Have used all of them, and will use some of them even today
Comment conditionals still needed to render proper tables in email for different versions of Outlook.
HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
201–210 of 233 posts
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's accurate. It was old Internet Explorer that wouldn't render tables progressively. See here, where it includes a demo: https://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=161099 Non-table layouts also came into fashion when screen resolutions started to vary more, and some degree of fluidity and responsiveness could've been implemented with non-table layouts while IE was still a target. However, IE w…
> I don't think that's accurate. It was old Internet Explorer that wouldn't render tables progressively. You both agree and disagree with my comment :) If memory serves me right, I started migrating off table layouts at the time when IE6 was still by far the most popular browser (>80% of the market?).
IE had a setting that forced tables to render progressively. They documented it on the Microsoft web dev site and also I’m reasonably sure in their “cool things you can do in IE5.5” book.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
The linked article includes an example of the "commented backslash hack," a variation on point #3 in this article Fell out of use because "nobody uses IE for Mac" :)
It amazes me to this day that IE for Mac wasn't even the Trident rendering engine.
While at Mozilla for a quarter century, I got to work for many years with one of the people who made Tasman, Mac IE's engine. It was a phenomenal engine from what I learned. I wasn't on Macs in that era so didn't use it much, but knowing today what I've learned about it, I believe it to be one of the better pieces of software Microsoft people ever built.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
The linked article includes an example of the "commented backslash hack," a variation on point #3 in this article Fell out of use because "nobody uses IE for Mac" :)
IE for Mac was so atrocious, there's a chapter dedicated to it in iWoz.
Tasman was way ahead of Trident actually. It had many problems Gecko had in that the web didn't care much for standards so implementing the standards, even well, wasn't considered a selling point. It was years of mostly Mozilla effort to make standards matter enough that web developers came around to them and then Tasman was viewed as an amazing pioneer alongside Gecko.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#205Using 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…
Every time I need tabular layout I try the tool du jour: Floats, CSS grid, etc.
It never works like I want it to, and I never know if it's because I'm dumb or the tool is poorly-designed, and by then I've wasted two hours, so I always end up just going back to tables because they freaking work.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't think that's accurate. It was old Internet Explorer that wouldn't render tables progressively. You both agree and disagree with my comment :) If memory serves me right, I started migrating off table layouts at the time when IE6 was still by far the most popular browser (>80% of the market?).
IE had a setting that forced tables to render progressively. They documented it on the Microsoft web dev site and also I’m reasonably sure in their “cool things you can do in IE5.5” book.
Didn't know that! Wonder what made them choose to turn this off by default. Must be an interesting eng story.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you added attributes for the number of rows and columns (something like ), it could render it progressively. I don't recall if that was vanilla HTML or vendor extension, I suspect not vanilla. I stopped doing front end work about the time tables for layout went out of fashion, my dorky internal tools still use them.
Not in the HTML 4.01 spec (https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/tables.html), so probably a vendor extension (don't think I ever used these attributes).
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#208Using 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…
Yep replacing tables with floats is just swapping one hack for another, with its own set of edge cases, browser incompatability etc.
The good news is now flexbox and grid work in all modern browsers, so this is (finally) a solved problem
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#209Anyone remember DHTML chromeless windows?
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex8/chromeless.htm
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#210Tldr: XHR