Wesleying Investigates: How Old Is WesMaps?

Ah, WesMaps. Everyone’s favorite course registration program that clearly hasn’t been redesigned in years. Wesleyan’s gone through one-and-a-half logo redesigns in the past decade, but WesMaps remains frozen in time. But how old is it exactly? I was expecting to have to do major archaeology (using the Wayback Machine, viewing the page’s source code, guessing the year based on web technologies used), but the answer ended up being a lot easier to find. At the top of every WesMaps page, there’s an “Archive” link that I’m willing to bet doesn’t get clicked that much, and it gave me the answer right away: 1996. And yes, the 1996 course catalog is still live on Wesleyan’s servers.

The big surprise to me is how little the structure of the course catalog has changed in the last 18 years. We still have the same three general education areas (Arts and Humanities, Natural Sciences and Mathematics, and Social Sciences), along with other familiar sections like Interdisciplinary Programs. The page also features those tiled-image backgrounds that were so popular on the ’90s web, along with a 1-bit black-and-white GIF depicting College Row at the top. Here’s what a course page looks like:

Hey look, the class has 999 spots! I should sign up! Just kidding, there’s no way I’d drag myself through Algorithms again. My GPA wouldn’t be able to handle it.

As for the current design, it dates to 2006, which is newer than I expected. (Warning: I’m about to get into some technical weeds. If you were planning to major in CS but fainted at the sight of DPL, look away!)

The 2006 update added cutting-edge web features like Cascading Style Sheets, table-based layouts, and frames. For those unfamiliar, CSS allows web developers to customize visual aspects of webpages such as layout, fonts, and colors. (The first version of CSS came out in late 1996, and it took a few years for it to be usable in web browsers like Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 3.) That said, its capabilities are seriously underused here. This exact page could’ve been created in 1996 using pure HTML — though by 2006, doing so would probably get you arrested by the web design police. “Table-based layouts” means that under the hood, the columns on this page are really just a table with 1 row and 4 columns. This is also something that’s very much frowned upon these days. What you’re supposed to do these days is use CSS to create columns, but that’s easier said than done. (Here’s a fun game: go ask a web dev “how do I center a div in CSS?” Same idea.) Frames only show up during course registration — they’re the things that make it so the course catalog shows up at the top and your current schedule shows up at the bottom. Their existence is generally regarded as a mistake.

But you know what? I’m fine with WesMaps’s design being a little dated. It’s lightning fast, and it works. It’s certainly better than the alternative, which would be Wesleyan paying some outside company a ridiculous amount of money to make a redesign that will inevitably be slow, buggy, and a major step down from what it replaced. Long live WesMaps!