Almost twenty years ago www.TourSantaFe.info‍* was a grow­ing web­site with dozens of inter­active, immersive, pano­ramic photo­graphs avail­able to all to freely explore.

Some of the panos were collect­ed to­gether into virtual tours using a relative­ly new tech­nology: embed­ded maps from a 3rd-party pro­vider.

The pin I design­ed for my tours was an homage to New Mexico’s love with hot air balloons, and it featur­ed the state seal, a Zia.

I made the site a data­base using Drupal to manage the con­tent. Drupal was an ob­vious choice due to its pow­er­ful in­te­gra­tion of num­er­ous tech­no­lo­gies and act­ive devel­op­ment. Especial­ly import­ant was Drupal’s dev­el­op­ers were keen to have its out­put be com­pliant with the World Wide Web Con­sortium’s and the Internet Engin­eer­ing Task Force’s standards.

Unfortunately, one com­pany in par­tic­ular wasn’t in­ter­est­ed in co-oper­a­ting in web stan­dards. Thus ma­king web­page fidel­ity and behavioral consistency, impossible.

Around that time, they required their Internet web browser to also be the binary executable for browsing the local file system, reducing system security for their users. They also polluted the HTML language by intro­du­cing non­stand­ard tags, among other shenanigans.

The Internet did not suddenly become a hostile place.

* Sorry to say, a number of factors doomed it.

• Competitors attacked the site.
• GoDaddy.com, my web host, didn’t patch their servers as they said they would.
• Hackers finally wrecked my database.
• An extremely large company decided to do “street views.”
• As noted above, another extremely large company made web work, and viewing panoramas remarkably difficult.
• Also, Apple decided QuickTimeVR was not worth supporting, thus easy playback in the short term was drawing to a close; with an uncertain future.

All of that is among why I stop­ped pay­ing for the TourSantaFe.info domain.