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'90s-Style 'Captain Marvel' Website Will Have You Nostalgic for Dial-Up (movieweb.com)
An anonymous reader quotes MovieWeb:
The official Captain Marvel website is a blast from the past... Marvel Studios is preparing its final promotional push for the project. This includes TV spots, various forms of merchandise, posters, and in this case, a perfect retro website, tailor made to take us all back to a time when the internet was a whole lot simpler.
Instead of flashy high resolution images, we are treated to pixelated versions, which perfectly reimagines the 1990s websites. There's a lot of Word art, a ticker to count how many unique views that the site gets, a guest book, and even a game that lets fans spot the Kree. Instead of the trailers coming through YouTube, they are played using the "Kree Player," which is take on the old Real Player.
MovieWeb writes that the site "also gives younger Marvel Cinematic Universe fans a chance to see what the internet looked like back in the day...."
And though the movie's slogan is "Higher, further, faster," they argue that "The only thing that could have made the Captain Marvel site even better is slow page loading, just to give it a real touch of what it was like surfing the net in the dark ages."
Instead of flashy high resolution images, we are treated to pixelated versions, which perfectly reimagines the 1990s websites. There's a lot of Word art, a ticker to count how many unique views that the site gets, a guest book, and even a game that lets fans spot the Kree. Instead of the trailers coming through YouTube, they are played using the "Kree Player," which is take on the old Real Player.
MovieWeb writes that the site "also gives younger Marvel Cinematic Universe fans a chance to see what the internet looked like back in the day...."
And though the movie's slogan is "Higher, further, faster," they argue that "The only thing that could have made the Captain Marvel site even better is slow page loading, just to give it a real touch of what it was like surfing the net in the dark ages."
For the Millennials among you, no that's not what websites looked like in the 1990s. At least not the functional ones. That Marvel site uses just about every cliched bad web site feature that was offered on GeoCities. That was a site where you could make your own web page without buying a domain, paying for hosting, or knowing how to code HTML Sort of a predecessor to Facebook and MySpace. It was designed to be easy to use, meaning that the clueless masses flocked to it and generated horrific websites which were gaudy, tasteless, and difficult to navigate. (Thankfully they've spared you blinking text, and a background which didn't scroll with the page leaving you confused if you were actually scrolling.)
Try Philip Greenspun's website for an inkling of what a functional site looked like in the 1990s. He was the original creator of photo.net, and his home site still uses the old layout and HTML coding used for the original photo.net. This was before drop-down menus, multiple column support, client-side scripting, in-line video, and (thankfully) in-line audio. Most people were on dialup so if you didn't want people to immediately leave your site, you used a small low-res version of any pictures which linked to a high-res version. You might notice the pages load a helluva lot faster than any modern site.
You beat me to to. This is a stylized "retro" web site not a '90s style web site.
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Nothing new. If you looked at retro-80's movies like Hot Tub Time Machine you would think everybody and their mother back then went around wearing all day-glo outfits with pop-star hair. In reality, most people just wore jeans and a t-shirt, same as today. And unless you were a woman or you were in the band Poison, your hair probably wasn't poofed-up too much.
Ironically, I remember my dad laughing at the version of the 1950's shown in Back to the Future (he was particularly amused at Biff's buddy who went around wearing paper 3D glasses for no apparent reason other than "3D movies were big back then, right?"). Now I see the same thing in the way movies portray the 1980's.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Bah; I usually try to use my 6-year old Opera 12 web browser on a site first (I don't like change), and with it, the page wouldn't load at all.
Over heavy Javascript wasn't that uncommon back then, although sometimes it was vbScript (Which i rarely saw since Netscape Navigator didnt support it)..
The major things that jump out to me.
1) The JS was almost always inline (I still actually do this. Honestly sometimes throwing the glue script at the end just makes more sense).
2) Div layouts. Back then Table layouts where the norm. Partly because after netscape introduced Div layers, the implementation was confusing as hell and inconsistent across versions
3) CSS. CSS was rare as hell. Things mostly used inline attributes.
4) Wheres the Marquee and Blink tags!!?
5) Needs more jeffk!!!!!!111one
The gif stuff actually was pretty common, and generally irritating as hell, and lead to some stupidly long load times. You kind of developed a habit of learning to read a page as it loaded then.
But yeah, ,the design, rings pretty true to me. I'm getting a giggle out of it, so mission accomplished.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.