Re:Welcome to the Old Internet Again
by vidarh on Saturday October 17, 2020 @07:01AM
(#24809112)
> All these animated gifs and visitor counters were not here to convey valuable information but rather to make the website more popular.
One of my websites (for my first startup - an ISP) used a server side include that called out to ping the client IP to inline either a static image or one of several "big" - by 1997 standards - animated GIFs by guessing at the client bandwidth based on ping time (yes, it was a very rough heuristic, but it worked surprisingly well at the time), because we wanted to be able to serve up a fancy animated logo to those whose connection could handle it...
If we could have served up something fancier we certainly would have.
One of my websites (for my first startup - an ISP) used a server side include that called out to ping the client IP to inline either a static image or one of several "big" - by 1997 standards - animated GIFs by guessing at the client bandwidth based on ping time (yes, it was a very rough heuristic, but it worked surprisingly well at the time), because we wanted to be able to serve up a fancy animated logo to those whose connection could handle it...
If we could have served up something fancier we certainly would have.