Microsoft's First Web Page
Christian Heilmann on Microsoft’s first web page and what it can teach us:
And this, to me, is the most interesting part here: one of the first web sites created by a large corporation makes the most basic mistake in web design – starting with a fixed design created in a graphical tool and trying to create the HTML to make it work. In other words: putting print on the web.
The web was meant to be consumed on any device capable of HTTP and text display (or voice, or whatever you want to turn the incoming text into). Text browsers like Lynx were not uncommon back then. And here is Microsoft creating a web page that is a big image with no text alternative. Also interesting to mention is that the image is 767px × 513px big. Back then I had a computer capable of 640 × 480 pixels resolution and browsers didn’t scale pictures automatically. This means that I would have had quite horrible scrollbars.
View the page or the readme explaining it. It’s neat to read. Neater is what Christian points out later in his post:
One thing, however, is very cool: this page is 20 years old, the technology it is recreated in is the same age. Yet I can consume the page right now on the newest technology, in browsers Microsoft never dreamed of existing…