Rescuing 7,234 Old GIFs from a 90s Server-Side Imagemap Challenge
Today I Rescued 7,234 Old GIFs
I teamed up with GlitchyZorua to archive the Ibiblio Icon Browser, a 1990s collection by Gioacchino La Vecchia that was nearly lost. The site used tricky server-side imagemaps that made downloading icons impossible without manually clicking thousands of times. By reverse-engineering the coordinate system, I wrote a script to fetch every file and built a modern static site with search functionality, ensuring this digital history is preserved for posterity.
I sincerely hope that La Vecchia had some automated process that he used to produce the thousands of lines of configuration that he needed, and he didn’t write his files by hand!
- moebrowne
TIL server side image maps: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLImageEl...
Supported since forever.
- varenc
fun fact: source maps are used by some Tor onion sites ("dark net") as part of a captcha process without using JavaScript. If you present the user with an image, and ask them to click on a particular part of it, the server can recieve exactly where they clicked and validate if that's correct without using JS at all. (JS is a big no-no on Tor hidden network sites)
- pizzaiolo
When I was a kid I had a Geocities-style website hosted on hpg.com.br which was wholly composed of animated GIFs, mostly Pokemon-related.
Very unfortunate that archive.org doesn't have a copy of it.