I have for some time now owned a computer from 1998. It runs Windows 95. Mostly when people have vintage computers they use it for gaming, I think. But more than gaming I did webpages when I was a child. I thought them fun to design. Webpage design has evolved tremendously. This is due to both CSS and JavaScript are becoming more and more complicated, one can create quite involved web applications. Though modern webpages are fun to create, I sometimes miss the early days of web development. They seemed way less serious.
I have thought of this project for some time now. The parts needed for this to be done, have existed for more than 20 years. So why not just put it together. The idea is to create some kind of protocol that one must follow to be part of this project. I have decided to have Netscape Navigator version 4.5 as a base point. This browser was released in 1998. I think earlier versions of the web is a bit boring. Newer might be too complicated. So in order to be part of this project you have to design a webpage that can be fully viewed on that version of Netscape Navigator. And that is it for now.
So this project consists of two parts:
The last part is quite important: by linking the webpages we create an actual network. That is a subset of the contemporary version of the world wide web. Let's call this subset wwwo - WorldWideWebOld or WorldWideWebOriginal or whatever.
I have started my own version of this webpage as an old-web version. It can be found on wwwo.brkmnd.com.
In the future it might be fun to extend on the given version of Netscape Navigator. One could enforce this protocol somehow - like making it only read webpages with a given header. The code might be available on the Mozilla Webpage.
If you have a webpage that can be run under these conditions, you can email me at no@js.error - set subject as "wwwo webpage" and include some kind of description in the mail.