How has the Philatelic Mineralogy website evolved over time?
The Philatelic Mineralogy website started life in 1996 as a website with the cumbersome title “Gem, Rock, and Mineral Postage Stamps from Around the World.” Due to the rather primitive nature of web browsers in 1996, the site’s pages were constructed from very simple HTML. Since an attempt was made to permit viewing the site with any commonly available browser and since some of those browsers lacked support for tables and frames, the site was constructed without them. The lack of tables resulted in irregular layout of the content, which made the pages hard to read. The lack of frames made interpage navigation difficult. Initially, only a small number of stamps were presented. Adding to the problems of the website was a choice of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that not only provided a very limited amount of space for the site’s files but provided extraordinarily poor service, reliability, and customer support. Several years later, uncommon web browsers disappeared and the remaining
