Presentation/technology wise this site is a contrast to its era. It has none of the good bits from the retro net and many of the bad bits of the modern net:
Images that don’t load unless you both have JS enabled, scroll down to them and then wait.
CSS that’s broken until the javascript fixes it.
Really, really narrow text columns with large fonts.
Lazy-loaded resources really get me when I load up articles in the morning before hopping on a train, only to find most of the article hasn’t loaded. Even enabling javascript doesn’t fix this – I literally have to scroll down the entire page for every link I open.
For formatting/column issues my eternal salvation is Chris Pedrick’s web developer extension, which provides a key shortcut to disable all CSS (Shift+Alt+A). This lets me read the article with only a few scrolls, rather than having to scroll every four paragraphs. I’m sure this works on a touchscreen, but not everything is a touchscreen. HTML wants to solve this for you, let it flow free. Please :(
Very interesting read. I want to find examples of “Gumball” by Broderbund Software showing the copy protection, but it looks like I’m out of luck.
I’m having a read of some other articles on that site. This page seems to be the main index. Site organisation is a little complicated.
Presentation/technology wise this site is a contrast to its era. It has none of the good bits from the retro net and many of the bad bits of the modern net:
Lazy-loaded resources really get me when I load up articles in the morning before hopping on a train, only to find most of the article hasn’t loaded. Even enabling javascript doesn’t fix this – I literally have to scroll down the entire page for every link I open.
For formatting/column issues my eternal salvation is Chris Pedrick’s web developer extension, which provides a key shortcut to disable all CSS (Shift+Alt+A). This lets me read the article with only a few scrolls, rather than having to scroll every four paragraphs. I’m sure this works on a touchscreen, but not everything is a touchscreen. HTML wants to solve this for you, let it flow free. Please :(
Ironically (for someone working for archive.org), 4am’s blog is almost impossible to find on search. But they have posted many highly entertaining and informative articles about the process, including this one about Burgertime: https://ia800209.us.archive.org/8/items/BurgerTime4amCrack/BurgerTime%20(4am%20crack).txt
(the ridiculous url may be part of the reason they’re hard to search for) :(