Let’s face it: the internet is broken. It feels like so much of the web is composed of clickbait, ads, popups, and a toxic amount of JavaScript that you need a modern computer just to get any value out of it. Remember when low-power computers were created for people who were “just browsing the internet?” Half of the sites on the internet are so overloaded with tracking scripts, ads, third-party “analytics” platforms, and other junk that they simply crash in the face of sub-par hardware; and don’t even get me started on what they do to “retro” computers. If the modern web hasn’t been created with aging hardware in mind, what does that mean for the proliferation of e-waste? Is it so necessary to update your computer every 2–5 years? And, what if you didn’t? What if you couldn’t to? really afford 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 supposed to do in this situation to save some money avoid adding more junk to our landfills? most people and These are the questions I have been asking myself over the last year or so, and while I haven’t come up with many answers for the general populace, I did make the decision to ensure that my personal website is as . great backwards compatible as possible The Basics When I say “as backwards compatible as possible,” I mean that my website will be usable on as many browsers, connections, and hardware as I can reasonably support. But, how exactly am I accomplishing this? While there are no hard and fast rules for keeping a website accessible to , there are a few basic guidelines and workarounds that I’ve come to rely on. everyone Missing Headers Host Did you know that the HTTP/1.0 specification didn’t require a header? Up until recently, I didn't. You see, in HTTP/1.1, the request header tells a web server , giving the Web Master—coolest job title ever, btw—the ability to configure multiple "virtual hosts" on a single server. Host very Host exactly which site it is requesting In other words, and can be hosted on the same server, while serving up content. As far as sustainability goes, this is a pretty decent solution, as it allows you to utilize the infrastructure you already have to host multiple websites. example.com example.net different But, you know what send a header? Internet Explorer versions 1 and 2. Probably more, too, but they are the only two I've come across so far that have forsaken me; which means that, without a workaround, my website is completely inaccessible to all of those IE1 and IE2 users out there. That's literally of people that don't have access to sweet, sweet content like this. doesn’t Host ones Thanks, Microsoft. So, how do we bring those no- rebels into the fold? A second IP. Host Thankfully, offers a handful of free floating IPs that you can assign to a single droplet, which means that my site has second IP address in order to appease those picky, early 90s Windows computers. With a , you can simply set your server to listen on the float IP, so request to that particular IP will fall back to your website. DigitalOcean flower.codes little bit of overhead any I use the webserver, so to accomplish an HTTP fallback that will be returned on every request (unless a valid entry can be matched), simply use as the site address: Caddy host http:// http:// {
  root * /www/example.com
  file_server
} No Automatic HTTPS To be absolutely clear here, I am advocating for not supporting HTTPS. not It’s 2022. That would be absurd. But, what I am advocating for is to HTTPS. Get your certs, encrypt that traffic, do all the things you normally do… just don’t force an HTTP => HTTPS redirect on your users. not automatically redirecting Don’t get me wrong, HTTPS is critical for modern website security, but all modern browsers automatically redirect to HTTPS whether you enforce it or not. What this means is that retro browsers can still load your website in good-ole HTTP, while newer browsers will handle the more secure redirection to HTTPS for you. If you’re using the webserver, this is as simple as creating two separate server entries, one with an prefix, and one with an prefix (I’m sure there’s a er way to do this, in which case please yell at me via your preferred choice of digital communication): Caddy http:// https:// DRY http://example.com {
  root * /www/example.com
  file_server
}

https://example.com {
  root * /www/example.com
  file_server
} Raw HTML is Your Friend Remember the tag? And based layouts? What about ? I do. Because the foundation of my website is built using those pre-Y2k web development standards. <FONT> <TABLE> <CENTER> As much as modern browsers like to say that they have deprecated some of the aforementioned tags (among other things, like setting a default in your tag), they still support the usage because there are enough websites that haven't (and likely never will) upgraded to the homogeneous post Web 2.0 hellscape. bgcolor BODY One of the advantages to using these old-school web design methods is that to make things look better on newer devices. Instead of going crazy with flexbox and floats, do a basic layout using tables and adjust the look with CSS. This gives you the advantage of having a modern-looking website design (if that’s your thing), while also gracefully degrading on older browsers that don’t support it: you can still use modern CSS then Use CSS Sparingly I think it is safe to say that modern CSS simply won’t work with old browsers. I shouldn’t have to go into that is, but what if you want to have CSS, just to make things look a tad more pretty for browsers that were released in the last decade? why some In general, most browsers (even most legacy ones) will gracefully ignore CSS that they don’t understand, which means that tags for things like basic responsiveness and dark mode are usable without any issue. That said, browsers that predate CSS , and as a result simply the styles out at the top of the page. It's pretty ugly and, depending on how much CSS you have, borderline unusable: @media do not know what to do with _<style>_ tags print To work around this problem, you can put standard HTML comments within the tags, which will get ignored by CSS-supported browsers, while getting interpreted by pre-CSS browsers: <style> <style type="text/css">

</style> Gettin’ GIFfy Wit It Fun fact: the earliest browsers only supported color images of the GIF. I won’t get into the technical details here, but you can blame CompuServe for its creation. This means that, if you want your images to load in browser, they need to be in GIF format: any Neat, right? Also, not for nothing, but Scream at me all you want, but it’s what the inventors of the format , and I’m a sucker for historical accuracy: GIF is absolutely pronounced with a soft “G” sound. intended The creators of the format pronounced the acronym GIF as /dʒɪf/, with a soft g as in ‘gin’. Wilhite stated that the intended pronunciation deliberately echoes the American peanut butter brand Jif, and CompuServe employees would often quip “choosy developers choose GIF”, a spoof of Jif’s television commercials. Unnecessary Improvements Forgotten Link Tags There are a number of tags that older browsers support that can be pretty fun to add. For example, the tag indicates what the homepage for the current website. <link> home <link rel="home" href="http://flower.codes" /> In some browsers (such as NCSA Mosaic), this results in a cute little "home" icon at the top of the page that, when clicked, sends you to the designed URL: home Another useful tag to add is the author tag ( and ). This provides information about the author of the page, usually in the form of a address. In some browsers—such as —this tag makes it easy for the user to contact the page author without having to look anything up (or jump to a "contact" page). <link> refv=made rel='me authn' mailto: Lynx <link rev="made" rel="me authn" href="mailto:zach@flower.codes" /> ❤ Dithering Lately, it seems like dithering is all the rage. Personally, I came across it via , but I’ve seen it mentioned more frequently in the past year or so. 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. Low Tech Magazine Most applications focus on desaturating the image and inserting strategic whitespace so our eyes fill in the gaps, but I’ve taken a more… extreme approach (that is, when I use images at all, which I generally try not to). Because my website requires all images to be in the much-larger-than-PNG GIF format (see above), I insert significantly more whitespace to keep the filesizes super small. The result is terrible for screenshots, but looks fantastic on photos: In case you want to accomplish the same thing on your own website (retro-or-not), here is the shell script I use to “degrade” all of my images using the command line interface: ImageMagick #!/bin/bashpushd ./http/assets/posts/for f in *.jpg; do
    if [ -f "${f%.jpg}-degraded.gif" ]; then
        continue
    fi    echo "Converting $f to gif"    convert "${f}" -verbose -format GIF -interlace GIF -resize 640\> -colorspace gray -colors 4 -ordered-dither 8x8 -set filename:f "%[t]-degraded" "%[filename:f].gif"
done No JavaScript Just… No. Validation, Baby Okay, so we’ve built a website that any time traveler would be able to use. How the hell do we actually it? While it’s tempting to collect retro hardware and do it natively (something I haven’t avoided), there are a handful of great resources out there that can make checking your website against old browsers incredible straightforward. test completely OldWeb.Today The most frequently used tool in my arsenal, is a website that allows you to emulate a number of different retro browsers (from NCSA Mosaic to Netscape Navigator) from directly within your browser. This has allowed me to double-check my work and verify the workarounds above in realistic environments. oldweb.today own Utilu IE Collection If you have an old Windows XP virtual machine laying around (or an old XP laptop, as I do), then the is an valuable resource. On Windows XP, it allows you to install every version of Internet Explorer from 1 through 8, which is how I learned that my website actually on IE 1–8, but also how I discovered that IE 1 and 2 _don’t send the header. Utilu IE Collection incredibly works host Old Version Finally, for all of the browsers you may want to test (think Safari, Firefox, Netscape, and Chrome), is a favorite of mine. Personally, I pull down the oldest version of each browser they offer and install it on my test machine, allowing me to check my work on the “v1” releases of every browser out there. other oldversion.com Anything Else? It’s important to remember that this is an experiment that I’m running in relative isolation. There aren’t exactly a of resources out there for providing value to aging systems beyond “recycle it” or “install Linux on it” (with the exception of my trusty book), so what I’ve learned has been a long series of trial and error. ton How to Set Up and Maintain a Web Site If you happen to read this and have some of your own tips, please drop a comment. I’d love to hear from you! Also published at flower.codes

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How To Build an Absurdly Backwards Compatible Website

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