School a youngster. Exactly what would have been so difficult about building a spreadsheet interface for IE2?
Assuming a crap UI is tolerable for business purposes and assuming that you wouldn't have to market it.
Assuming a crap UI is tolerable for business purposes and assuming that you wouldn't have to market it.
Back then, you wouldn't use PHP, CSS, Javascript, XMLHttpRequest or Flash. They didn't exist or hadn't matured yet.
Most likely, you would've used a Java based solution, such as NeXT WebObjects. That's what e-commerce businesses did back then. However, you wouldn't have developed the product on your own. You would've needed a team and plenty of funding, in part because WebObjects came with a $50,000 price tag.
I encourage you to read this WebObjects advertorial from april 1997, courtesy of the Wayback Machine. It's a good illustration of what was considered modern web development:
http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19970412201603/http://www.n...
WebObjects - didn't have any direct experience with that back then, but it and many other proprietary options were quite pricey, IIRC.
The DOM wasn't standard, HTML4 was still in the works. I'm not sure if IE2/3 or Netscape 2 could even dynamically access table elements at the time.
Javascript performance was utterly terrible, and JScript had a strong presence that created an important and problematic language/support divide.
CSS didn't exist at all, your visual styles were either images or elements rendered as the browser saw fit.
XHR didn't exist and wouldn't exist until IE5, 4 years later. There was no way to update a page without a round trip to the server. This was also during the days of AOL and Dialup.
Ugly as sin? Slow as hell? Absolutely. Probably doable, though.