Run Detail

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, 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

Expected, because it is 1998:

• Tables for layout. Nested if you need them.
• <font>, bgcolor, border=0, cellpadding, cellspacing, <center>
• 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.