Earlier quoted context omitted.
you mean the title cut off? it happens on desktop too. i wonder if it's intentional
Yes, it is intentionally their design.
In that case, awesome.
HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
221–230 of 233 posts
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#222Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
IE for Mac was so atrocious, there's a chapter dedicated to it in iWoz.
As I understand it - I was a bit young when it happened, so all I have are secondhand accounts - IE 5 on Mac was substantially better that other browsers due in part to its CSS support.
The chapter on IE for Mac in iWoz has nothing to do with how the browser render engine worked. It is about how the OS behaved after it was installed.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#224And PNGs for rounded corners. I can't remember what the term was when you took two images overlayed to make a rounded button that was resizable. Sliding door buttons? And transparent gifs to set a width without being seen.
It might have been this:
as posted by @hypertexthero "My favorite from 20 years ago: Doug Bowman’s 'Sliding Doors' of CSS to make rounded corner tabs that would expand to fit the text: https://alistapart.com/article/slidingdoors/ "
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Tables just works - as long as you know when and how to use the 1x1 transparent spacer gif.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#226The 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.
Yeah and hilariously, being able to navigate and accurately exploit the quirks of browsers could give your web development business a competitive edge. My colleagues and I had it as a source of pride to come up with a complete stack of tedious "hacks" to make even the most ambitious designs possible, in the mid-2000's. Our designers were able to basically make whatever they wanted (within reason) and have it work out. The excitement of getting some layout working that today would be trivial... ahh, fun times :) haha
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#227IE for Mac was great. People forget that IE for Mac was the best & most standards compliant browser for Mac ~25 years ago. All of the “IE hate”, was only directed at the Windows version … not the Mac version. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac Here’s Gruber also saying it was great. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/01/06/grewel-ie-5-mac
Yeah, even from your first line I knew you must be talking about IE 5. It was the most fully-featured browser at the time and was fast. I remember Netscape Navigator crashing a lot, by comparison. >_<
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#228Walk down memory lane. I've used almost all of these over the nearly 27 years I've been doing web development. I kind of feel like the old float/clear and 1px x 1px transparent gif hacks should have been in there as well.
Yeah, I was waiting for the 1px.gif for spacers, and display: inline-block for "tile" layouts... haha
Fist-bump to fellow "nearly-three-decade-er" (learned HTML in 1995)! :)
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#229No mention about HTC? .fancy { behavior: url("path/to/pie_files/PIE.htc"); } (It is still online [1]! And even on GitHub [2]!!) [1] http://css3pie.com/ [2] https://github.com/lojjic/PIE
I have a stupid fondness for the level of hacks that we all collectively developed for IE6-9. One of my favorites was tricking IE6/7 into supporting Base64-encoded images in CSS by essentially triggering Outlook rules. They're 100% things that shouldn't exist, mind you.
Hm, cannot recall this one, but it reminded me of another magical trigger: to make HTML file loaded from local file (or CD-ROM, or whatever non-Internet) one had to pretend that given file was "Saved from (Internet)" with magical HTML comment preambule such as
\r\n
While searching for it now results let me to SO [1] and from there to (former) MSDN [2], so only now I know this has rad acronym: MOTW meaning "Mark of the Web". It could hardly be more arcane.
[1] https://superuser.com/a/484428/50036 [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#230The amount of conflation between "the Internet" and "the Web" is way too high in here. It is the most popular protocol, but it is not the only protocol.
The amount of conflation between "The Web" and "HTTP" is way too high in here. "The Web" is not a protocol.
This trick doesn't work because you cannot talk about the Web without also talking about HTTP, the protocol that runs it.
The Internet is made up of MANY protocols, of which you could be talking about ANY, not just the Web. SSH, Gopher, SMTP, they're all Internet, but they're not the Web, and the Web isn't the entirety of the Internet.
Words mean things but of course count on humans to be stupid with them.