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HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

tedium.co

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Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#161
Actual HTML title: "10 Weird HTML Hacks That Shaped The Internet"

Is there a difference between "the Web" and "the Internet".

As a loyal text-only browser user (not lynx or w3m), I have safely avoided all 10. It's possible for me to disable tables and normally I do. Breaking out of frames is one keypress.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#162
post #64

The article and every comment in this thread thereof is a thermonuclear illustration of (part of) why I hate web development. This is what so many of my peers told me was the way to develop applications. Nevermind that the desktop frameworks, quirky though they were at times, had none of these issues and didn’t force some absolutely wild hacks on their users. I will never not be salty about the DOM, CSS, and all the…

In an odd way, I miss the time when web dev was so quirky and unpredictable. It was a never-ending process of experimentation, puzzle solving, discovery, and, once you figure out a hacky way to do something as basic as a 3-column layout, very gratifying.

I guess for me it was more of a creative outlet than just a job.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#163

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.

And more importantly, as I recall, you could install chrome frame without admin access.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're telling me it's unreasonable for people to mix up W3schools and W3C? lol

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#165

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…

Something related to this: I made an SVG interface for displaying/editing diagrams using nw.js (essentially Electron). It would adapt the SVG viewport height and width based on the amount of space that's actively being used so that scrollbars will appear only when needed. The interface would work perfectly in Chromium and Firefox. But in nw.js I was using their menu api to display a window menu. That menu wasn't part…

Possibly the svg element was inline, so sitting on the text baseline rather than the limits of the container element?

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#167

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…

E-mail was never meant to support HTML, though, and it's a major vector for attacks. I wish more servers would disallow or strip HTML from their incoming messages.

Generally speaking, if I see an HTML e-mail I know the other end cares NOTHING about security or efficiency, and is actively trying to snoop on me with analytics.

Not surprising you had to fall back to very old HTML to hit a common featureset.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#168

I 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…

WHATWG didn't advance the Web for anyone except for-profit interests.

I cut my teeth on HTML 3.2 so I know what byzantine BS was needed for IE and Netscape. Those were choices made by MS and Netscape, however, so even with a bigger W3C presence, there was no guarantee or even hint that MS and Netscape would fall in line with new standards to begin with.

And it was better then than the garbage we have now where if one big company decides they want it, the rest of the Web gets to deal with it.

That's SO much better, man. /s

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#169

Is responsive design really a hack? Media queries are awesome Putting that stuff in css vs having conditional logic in the javascript is a huge win, esp when you want to ssr

No, it's not a hack. You can query different things about the user agent and serve different CSS based on those queries. Anyone calling it a hack is ignorant, it's a necessary part of producing responsive designs.
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