A community radio station's website, built for IE4 and Netscape 4, with the modern web banned by name. Anyone can make a page that looks like 1998; this asks whether the model knows the era from the inside, and the compatibility notes at the end are where that gets settled.
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Rounds stay open: later videos added their new models to this one.
It is March 1998. You build websites. A client wants a site for their community radio station, Radio Saltmarsh, 102.3 FM, broadcasting from a caravan on the east coast.
Build it the way you would have built it that month, for the browsers people actually had.
Target browsers
Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 4. It must render acceptably in both. Assume 800 × 600, thousands of colors, and a 33.6k modem, so keep the weight down.
What the site needs
A masthead with the station name and frequency.
The schedule — a week of programs with presenters and times.
"Meet the presenters" — four of them, with a line each.
A guestbook form. It does not have to submit anywhere; it has to look like it does.
A hit counter.
A webring strip at the bottom — previous / random / next.
At least one piece of movement on the page, done the way it would have been done then.
An "under construction" notice, because there is always one.
Write the copy yourself. Give the presenters names and the programs titles. Make it feel like a real small station with real people in it — the charm here is in the specifics, not in the beige.
Period constraints — these are the point
Banned, because they did not exist or did not work:
flex, grid, position:sticky, CSS variables, media queries
border-radius, , , , , ,
Answers
Sorted by cost. Open a row to load its answer.
box-shadow
opacity
rgba()
transform
transition
@keyframes
const, let, arrow functions, class, template literals, Array.forEach, JSON
querySelector, addEventListener, getElementById (yes — IE4 has it, NS4 does not; you branch)
Anything from HTML5: <section>, <header>, <nav>, <video>, <canvas>, data- attributes
Attribute-driven presentation generally, and a <style> block for the bits CSS1 could actually do
document.all for IE and document.layers for Netscape, branched properly
<!-- --> comment wrappers around script contents
Technical constraints (mine, not 1998's)
One file. No external stylesheet, script or image — but you may use data: URIs for graphics, and you should, because the period look needs them. Draw them yourself; no placeholder services.
Return the file as exactly one fenced html block.
Answer in exactly these sections
The build
One short paragraph before the file: your layout structure and how you handled the IE/Netscape split.
The file
The single fenced html block.
Compatibility notes
The honest part. Go through your own file and tell me:
Which techniques would genuinely have worked in both IE4 and NS4 in March 1998.
Which ones would have worked in only one of them, and what the other would have shown instead.
Anything you used that is anachronistic — that looks period but shipped later, or that only works because I am opening this in a modern browser.
Be specific and name dates where you know them. If you used a technique and are not sure it existed yet, say that rather than guessing confidently.
What I'm actually testing
Anyone can make a page that looks like 1998 — Comic Sans, a starry background, a marquee. That is a costume.
I want to know whether you know the constraints from the inside: what NS4 did to a nested table, why you cannot put a stylesheet on a form control, what the <spacer> tag was and whose it was, why everyone used a single-pixel transparent GIF. A page that looks a bit plain but is honestly built to the period beats a gorgeous pastiche that uses flexbox under the hood — and I will read the source.
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