No respect for spacer.gif?
It's still here on HN of course, included in every page request:
HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
11–20 of 233 posts
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#12I'm not sure "shaped the Internet" is the right description. These are 10 HTML/CSS hacks that enabled you to work around browser quirks and poor support for certain features.
Some of them are definitely more "historic" than others. For instance, #2 ( -based layouts) definitely shaped much of early-to-mid-2000s web design, and can be viewed as a precursor to flexbox/other modern layout engines. Same with sIFR -- custom webfonts are totally taken for granted today largely because of "hacks" like this.
I strongly agree with table layouts being historic. A large reason we now have flexbox is because early CSS was really bad at replicating table-based layouts, so people didn't stop using then despite the drawbacks.
Same story with rounded corners, which were originally accomplished with tables and images. And a lot of the conventions for website navigation were established in table-based layouts
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#13I remember the good old days of the transparent 1×1 pixel gif to keep table cells in check.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#14This gave me ptsd haha. Also shows how mush cost we have/had with one company (MSFT) fucking up so bad. Imagine the hours incurred because IE sucks?
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#15It's funny how we came around to JSSS, and it's now everywhere: from CSS-in-JS to web components coding their CSS in strings inside Javascript
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#16Rounded corners using images? Usually using a sprite.
Also I worked somewhere that used Flash as a proxy for realtime socket support. I believe web sockets were not around then or maybe not fully supported.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#17I remember running a project to build a mortgage calculator/spreadsheet 'app' for a bank that had to work in 'Dynamic HTML' in Netscape 4 and IE. A never ending hell of compatibility, functionality and appearance differences that took many sleepless nights to fix.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#18I'm not sure "shaped the Internet" is the right description. These are 10 HTML/CSS hacks that enabled you to work around browser quirks and poor support for certain features.
Some of them are definitely more "historic" than others. For instance, #2 ( -based layouts) definitely shaped much of early-to-mid-2000s web design, and can be viewed as a precursor to flexbox/other modern layout engines. Same with sIFR -- custom webfonts are totally taken for granted today largely because of "hacks" like this.
I don’t know about others, but I hated sIFR. It was routinely deployed without sane fallback (so that if you didn’t have Flash, headings were broken, for example—it being common to deploy it on headings only, since it was overall so awful), it butchered performance, the rendering was ugly and often difficult to read, and it thwarted regular operations like text selection.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#19I like how HN employs one of these today: - Use HTML tables for layout Hahaha :) On a more serious note, this list highlights how development without standards leads to control information being encoded in various tolerable side-channels. The potential mess and collision of this brings into relief the disdain that's sometimes levelled at the current W3C process. This process marries a standards-driven evolution of we…
Unfortunately today w3c and tc39 (Javascript) are completely dominated by Google who ram through a lot of standards while barely paying lip service to the process.
Unfortunately a lot of players who rely on browser functionality are completely silent in the standards committees (like the TV vendors who all run their apps in a webkit or chromium version), so it's barely a three-way tug-o-war between Google, Apple and Mozilla
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#20Some of my favorites: - Faux columns, to get a visual stretch and make it appear that the sidebar was as long as the content https://alistapart.com/article/fauxcolumns/ - Or take that even further, with a nine-patch and 9 div's or a 3x3 table you could hack your own borders by repeating backgrounds in some axis. With CSS3 we got border-image that could help this a bit. These border styles aren't that much in favor an…
Golly. It’s a bit of a slap in the face to click through to A List Apart and see the header broken on mobile.
It’s still so clean though after all these years.