20 years old: Microsofts first website recreated | Hacker News Reader

20 years old: Microsofts first website recreated

microsoft.com

47 pointsguardian5x12 comments

One huge server-side imagemap. Yep, this is authentic 1994!

Whatever happened to imagemaps anyway? I guess they just went completely out of fashion sometime around 1998. Before that, they were quite extensively used to create webpages that resembled HyperCard at its simplest.

If you only use one image how will your navbar have JavaScript hover substitutions?!

Swap out huge images with each state highlighted of course. If we get really fancy we can preload these images on body load.

SEO happened. Wasn't Google created in 1998?

Some good notes on its reconstruction can be found in the readme: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/discover/1994/readme.html

I checked the http headers - hoping to see them serving this up with a time era webserver (EMWAC). Nope, IIS-8. Still, pretty neat.

Gotta hand it to 'em. They've always had an eye for design.

Is it a coincidence it looks like a CD-ROM?

I'm going to keep asking every time a Microsoft website is posted:

Why don't they embed their fonts? Indifference? Laziness? Ineptitude?

Obviously I don't mean this retro landing page, just click through to any other page of theirs. It's all Times and Arial.

Why would they embed fonts that are standard on Windows? Chances are good you already have the font. And if you don't use Windows, why would they care?

By that logic, Google should only care about their sites working in Chrome?

Also, any web developer should be thoroughly embarrassed if their unintentionally have Times on their site. That is an unequivocal "something got fucked up" error, especially because it means you didn't care enough to make a fallback.

See that doesn't really apply to basic fonts like Times and Arial though. If you we were talking about rare fonts I can understand why you would want to embed them. But with these two all systems will have an equivalent font to render. For instance on Mac it will use Helvetica. On Linux it will probably have Arial or Helvetica depending on user's choice. And this applies for every OS I can think of.

What I'm saying is not that they should ignore user's but that it's probably not an issue in the first place. They use basically boilerplate Serif and Sans-Serif fonts.

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