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Source. Eight captured splash pages, all in reference/4-construction/splash-page/. The eighth is spacejam.com, Wayback capture 28 December 1996: 470 bytes for the whole document, a 25 second REFRESH to index.cgi, bgcolor="#000000" text="#ff0000", a stray quote shipped in border=0", a developer joke left in the source as <!-- Badda Bing, Badda Boom -->, and the only alt attribute in the whole set. That site is still live. The 605 byte document is mcdonalds.com, Wayback capture 12 November 1996, quoted whole and unedited including its lowsrc attribute and its missing alt. The twenty second hold and the <META> placed outside the head are dole96.com, capture 24 January 1997. The five second amateur version is geocities.com/Area51/1371. The gate title and the LinkExchange banner are geocities.com/Hollywood/1044. The green on green cell, with bgcolor="00FF00" missing its hash, is geocities.com/Area51/1317. The splash carrying an autoplaying MIDI is geocities.com/TimesSquare/1090, the same file the site music plate takes its incantation from. The browser sniffing, the UNKOWN typo, the IETF doctype and the forty word keyword dump are pepsi.com, capture 5 June 1997.

The countdown on this page is real, and its stop button is not period accurate. A timed redirect the reader cannot stop, extend or turn off is a WCAG 2.2.1 failure. McDonald's 120 seconds and Dole's 20 both fail it. This plate reproduces the mechanic because it is the subject, and builds the control those pages lacked, because shipping the failure would have been a worse choice than showing the fix. Enter or Escape also opens the gate, and focus moves to the heading so a keyboard reader is not left behind the door.

The artwork in the walk-throughs is the original artwork, and none of it is ours. Nine files were pulled from the Wayback Machine and the GeoCities mirror at the exact paths the captured pages request, and every one is served from this origin rather than hotlinked: McDonald's img/splash and img/splash_anim, Dole's images/logo.jpg, greetz.gif and enter.gif from Hollywood/1044, valtbg.gif and blakeva.gif from Area51/1317, chuck.jpg from TimesSquare/1090, pworldtype.GIF from pepsi.com, and img/mjbugs.jpg from spacejam.com. None of them states a license. The corporate images are live trademarks and the personal pages belong to real people, so this is rehosting without a grant, done because a splash page with the pictures removed is not a splash page but a paragraph about one. Nothing is redrawn or imitated, no author name or agency contact detail from the Dole source appears anywhere, and any of it comes down on request. The browser sniffer runs the captured 1997 logic against your own browser and reports what it decides; nothing is stored and nothing is sent anywhere.

The eight walk-through recreations. Each captured page is rebuilt as a full-screen door you can stand in front of, and the hold times are the real meta refresh values: 120 seconds for McDonald's, 25 for Space Jam, 20 for Dole on election day, 5 for the amateur page. Five of the eight captures record their body colors, and those are used exactly as declared: bgcolor="#FF0000" text="#FFCC00", Dole's white on black, BGCOLOR="#000000" TEXT="#FFFFFF" LINK="#FF0000", and the #BBBBBB that was standing in for a tiled GIF that had not arrived. The other three record no colors at all, so rather than invent a palette they are shown in the 1996 browser default of white, black and #0000EE links, and the plate says on screen that this is what it is doing. Every timer has a stop and a skip, the stage closes on Escape, and focus moves into and back out of it.

Two things the files themselves gave up, which no write-up would have. McDonald's lowsrc pair turns out to be a 2,524 byte still and a 23,559 byte thirty frame animation, both exactly 280 by 180, matching the height=180 width=280 on the tag; the recreation performs the swap rather than describing it, showing the still first and replacing it a moment later, which is what the attribute did. And TimesSquare/1090's chuck.jpg is not a JPEG at all: the file begins BM and is an uncompressed 74,646 byte Windows bitmap wearing a .jpg extension, roughly twenty one seconds of a 28.8k line for one picture on a door. It is renamed .bmp here only so a modern server sends a content type that renders it.

Deliberately absent. When splash pages started or stopped being common, what share of sites used one, and any measurement of how many visitors left at the door. None of that is in these captures. lowsrc is dead in modern browsers, so the still-then-animation swap in the McDonald's recreation is driven by a timer standing in for the modem, not by the attribute; the attribute is quoted as an artifact and nothing depends on it working. The MIDI recreation plays nothing: the capture proves a splash page carried autoplaying music, which is the fact worth having, and a modern browser will not start audio you did not ask for.

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