made you stand there and gave you something to look at. The personal ones said sorry and hurried.
<TITLE>The Gates to ... Heaven !!!</TITLE>
That banner is a six frame animation, 36,832 bytes.
No timer. A picture, and one link through it. The author did not call this a landing page. He called it a gate, in the title tag.
| <!-- BEGIN LINKEXCHANGE CODE --> |
The threshold was monetized. That blue is
<TABLE BGCOLOR="#0000FF">, from the capture.
This page declares a background color
and a background image: bgcolor="#BBBBBB" is the fallback
you saw while valtbg.gif was still coming down the wire.
Click to Enter |
There is a link in that green box. It is set
to #00FF00 on a cell set to bgcolor="00FF00", without
the #. Select the text and you will find it. Whether that was a
reveal-on-hover trick or a mistake cannot be recovered, so this plate does not
claim to know.
The link also carries
Target="_top", breaking out of a frameset on the way in.
That tiled background is the real
valtbg.gif, 144 by 144 and 13,608 bytes, and the banner under it is
468 by 60, the standard unit the button plate
contrasts with.
That image is a bitmap. The page calls it
chuck.jpg, but the file begins BM and is an
uncompressed 74,646 byte BMP. On a 28.8k line that is about twenty one seconds,
for one picture, on the door.
Click Above To Enter
<bgsound> would have started here.
Nothing plays on this recreation, because a modern browser will not start audio you did not ask for, and neither will this guide. The point is where the music started: at the threshold, not inside the site. Splash and soundtrack were one gesture, and this single captured file is the evidence, because it is both.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 3.0//EN">
Checking your browser
navigator.appName...
_get_os() returns...
Shockwave...
verdict...
That is the real 1997 branch, running now. It is about to send you somewhere based on it.
Take me to the site it picked
The whole document was 605 bytes
This is mcdonalds.com, captured 12 November 1996. Not an excerpt. The entire file.
<html><head> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="120; url=/main"> <title>McDonalds Splash</title> </head><body bgcolor="#FF0000" text="#FFCC00"> <p align=center> <a href="/main"><img lowsrc="img/splash" src="img/splash_anim" border=0 height=180 width=280></a> <p align="center"> <h2 align="center">Did you know...</h2> <h3 align=center>...that it took three years to sell 100 million hamburgers, but by our 15th anniversary, we were selling them at a rate of 3.5 million per day?</h3> <h2 align="center">Click on the <a href="/main">Golden Arches</a> to continue</h2> </body></html>
<title>McDonalds Splash</title>The genre named itself
Shipped with the word in the title tag. Nobody had to coin it later.
content="120; url=/main"Two minutes, not five seconds
A threshold, not a redirect. It holds you, then relents.
lowsrc="img/splash"Load the still first, swap in the animation when it arrives. Neither file has an extension. Go and watch it happen in the McDonald's door above: 2,524 bytes, then 23,559.
altThe only way in is an unlabeled image. The body copy is a hamburger fact, because the job was to make waiting feel like content.
The third kind checked you before it opened
pepsi.com, 1997. Almost the whole page is JavaScript that fingerprints your browser and decides which site you get.
function _get_os() {
if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Win95") > 0) return "WIN95";
else if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Win16") > 0) return "WIN31";
else if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Mac") > 0) return "MAC";
else if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("X11") > 0) return "UNIX";
else return "UNKOWN";
}
if (navigator.appName.substring(0,8) == "Netscape") { ... }
else if (navigator.appName.substring(0,9) == "Microsoft") { ... }
The UNKOWN typo is theirs and shipped. This is where "best viewed in" comes from: the splash existed so the site could decide what you were allowed to see.
That logic, running against your browser now:
navigator.appName...
_get_os() would return...
1997 Pepsi would serve you...
Field marks
How to spot a threshold.
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="20; url=main.html">A refresh with a URL and a delay
The delay is the tell. A zero is a redirect. Anything above five seconds was somebody deciding you should wait.
EnterClick to EnterClick Above To EnterThe word Enter, alone, as the only link
Not Home, not Continue. Enter is a spatial verb, and it is the one they reached for.
<body bgcolor="#BBBBBB" background="valtbg.gif">A background color and a background image together
The color is the fallback while the tiled GIF arrives. Shipping both is a modem-era habit.
Target="_top"An entry link that breaks out of frames
The way in had to escape whatever frameset it was loaded into, the same habit the frameset plate documents.
navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Win95")Browser sniffing above the fold
If the first script on the page is deciding what you are, the page is a gate and not a welcome.
altThe single way through, unlabeled. Every splash in this folder does it, which is why the genre is unusable with images off.
What it solved, and what took it
A splash page bought time. On a modem the real site was heavy, and a 605 byte door gave you something to look at while it arrived. It also set a tone and named the place, so arriving felt like arriving rather than loading a file.
Measurement took it. Once anyone could count how many people left at the door, the door stopped being defensible. The mechanism did not die: it came back as the cookie wall, the app interstitial and the newsletter overlay. It stopped being decorative and started being extractive.
A threshold, so that arriving somewhere felt like arriving rather than loading.