I’ve been bowled over by the reception my Retro Corner has received, especially over the last year. I receive more email from people who found me via that site than the blog you’re reading now. Referral headers and inbound search results also favour it over my writing here. If I were letting “the algorithm” decide to what I dedicate my attention, I’d hang the proverbial blogging hat up and only maintain a GeoCities-inspired site in 2025. There’s something profoundly wonderful about that.
It’s also… surprising, for a couple of reasons.
First, there’s the obvious and silly fact the site is written in HTML 3.2, a standard that was superseded almost thirty years ago. There are adult…
I’ve been bowled over by the reception my Retro Corner has received, especially over the last year. I receive more email from people who found me via that site than the blog you’re reading now. Referral headers and inbound search results also favour it over my writing here. If I were letting “the algorithm” decide to what I dedicate my attention, I’d hang the proverbial blogging hat up and only maintain a GeoCities-inspired site in 2025. There’s something profoundly wonderful about that.
It’s also… surprising, for a couple of reasons.
First, there’s the obvious and silly fact the site is written in HTML 3.2, a standard that was superseded almost thirty years ago. There are adults walking the Earth today that weren’t around when the W3C published its replacement in HTML 4.0, let alone the original spec. I talk crap about the current state of the Web, but its a testament to its resiliency and compatibility that browsers even know what to do with such documents now (albeit by dropping into “quirks” mode). I did this purely out of nostalgia and to remember what it was like to craft pages in text editors and Netscape Navigator Gold. Spoiler: it’s seriously fun!
Having been written in HTML 3.2, the Retro Corner also has little in the way of metadata. There aren’t HTML5’s rich library of semantic tags, and we only have <META> tags that search engines have reportedly ignored for years. Still, I publish a Last Modified string in the footer of each page, and search engines are still able to find and reference them. Neat!
The late 1990s and early 2000s weren’t some utopia of accessibility or usability; we had popups, webs of nested tables, frames, and other such things I’m sure I abused too. But it’s been fun going back to a simple spec like HTML 3.2 and working within its limitations. Evidently, you can still craft pages in it that are accessible, readable, and search engine indexable if you use the elements in ways that make semantic sense.
The Retro Corner started as a way to document my old machines in a way that would be a bit more quirky and fun than a simple wiki page, but it’s taken on a life of its own. I’m so happy others are able to find it and have a bit of fun too.