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Published / Modified: 2024-02-23 / 2025-09-14
You bravely browse the world wide web with Netscape 4 on Windows 95? Or Mosaic is your favorite application of all times? Then I have good news for you: this website has you covered!
There has been a handfull of mayor versions of the Hypertext Markup Language - of which HTML5 had been the most recent main version for more than a decade and with its last version 5.3 was officially retired in 2021 - in favour of the contineously evolving HTML Livinig Standard. While our every-day tools were made with the current iteration of HTML in mind, years old technology was not: for browser-driven HTML5 web applications and modern media formats, compression or encryption these machines lack the computational power. And that cannot be fixed in software - unless...
It needs two to communicate. If we cannot teach the old dogs new tricks, let's simply smarten up the young. Specified in the mid 90ies HTML 2.0 already included key elements which still are around in HTML5 today: paragraphs, headings, lists, forms or blockquotes, for examples. It still can be a vehicle for a modern websites' structured content minus the interactive and fancy pants.
That said, there are some hurdles with HTML 2.0 one needs to overcome: a table element, for example, is absent from the specification and was only available starting with verson 3.2 in 1997. Until then a table was embedded into a website either as an image or as preformated text within a pre element. This website's HTML 2.0 page controller uses the latter approach to render tables.
Most browsers around 1995 adopted HTML 2.0 and supported few raster image formats, namely CompuServe's Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) and - on more capable machines - even the younger JPEG, named after the Joint Photographic Experts Group. Other formats like Portable Network Graphics (PNG) or Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) would need almost another decade to further application support and gain traction on the web. This website provides GIF images in HTML 2.0 mode.
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