>>67413Depends on what you're calling "old web".
From 1999-2014 the standard for HTML was HTML 4.01, and most sites would have used HTML 4.01 Transitional.
This likely represents the majority of content most people 20-40 have memory of on the internet.
W3C probably has archives of the published standards, but let's be clear: in the same period, you're also in the heyday of IE6/WinXP, so you're not necessarily going to find live sites 100% targeting standards because IE6 wasn't 100% compliant, especially re: CSS rendering.
If you want to learn how people were actually doing it back then, I'd look at tutorials on htmlgoodies.com through wayback machine.
I started learning from that site back in around 2002, and the site stays self-similar until later in the 2000s decade. They had a major update that you can see the results of in at least 2007, and they're still around teaching modern webdev today, but I think most people go to W3Schools anymore for that.
The earliest timeframes of this site teach pre-4.01 HTML, and he seems agnostic to CSS until the second half of the 2000s decade, which is pretty realistic for how people thought back then due to the fact that lolno one could rightly pass the acid tests anyway.
Do note well though:
You can't necessarily write code like it's 1999 or 2004 and expect things to work as intended or be safe.
When IE6 died with the fall of XP, people started to drop support for certain older tags in HTML in newer browsers in order to push modern web standards. <blink> is the biggest one I'm aware of, but I'm sure we'll see most ancient tags like <font>, <tt>, <frameset> etc lose support as we go forward. Many still-supported tags may also lose their deprecated attributes. This is similar to how we lost flash! You can reimplement these as undocumented tags via CSS, but that's a modernist trick, not oldschool development.
With dynamic content, you should absolutely avoid imitating the old ways entirely -- it simply isn't safe! Perl-CGI is deprecated and no longer updated, and even PHP is now on major revision 8, vs. 5 from back when most of the internet was written. With dynamic content, security starts to become a concern, so using old versions of code can be dangerous.
Example: PHP 5 queries mysql with a function set prefixed mysql_*
mysql_real_escape_string() could sanitize against injection, but didn't take into account character encoding, so it could be bypassed if you knew what you were doing.
In PHP 7+, they deprecated this and brought out mysqli_*, and it's version of the escape string function takes a connection to the DB in order to fetch the encoding and thus isn't vulnerable.
because of this, actually writing a mysql query the old way would simply be a security risk! So keep your back-end modern!
