Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

tedium.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 233 posts

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#91

Post by hutzlibu »

debok wrote: post #23
mcv wrote: post #2

I'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.

Yeah. I was hoping for a list of hacks that got promoted to standards. That would have been a really cool read.

"list of hacks that got promoted to standards. That would have been a really cool read."

I guess that would be just called "history of the internet". Originally designed to display text with links - and after decades of hacks, a browser is now allmost an OS, capable of allmost anything computer related.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#93

Post by joshstrange »

fifilura wrote: post #41

Using tables for layout is pretty understandable. But when tables went out of fashion it was all about using floats for layout for a few years. That was wild, I am surprised it was left out from that list. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/CSS_layou... "Originally for floating images inside blocks of text, the float property became one of the most commonly used tools for creating multiple column layo…

When floats first came out (or around that time) I wrote my computer repair site using them, all developed in FF. Then, as I was finishing, I opened it in IE and watched the entire design fall apart. Unfortunately the people I would be targeting with my website would almost certainly be using IE so I had to go back to the drawing board and rewrite it using tables. It was a sad day.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#94

Post by 101008 »

Great article. I love everything related to the "old internet" (as you can see from my nostalgic point of view on some of my comments in Hacker News). Is there a good book about that particular time? I'd like to read a very good book about not just browsing the internet back then, but doing some kind of development (especially frontend, which I think it was the one that required most hacks and changed more than the backend in a few years)-

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#96

Post by reddalo »

stabbles wrote: post #88
fifilura wrote: post #41

Using tables for layout is pretty understandable. But when tables went out of fashion it was all about using floats for layout for a few years. That was wild, I am surprised it was left out from that list. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/CSS_layou... "Originally for floating images inside blocks of text, the float property became one of the most commonly used tools for creating multiple column layo…

As W3Schools still likes to call it: the new, modern clearfix hack [1] .clearfix::after { content: ""; clear: both; display: table; } [1] https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_clearfix.asp

W3Schools is a horrible resource. I'd like Google to hide all of their results.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#97

Post by _fat_santa »

fifilura wrote: post #41

Using tables for layout is pretty understandable. But when tables went out of fashion it was all about using floats for layout for a few years. That was wild, I am surprised it was left out from that list. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/CSS_layou... "Originally for floating images inside blocks of text, the float property became one of the most commonly used tools for creating multiple column layo…

I had to develop some email templates a while back for the first time and was almost shocked that they still use the "tables method" for layouts. Overall I'd say developing email templates now is much like developing websites in the early 2000's, email clients have such a wider range of CSS support that there are hacks all around. We now have frameworks like MJML and Foundation that do their best to abstract all that stuff away through components but take a look under the hood at the rendered HTML and it's a very scary and nostalgic place.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#100

Post by rchaud »

reddalo wrote: post #96
stabbles wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As W3Schools still likes to call it: the new, modern clearfix hack [1] .clearfix::after { content: ""; clear: both; display: table; } [1] https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_clearfix.asp

W3Schools is a horrible resource. I'd like Google to hide all of their results.

A lot of people on HN seem to have this opinion. A lot of the content on that site has been re-written, and it's now a pretty fantastic resource for beginners.

If you tell 2 beginners to build something with PHP/jQuery/JS, and send one person to W3Schools and the other to PHP.net/jquery.org/MDN, I have no doubt that the W3schools person will get something done in workable state faster.

Post reply on HN