Netscape Composer: How I Love Thee

Posted by Chris on Mar 7, 2010 in Blog, Featured, Technology | 1 comment

The year was 1997.  I had my own computer a couple years before that but never had the Internet.  It wasn’t until the summer before I started high school that I was introduced to AOL and 56K modems.  I had to stay with my godfather during the summer of ’97 and he was always up on the latest technology.  I still remember it like it was yesterday. He sat me down in front of his computer, signed on to the Internet, after a couple of seconds his computer gave out this ear piercing high pitch sounds and said “Hi, You’ve Got Mail”.

I shrugged it off “Mail? Whatever”.  The first website I ever opened up was Yahoo.com.  The design of the site was simple.  It had a search bar and a slew of hyperlinks that drilled down to it’s different sections.  It was the first website design I ever memorized, the first time I realized how vast the Internet could be, and the amounts of information it could hold.  Maybe that why I still using Yahoo for my search today instead of Google or Bing.

The browser I used was Netscape 3.0.  I didn’t know the difference, it was just what I was told to use.  But there was a hidden gem that came with the browser: Netscape Composer.  Composer was a webpage building program with basic features which included a WYSISYG editor, an option to type in HTML code, and a handful of buttons for creating hyperlinks, inserting images, and creating tables.  It was beautiful.  So simplistic.  My inquisitive mind couldn’t help but play around with and after a while I fell in love.

I didn’t know why I liked web design so much.  It just stuck with me.  But after a lot of years being a web designer it hit me:  I was actually an artist, an artist of the web.  I would take a blank canvas, mix it with graphics and code to produce beautiful imagery.  Composer was my paint brush.  I would sit for hours flipping back and forth between design mode and code mode.  AOL gave you 2MB of free file space to upload your personal website and I used that as my hosting server.

I wish I still had a copy of my first website.  It’s a little embarrassing but I remember it had animated gifs, everything was aligned vertically, a light blue strip for the background, and it was six pages.  The hardest thing ever?  Figuring out why my images weren’t showing up.  The technical explanation was that the relative path of the image file was wrong, which means that I told my website the image was located in one folder when it really was in another.

Today, I have Dreamweaver/Photoshop, use WordPress as a CMS, write functions in PHP, and it only takes me seconds to read and decipher source code on a webpage.  But I’ll still remember my first love.  The one that taught me how to type out HTML tags from scratch, how unforgiving it can be if you mess up, and started off my career as a web artist.