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Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

zachholman.com

11–20 of 407 posts

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

#11
post #3

> DHTML, which stands for “distributed HTML” Is this a joke I don't understand?

It's almost certainly a joke but not obvious exactly what the joke is. What it actually stood for (in case you don't know) is "Dynamic HTML." My guess is that he's drawing a parallel with "distributed" as a modern day buzzword that's used in so many ways it's almost meaningless, but attracts attention and money almost automatically (other modern-day buzzwords like this include "blockchain," although that's fading, and "AI").

Incidentally, nowadays we never refer to DHTML because probably over 99.9% of pages use at least some JavaScript and CSS, so it's redundant to even mention them; you just say "front-end development."

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

#12
Ah, the 90s - a time when was the answer to every web layout question. Miss aligning your text? . Need a fancy menu? . Creating a full website? Nested s! Who needed CSS when you had rows and cells to hack your way through design? Good old days of -ing everything!

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

#13
I still use   when writing headlines, to avoid breaking apart 2 key words that should stay together.

I also use the non-breaking hyphen for this, which is a different char than the regular hyphen or the em/en dash.

> 1x1.gif let you push elements all around the page effortlessly. To this day it is the only way to vertically center elements

If you can think of another way to vertically center, I’d like to hear it.

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

#14
That’s nothing. The real state of the art was putting a smiley GIF inside a horizontal marquee, inside a vertical marquee, and setting behavior=“alternate” on both marquees.

For your pleasure, here’s how to do a marquee in pure CSS:

@keyframes marquee { 0% { transform: translateX(100%); } 100% { transform: translateX(-100%); } }

.marquee-container { white-space: nowrap; overflow: hidden; position: relative; animation: marquee 10s linear infinite; }

.marquee-content { display: inline-block; }

Microsoft™ Internet Explorer™ 4.0!

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

#15

Ah, the 90s - a time when was the answer to every web layout question. Miss aligning your text? . Need a fancy menu? . Creating a full website? Nested s! Who needed CSS when you had rows and cells to hack your way through design? Good old days of -ing everything!

Still true for email layout in 2024

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

#16

Ah, the 90s - a time when was the answer to every web layout question. Miss aligning your text? . Need a fancy menu? . Creating a full website? Nested s! Who needed CSS when you had rows and cells to hack your way through design? Good old days of -ing everything!

But don't forget that you'll have to add the `` tag in _every single cell_.

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

#20
post #17

I don't remember if this was a common technique, but before XmlHttpRequest (came in 2000, i think) we used to do "Ajax" by loading data into an invisible iframe and reading the contents. Worked well iirc.

Oh right I forgot about that.

Also back then (up until ~2005) browsers were hilariously insecure. For example I was in a forum of a local youth club and you could have signatures that were displayed under every post so I added some edgy image linked from my own webserver.

Some day I accidentally put the whole folder on a password protection which prompted the "username password" login window on every page my signature was linked to. FOR ALL USERS.

I realized users would think that the forum software would ask them to log in again for some reason so I basically got all passwords of people in the forum in plaintext on my webserver.

Crazy times

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