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HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

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Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#131

Post by anarazel »

rchaud wrote: post #100
reddalo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My main issue with them is not their content proper, but that their SEO ranks them above much more topical results. That's clearly also Google's fault, but it's also clearly w3school's strategy.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#132

Post by Kwpolska »

kuschku wrote: post #42
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.

If you want to know a JS hack that truly "shaped the Internet", that'd be ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"). It's the origin of AJAX, allowed GMail to dynamically update the mail list, and led to the entire SPA craze. If you read ancient articles like this one https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/dynamic-page-updat... you can truly see just how much it changed the internet.

That one is truly ancient, and unique in that it actually uses XML, and even SOAP, in AJAX calls. (Although the SOAP is mostly a façade and a fancy way to call a function without any arguments.)

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#135

Post by stabbles »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #117
dylan604 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

don't forget that the holy grail was to have a locked in header and footer with the middle section as scrollable 3 columns

This is firmly cemented in my mind as completely impossible. I won't listen to reason.

It because of this exact technical challenge that ads nowadays appear between paragraphs in the middle content column, instead of in the right column where they belong.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#136

Post by adamzochowski »

Kwpolska wrote: post #133

Did anyone actually use Chrome Frame? Were there so many users that were so used to the IE interface and were unwilling to accept Chrome itself?

Plenty corporates had IE only/first policy. This meant everything intranet had to work on IE. A website developed for chrome was allowed to request chrome frame, but it had to undo itself for any external links when linking to other intranet sites (plenty active-x / silverlight).

I wish there was an option to specify per website domain which browser to use.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#137

Post by account-5 »

rchaud wrote: post #122
mpixel wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you tell 2 experts to build something with W3Schools as the resource against better documentation, I'm sure the results will be the opposite. That's not the point though, I'm not going to say different strokes for different folks. Instead I'd say, if that beginner uses the 'slower' path instead, that will pay dividends in time -- they are better of learning to use the docs than getting paid peanuts for deliver…

An expert wouldn't go to W3schools to begin with. They would have far more specific problems that would be better explored on Stack Overflow. A beginner on the other hand would have their SO questions locked/closed within minutes because it would likely break any one of the thousand little rules SO has (to reduce duplicates) that are unknown to beginners. Horses for courses; I read the official MDN and PHP docs now,…

This exactly. I still look to w3school over mdn if I can. The information is just friendlier. I'll use "proper" documentation if needed and never post anything to SO for the reasons you state.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#138

Post by jorgesborges »

rchaud wrote: post #100
reddalo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What would be the point of that exercise though? It's true they might produce something faster, but if those sources are meant to be an educational resource then they'll learn more reading through actual documentation than copy-pasting questionable code to get something done.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#139

Post by SkeuomorphicBee »

woodrowbarlow wrote: post #112
rchaud wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i'm mostly upset that they use "w3" in their name to masquerade as an "official" source of documentation. i know their about page clears this up, but it's pretty buried.

I disagree, "w3" doesn't have any official connotation, it is literally the name of the thing they are teaching (or the alternate spelling of the abbreviation, but same thing). It is a common pattern for a school that teaches [thing] to call themselves "[thing] school", nothing wrong there.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#140

Post by jorgesborges »

bonzini wrote: post #92
davidy123 wrote: post #38

This doesn't include my "favourite," putting a heading for accessibility at a -10000 position, so screen readers would read it, but it didn't render on the screen.

Does it still work? Or do you have to use ARIA?

This still works and is a somewhat common practice, especially for something like a skip link. Try pressing tab on some of your favorite websites you might find they use this technique.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/a#...

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