Great websites are always evolving Options

[Charlie_D]

Proof that a great website is always evolving.

This is real fun to check out

The evolution of some of the big heavy hitters

Yahoo in October of 1996
http://web.archive.org/web/19961023235123/...ww10.yahoo.com/

Yahoo in April of 1999
http://web.archive.org/web/19990418100803/.../www.yahoo.com/

Yahoo in January 2002
http://web.archive.org/web/20020123010930/.../www.yahoo.com/


Google

Google in December of 1998
http://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/...www.google.com/


This one is great -- Ebays home page in June of 1997

http://web.archive.org/web/19970614001443/...//www.ebay.com/

Who would have thought?


For those of you who have never seen the Way back machine the URL is
http://www.archive.org/web/web.php


The search engine Gigablast lets you access older versions of websites very easily in its SERPS if you want to play around a little bit
http://www.gigablast.com




Have fun with it


I see many people make a site and never update it or evolve with the times. I see others discouraged or unsatisfied with their progress.


Dont worry - We all evolve and learn and grow


Just keep on plugging

[bragadocchio]

The archive.org site is a lot of fun.

Hard to believe how large the site actually is - 30 billion web pages.

I was messing around with the Google Groups pages earlier today, trying to look up some of the old Robots.txt mailing group posts. While I didn't find that old mailing list on the web, I did find some posts from people involved in it's creation.

Some quotes I found interesting:

From Guide to Searching the Internet Using the World Wide Web (Part I)

>ALIWEB has many advantages over other search engines. It does not consume
>as much bandwidth as even the most elementary Web crawler or spider. Its
>unique organization allows ALIWEB to be updated daily. Because authors
>write their own descriptions of their work, the information in ALIWEB is
>accurate and informative. A prototype method of linking a Harvest-style
>spider with the ALIWEB database is now under development. ALIWEB is a
>public service provided by NEXOR.

Back in 1993, they were pretty optimistic that descriptions written by authors of web pages would be accurate and correct.

In 1994, folks were pretty excited about being able to create tables without using the <pre> tags:

4.7: How can I create decent-looking tables and stop using <PRE>... </PRE>?
  Tables are a standard feature in HTML+, a forthcoming superset of
  HTML. Unfortunately, they are at present implemented only by the Viola
  and Emacs-W3 browsers, to my knowledge.


  However, there is a way to use HTML+ tables now and convert them
  automatically to HTML, allowing you to design proper tables and
  install those pages directly when table support arrives in the
  majority of clients. You can do this using the html+tables package, by
  Brooks Cutter (bcut...@paradyne.com), which is available for anonymous
  ftp from sunsite.unc.edu in the directory
  pub/packages/infosystems/WWW/tools/html+tables.shar. This package
  requires the shell language Perl, which is primarily used on Unix
  systems but is also available for other systems (such as MSDOS
  machines). html+tables accepts HTML+ and outputs html using the


   <PRE>...</PRE> construct to represent tables, allowing you to write
  HTML+ now, knowing that it will look better when clients are ready for
  it.

From WWW FAQ, Jul 17 1994

Compatibility problems between browsers is something that has existed on the web since the early days. See: Comments on \"strict\" HTML composition

These comments are a semi-rant on some of the problems I've
encountered, after using X Mosaic and Lynx about equally as much, and
noticing that a lot of information providers are, probably
inadvertantly, providing Mosaic documents rather then Web documets --
that is, documents that are tweaked for Mosaic display, rather then
documents which look good on any browser.


The biggest problem with this approach is that is that HTML isn't a
Mosaic-specific description language, but is rather intended as a set of
\"hints\" for any browser to be able to generate a page. In fact, the
information provider isn't in the business of layout at all. For example,

If you've ever struggled putting together a robots.txt file for "spiders", you could have been writing a RobotsNotWanted.txt file instead, to keep away "web walkers.":

RobotsNotWanted.txt ??

    Anyone else getting requests on their servers for a file named 
  RobotsNotWanted.txt on the top level of their server?  I've received
  a number of them from a .uk site (sorry, I've blanked on the name at
  this time and I'm at home) ... but I've seen the same request from 
  another machine recently.


Something to Ward off Web Walkers ??

Lots of other fun stuff in there. It's amazing how much the web has changed over the past 11 years.

[DianeV]

The biggest problem with this approach is that is that HTML isn't a 
Mosaic-specific description language, but is rather intended as a set of 
\"hints\" for any browser to be able to generate a page.

Some things don't change so quickly. Just substitute "Internet Explorer" for "Mosaic" ... and it's easy to see where the problems come in.

[Charlie_D]

Nice stuff bragadocchio


Crea8asiteforums October 9th 2002


http://web.archive.org/web/20021009074411/...siteforums.com/


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