Wow, this website in particular was extremely formative for me. I was 10 in '97 and I was so excited about Pathfinder. I remember asking my librarian about it, who showed me how to use the library computers to access "the Internet" and look up the images it sent back. I think this was the first time I really appreciated the power of the web, and I've never looked back. Almost got a little emotional seeing this page still plugging along, now that I'm more than a decade into my career as a developer :)
I worked at JPL at the time, and the mission was a pretty big deal there too. TV trucks in the parking lot for days. A long line outside to get your Hot Wheels toy rover. (I guess that would've gone under the employee merchandise link on this page, which is broken now.)
The Hot Wheels collection was one of my prized posessions... I remember I was disappointed by the difference in scales between the rover, lander and capsule, so I built my own lander and capsule for the rover out of cardboard :)
That Page must have been really expensive. Fully responsive, seemingly tested on iPad and iPhone back when mobile browser penetration was much lower compared to now. Incredible loading times, maybe they used a lot of asset preprocessing/compressing to make the page load that fast.
One thing that bothers me is that there is no Google Analytics. Without good tracking they might not be able to optimise conversion rates of the landing page in the long run.
Its not a single page application though. That really hurts usability. As a user I want to load the entire web application up front, then deal with JavaScript loading nonsense constantly.
Why should big powerful servers do the work when I have my battery constrained smartphone/laptop to do the heavy lifting?
People forget that web pages require maintenance. This is a great example of the benefits that come from keeping plenty of spare HTML on hand. Though I hate think about the cost of to taxpayers of a <p> in 1997...and the </p> tags? Well that's just plain over engineering. Oh wait, it's Nasa.
This is brilliant! "Virtual Reality models and animations galore!"
Quite a slice of history. It's amazing how much the internet has become gentrified since the days when a plain hypertext document sufficed for one of the biggest space agencies in the world.
Remember when you could browse the internet on a 56k modem? Can you imagine trying to do that today? "Here download 1meg of JS because i want to have a link, but didn't want to write <a href="blah">"
It's extremely amusing to see someone nostalgically complain about huge JS assets, when every subpage on that site has a 56K *.gif image as a <body background="">[1], i.e. something that would have taken a full second to download on a 56K connection. Just like 1MB of JS takes about a second to download & render on your current >1MB/s connection.
Back in the day people used to complain about these huge background images just as much as purists today complain about >1MB JS/CSS assets, which given Moore's law & the increase in network speeds works out to be the same thing, relatively speaking.
Oh, i'm 100% sure i complained about slow pages then as well, but otoh a delayed background didn't typically* block all the content.
That said this wasn't really a comment about time to load the page back then, but rather the massive amount of data pulled for exactly the same content now.
There's also things like Gmail, FB, etc that do a lot of things that fundamentally wouldn't be achievable then. But i still think that there's a lot of strictly unnecessary content pulled. Things that are logically needed given the way the code is written, but i feel a bunch is overwritten, and a bunch is for stuff that i don't personally need/want, so why ship that to anyone? ;)
* Ok, ignoring bright yellow text on a white background until the swirly background image comes into existence. I guess the early internet was similar to those old "awful myspace page" competitions :D
Even if NASA had made every link a 56K GIF they would have slowly lazy loaded with an image outline and Alt text shown allowing you to navigate.
Compare visiting a simple blog post on many sites now. You visit the page, get a brief period of NO text while some slow JS loads. Then all the page assets will bounce around as other elements and JS is loaded, then there's a major refresh as the lazy loading font shows up.
The images are now often deliberately blurred and detail free (Medium) - to show how clever they are using lazy loading. Well, when it triggers successfully, which I find isn't that reliable. Had they provided a very low res starter image rather than blurry obfuscation it'd give something over progressive JPGs.
I'd say the user experience has worked out to be a lot worse. Of course it's higher res and prettier. That's avoiding even mentioning the many who still pay for bandwidth.
The difference is this site has, at the very top, a link embedded in the sentence "Here is an all text version of this page."
So while your comparison is apt, the difference is that bad web programmers no longer pretend to care, which is the underlying cause of the nostalgic bitching.
Except, the difference is, there's still people on 56K connections today, once their data volume on mobile has run out.
This site loads within of < 1 second for me.
Any modern site? I can wait 2-3 Minutes to even begin to see text.
And thanks to the assholes who want to prevent the "flash of unstyled content" I just see blank white for 2-3 minutes before seeing any actual text.
By now I've written a custom tool and proxy based on Mozilla’s reader mode so I have an app, open the link in it, and it downloads only the extracted text, in markdown.
Been noticing less 'Print' versions these days, too. So much for convenience & 'save the trees' if you want to print out a page without the secondary cruff.
Am I the only one to find it a little sad that "oh wow, ${some.website} is still online!" is such a common sentiment? It seems to me that the default should have been for content to persist, and the surprising events should have been content that disappears.
I mean, 1997 is not even twenty years. Nobody expresses surprise that, say, Fight Club is still available to watch - but on the web we seem to expect near-total transience over tiny, tiny timescales.
I agree it's a shame that static content is more ephemeral than it should be, but I also worry about dynamic content and how the whole experience of using the web isn't snapshot-able. For instance, I can't really go back and browse the front page of Reddit, or look at Google News or just search the Internet of ten years ago.
In fifty years, it's going to be really hard to explain to people who weren't there what it was like to use the web in it's early days. We'll have lots of archived data from that time, but the experience can't be re-created.
Incredibly the more features and bloat one adds to the pages the less likely it is to stay functional/not be hacked etc.
The first iterations of the Web where nearly perfect for information retrieval / linking of actual information. We spent the last 20 years adding videos and adding tons of crap that make the whole experience worse and are quite detrimental to the signal to noise ratio on most websites.
And the effort is made to make people pay attention to crap. Just like TV shows, if website is not crap and has actually engaging content, users won't reach for smartphones.
>> Nobody expresses surprise that, say, Fight Club is still available to watch
You would if it was on a streaming service. How many times have you watched something on Amazon/NetFlix and go back to watch it at a later date and it's unavailable?
