HTML hacks that shaped the Internet • Hacker News Board

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#231

Post by simmer » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 1:20 PM UTC

wiredfool wrote: post #33

keepamovin wrote: post #5

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…

I love how tables "went away", and were widely replaced with bootstrap. Which gives you ... tables. in divs. But only 12 columns wide.

“Gridlike layout” != “tables”.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#232

Post by slapo » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 11:25 PM UTC

handy2000 wrote: post #181

slapo wrote: post #179

Earlier 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?).

So did I, but at the time, screen resolutions were starting to vary more.

It was probably a case of killing several birds with one stone - make layouts fluid while avoiding IE's issues with rendering tables.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#233

Post by slapo » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 11:42 PM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #195

slapo wrote: post #179

Earlier 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. IIRC Netscape didn't either around the IE4/5 days. It also had significant performance problems with large sets of nested tables which IE6 (and perhaps IE5) did not. For example back at University on 133MHz Pentium-class CPUs a large slashdot page with all threads open could take minutes to render where IE took me…

I haven't worked with Netscape that old, only some time after it became free of charge, but I remember it was really slow at just about anything compared to IE 5.5 and 6 - startup, rendering, UI. To the point that even if it could render tables progressively, it wouldn't really matter on my computer (which I think was either an Intel Penium II or an AMD Duron 850), despite only having a dial-up connection.

I think it was around the time of Firefox 1.6 when it felt like it was about on par with IE 6 in rendering speed for me, after tweaking some of its settings. I think it was also rendering tables progressively at the time.