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Title: Toying with old web dev again
Date: April 28, 2022
Written On: BBEdit on 2009 MacBook (MacOS 10.6.8)
Mood: Amused
Listening To: Air conditioning

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So... I found out through no fault of my own that IE5.2 for Mac is installable
on Snow Leopard. So I did it. And it's funny, because it made me jump down a
rabbit hole that I'm thoroughly enjoying my in. It's making me relearn some old
skills that I'd lost, including the idea of "test on multiple browsers+ (which
is lost on today's Chrome-only devs). Like... I've got Dreamweaver CS3, IE5,
Arcticfox, and Netscape Navigator 9(!) open, and I'm having a good time with
it.

To be honest, I feel like I'm able to relax like this. Just playing with
something that isn't going to change in five days because someone got mad that
the drapes didn't match in their office, so they told their dev teams to start
over. I'm able to look up information about how to do something, and it not be
deprecated after only a couple months because "move fast and break things"
became someone's kink.

And given the amount of actual books from that time, I'm not short on reading
material. In fact, I have "HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide", "Cascading
Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide", and "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide"
from the HTML4/XHTML1 era sitting on my bookshelf, among a few other pieces. I
also have some ebooks on my iPad, like Christian Heilmann's "Beginning
JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax" from 2008, and "Pro JavaScript
Techniques" from 2006, and "Internet & Worldwide Web: How to Program" from
2008. So it's not like I'm in the dark or anything like I would be trying to
look a lot of this info up in a search engine. Fewer browser hijacks, too.

But I think part of why I'm enjoying myself is because I started on the web
around that era. It's partly nostalgia for me, but also makes me remember back
when web designers and dev didn't tell you that you needed a command line and
about 2GB of libraries from a JS package manager just to get started. Hell, my
little site, PDN[0], is hand-coded. There's not much there at the moment, but
it's something I play around with, just like in the old days. And sure, that's not for everyone, but it's better than waiting an hour for Node, Yarn, etc...
to run through everything just to test a site every time I change something.

Hell, at this rate, I might try pulling out some of my old PHP knowledge and
see if I can get something running with that. Not sure I will, but I'd like to
try.

Just... I'm having fun again, and it feels great. I miss feeling this way
about computers and tech.

Also, I just discovered IE5 for Mac can browser gopherspace. Yeeee! Already
20% cooler than Chrome[1].

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[0]: http://prismdragon.net/
[1]: This is an opinion, and not an objective statement.