> Let's face it: the internet is broken.

This is where I disconnect. The internet is not broken. Maybe arguably the _web_ is broken, and specifically, web pages are broken (the HTTP protocol is still a wonderful thing).

I wish technical authors would stop making the internet-is-broken meme when they really mean the web is broken. Sure, there's plenty broken with the internet in other ways (DNS, encryption, governments, ddos's, etc.), but let's not make the mistake that the internet equals the web.

This is a cute and cool dive into taking backwards compatibility to absurd extremes. There’s one bit I might take overly-serious issue with (I hope the author will take this as non-serious criticism and an amused engagement with the thought process):

> That said, browsers that predate CSS do not know what to do with <style> tags, and as a result simply print the styles out at the top of the page. It's pretty ugly and, depending on how much CSS you have, borderline unusable.

> […]

> Forgotten Link Tags

I know external vs inline CSS is pretty much never going to be an answered question, but I feel like there’s a missed opportunity here. In particular because

- External CSS by link element addresses this much better for the backwards-compatible extremes: why even serve the contents of the CSS at all if the browser will just treat it as a comment? That’s just precious bandwidth wasted.

- Taken to extremes, external CSS relaxes the use CSS sparingly principle if you strategically break up the link tags to align well with likelihood of support/value ratio. Using media attributes to split CSS payloads can improve UX for old/underpowered mobile devices and even desktops/laptops with lower resolution screens. Detecting support for (ahem) @supports can open all kinds of CSS minimization doors for newer but lower power devices. Segmenting stylesheets by capabilities and preferences allows compatibility improvements regardless of point in time!

And a minor nit: if you’re dithering images for file size it’s worth comparing against a non-dithered version with a small color palette. The latter might actually be better for everyone!

Oof and that prompted a larger one: you can improve UX for ~every real visitor with <picture> tag and more efficient formats, and you could also sorta skirt the no-JS rule and upgrade pre-picture browsers to PNG with a simple inline onerror.

Regarding https, one thing I like to do on my personal websites is listen if the client actually wants to upgrade protocols instead of forcing https on everyone.

  set $need_http_upgrade "$https$http_upgrade_insecure_requests";

  location / {
    if ($need_http_upgrade = "1") {
      add_header Vary Upgrade-Insecure-Requests;
      return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
    }

    index index.php index.html;
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
  }

Its pretty straightforward to do in nginx, and my websites remain usable in IE5, Contiki, various feature phones.

I don't think that the advice to offer non-HTTPS is good: it exposes your users to downgrade (SSL stripping) attacks. Even extremely old browsers supported HTTPS: it was added to Netscape in 1994, and Internet Explorer in 1995 (IE2). You shouldn't have to give up security for users of modern browsers in pursuit of backwards compatibility.

(It might be a bit tricky to find an HTTPS configuration that supports for both modern and extremely old browsers, but it should be possible)

My key takeaways:

1. When I say "as backwards compatible as possible," I mean that this website will be usable on as many browsers, connections, and hardware as I can reasonably support

2. Raw HTML is Your Friend Remember the <FONT> tag? And <TABLE> based layouts? What about <CENTER>? I do

3. I won't go into the technical details here (Low Tech Magazine does a far better job explaining it than I can), but the thing to know is that dithering allows you to reduce the filesize of your images by reducing the amount of information it takes to render them

4. OldWeb.Today The most frequently used tool in my arsenal, oldweb.today is a website that allows you to emulate a number of different retro browsers (from NCSA Mosaic to Netscape Navigator) from directly within your own browser

I practice a lot of these things on my website locserendipity.com, and the associated search engine, which is the only one that you can download with a working index, albeit it is limited to only around a million entries.

This experimental search engine indexes all of the .edu pages on DMOZ circa 2010. It also has a local index: https://locserendipity.com/edu.html?q=amateur%20radio

This is great. I'm not a front-end dev but I have a low-traffic personal site where I like to experiment. One of my hobbies is to find out how small, lean and compatible with old browsers I can make it, while still looking modern-ish (very subjective I know) and with _some_ interactivity that can degrade gracefully.

So far it's pretty much usable in IE6 and Mosaic 2 (1993).

> I use the Caddy webserver

I used to love Caddy. Not so after the move to 2.0 when they got the json formatted config thing going on. Of course there is still Caddyfile but most of the time I'm bashing my head on their json focused documentation page to find out how can I do that same thing from a config file. I'm pretty sure there might be somewhere but I don't want to read a book I just need a nice quick web server that runs from a single binary like v1 did.

Supporting old web standards is neat, and you make your goal with this clear in your article, but I can't help but wonder if just using a subset of the newer standards isn't a better idea in the long run. HTML5 standardized a lot of the browser-specific features that plagued websites, and did away with a lot of ways to do the same thing with subtly different results. Supporting all these old methods and standards for compatibility purposes is part of the reason modern web browsers are so huge (the other part being overzealous standards), so I wonder if someone couldn't go and try to figure out a subset of the current standards that are simple to implement, so simpler browsers can be made for older machines, and people have an easier time making sites that can run on old machines without digging into arcane behavior of old browsers, and having to hackily support both.

Warning, off-topic

> My daily driver is a mid-2012 MacBook Pro that will stop receiving all updates (security included) from Apple by the end of this year. While I personally intend to keep it alive with Linux, this isn't a path that is readily available to most people. What are most people supposed to do in this situation to save some money and avoid adding more junk to our landfills?

I’m in the same boat with the same machine. Have you heard of Open Core Legacy patcher? The 2012 machine is apparently the cut-off for ‘everything works’ but I’m really curious about the definition of ‘works’. Also, the security implications of using it, of course.

(I’m assuming OP is the author)

[0] https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/

A lot about the "how", but very little about the "why".

Why not serve .txt and be done with it? Sometimes I wonder, who is the styling for - especially on personal sites/blogs. Repeat viewers/readers come for the text, if they do at all (otherwise it is their favorite reader).

If someone is using a screen reader, low-contrast/high-contrast setting, translator - plain txt simply works. For more intricate content like schematics, equations, offer a link to PDF.

I am not sure if the lack of mention of Lynx was an oversight.

I started writing my personal website in 1995 and since than did not change much about usage of HTML. So, really no surprise that it still looked pretty okay when I opened it in the NSCA Mosaic 2. Of course, some images are missing and some JavaScript animations do not work. I do use NOSCRIPT. I am using a plain text editor (which has a function to follow local links and open them) for editing my website in HTML. I am also using a program for checking the HTML.

Don't forget to use web-safe colors and key your gifs to the system palette. 1995-era graphics cards usually supported 256 colors.

> Let's face it: the internet is broken.

Again and again: It's not the internet broken, its only HTML plus the required interplay of a bazillion of specs.

For some reason I thought this would reveal some shortcut for ensuring unchanging URLs even after you switch stacks etc.

Your site has broken CSS (on mobile)

Very beautiful typography. Feels quite satisfying to read.