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HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

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Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#151

Post by ghusbands »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #121
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 was going to comment that I took offense to calling table-based layout a hack in the first place. When tables went out of favor, and I saw many, many front end dev teams waste cumulative months of time creating a much less understandable web page fiddling with float nonsense all over the place, solely so "purists" could keep their religion in tact, I learned a valuable lesson. Joel Spolsky calls them "Architecture…

Not everyone who cares about accessibility is an architecture astronaut.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#152

Post by Tijdreiziger »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #17

I 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.

But hey, it gave us http://www.dynamicdrive.com!

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#153

Post by paradox460 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #16

Rounded 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.

Sockets are very new. Way back when, you'd either use COMET, which was a connection that the server wouldn't close, and you'd append data to it, for the js in the browser to use. This was one directional, so going the other way still required separate requests

For real bidirectional sockets, it was common to make or use a small flash file. You'd talk to it with js, and it would handle the actual socket stuff. Worked pretty well

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#154

Post by trealira »

ksherlock wrote: post #150
trealira wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it also makes sense in Python, where it can be used to automatically close a file, or with open(filename) as my_file: data = my_file.read() Or with acquiring and releasing a lock: lock = threading.Lock() with lock: pass # do stuff That being said, I prefer the C++ approach of using constructors and destructors to automatically acquire resources (like locks and files) by declaring variables within some block s…

Javascript with and python with are completely separate things. Javascript with comes from Pascal with (which was perhaps copied from somewhere else) and is used to modify variable scope. with (my.long.variable.reference) { a = 1; b = 2; } is equivalent to: my.long.variable.reference.a = 1; my.long.variable.reference.b = 2; or at least, it might be ... due to Javascript's dynamic and typeless nature you might not kno…

I knew about the Pascal "with", but I didn't know JavaScript had the same construct.

That kind of "with" is a lot less intuitive to me.

I was responding with Python's "with" because it sounded like they were talking about programming languages in general, but now I can see they were obviously talking about JavaScript's "with" given this context.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#155

Post by paradox460 »

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.

Kagi let's you hide it.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#156

Post by cratermoon »

Notice how many of these hacks grew out of what was called the "pixel perfectionist" crowd in those days. The Web and HTML came out of a community that valued logically, semantically organized content. Communication was largely about words and ideas. If the result looked about as exciting as an academic paper, well, that was fine. The adoption by a community concerned with communicating with design, using color, layout, and other visual elements, came with a host of ways to squeeze it out of the limited capabilities of HTML.

Notice also how many of the hacks were about making it the design look the same in IE as in Netscape. Or in some cases, making it just work, at all, in IE while not breaking in Netscape or Opera or other browsers.

One could argue that this mix of competing rendering engines led to a great deal of creative discovery that drove future developments, and today we have, essentially 3 engines: Chromium, WebKit, and Quantum (formerly Gecko)

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#157

Post by chinkinthearmor »

rand_flip_bit wrote: post #104
reddalo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Amongst many other sites, I have w3schools blocked in my Kagi search results, along with MDN being raised/prioritized. From the looks of it, it seems like blocking w3schools is quite popular among Kagi users [1]. [1]: https://kagi.com/stats

Could I ask real quick why you dislike W3Schools? I def learned SQL syntax and basic HTML/CSS (I needed to use CSS selectors but had basically no knowledge) through them and actually thought to myself they did a great job at keeping things need-to-know for immediate use.

I have a feeling I know your answer - as a financial professional I initially used Investopedia in a pinch but over the years realized their accuracy has an inverse relation with the specificity of the topic. After seeing incorrect formulas and descriptions a handful of times, I eventually stopped using it completely.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#158

Post by handy2000 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #121
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 was going to comment that I took offense to calling table-based layout a hack in the first place. When tables went out of favor, and I saw many, many front end dev teams waste cumulative months of time creating a much less understandable web page fiddling with float nonsense all over the place, solely so "purists" could keep their religion in tact, I learned a valuable lesson. Joel Spolsky calls them "Architecture…

IIRC non-table based layouts are rendered progressively, while table-based layouts have to be loaded fully first, and only then rendered. At the point when this was relevant, the Web was slow (slow connections, slow rendering engines), so one of the primary motivations for ditching tables for layouts was an increase in the perceived page rendering speed, not just a purist quirk.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#159

Post by fsckboy »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #121
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 was going to comment that I took offense to calling table-based layout a hack in the first place. When tables went out of favor, and I saw many, many front end dev teams waste cumulative months of time creating a much less understandable web page fiddling with float nonsense all over the place, solely so "purists" could keep their religion in tact, I learned a valuable lesson. Joel Spolsky calls them "Architecture…

what do you mean by "purists" wrt tables? not nesting them or something? or using them only for marking up "relational" data and not page layout? or were these purists from the design side?

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#160

Post by zerocrates »

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.

This (as well as close relatives of this) is still relatively common because we still don't have a great option for to have non-visible text that's screen-reader accessible in all cases.

aria-label and things like that have replaced some usages of this pattern but not all.

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