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Comment on The Netscape Dorm (1994)

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Here's a fun bit of trivia: you can download the original Mosaic Netscape 0.9 beta today and experience for yourself what it was they shipped way back in October 1994.

http://img46.imageshack.us/img46/9341/netscape091.png

http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/3833/netscape092.png

http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/6576/netscape093.png

Details on how to set this up are here: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/happy-run-some-old-web-brows...

Now excuse me while I go play Mille Bornes, Glider Pro, Lemmings, and Oregon Trail...

Heh, I remember when the recommended practice for <script> tags was to put the contents inside an HTML comment <!-- --> so that it was hidden from browsers that didn't recognize the <script> tag. I believe it was even special-cased in the JavaScript parser so that it wouldn't cause a JS error. I wonder if that's still the case...

Yea, in fact, have you seen this: <!--//--><![CDATA[//><!-- ... //--><!]]>

XHTML required the <![CDATA[, old browser compatiblity required the <!--.

"The web server also had to be configured to not send a "charset" parameter on the "Content-Type" header, because the old browsers didn't know what to make of that. "

Looks like someone messed that up later. From a telnet session to home.mcom.com:

HEAD / HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2011 07:57:27 GMT

Server: Apache

Last-Modified: Fri, 21 Oct 1994 19:00:00 GMT

ETag: "10400d9-f1-2c7ebe95f4c00"

Accept-Ranges: bytes

Content-Length: 241

Cache-Control: max-age=31536000

Expires: Tue, 14 Feb 2012 07:57:27 GMT

Vary: Accept-Encoding

Connection: close

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

It is fixed now.

"and the "non-exportable"-crypto versions of almost all of them."

Not that these are very useful, since SSLv2 is obsolete and disabled on many servers because of several flaws in it.

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