Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

> It's almost certainly a joke but not obvious exactly what the joke is.

That's the conclusion I've come to from all the responses. (Thanks everyone.)

The reason I asked is because I remember web development in the 90's, and the article while irreverent in tone misses the mark for me.

I think it's aiming for "The Register" style irreverence but their style is to have a cynical mocking and sarcastic tone while still being factually accurate, while this article changes facts in a way that feels like a joke, but stops short of actually making the joke or point it wants to make.

It's as if "This joke is left as an Exercise to the reader". Given the range of different explanations of "the joke" that have followed, I've come to the conclusion that the author has nailed the tone of being funny while not actually being funny.

The bad good old days, I sure don't miss writing pages with byzantine structures of tables within tables.

I do miss web pages that weren't +10MB that load hundreds of JS and CSS files that clog up your computer and may or may not contain malware. I hate that having uMatrix and uBlock Origin installed is pretty much a requirement to use the web nowadays.

And SHTML for Server Side Includes.

I remember it taking a few years between DHTML becoming a buzzword and XHR becoming popular. XHR was slept on for a while even though it was available in all major browsers by the early 2000's. Back when we were calling things "DHTML," updates originating from the server typically would happen by refreshing the whole page, or sometimes an IFRAME if you wanted to get fancy [1]. Once XHR finally started to get popular is when people started talking about "Web 2.0" in the mid 2000s.

I heard that someone did a talk on why it took so long for the Web 2.0 phenomenon to happen even though the technologies were available for several years before. Can't remember who.

A little known fact is that even streaming updates (e.g. for live chat) were actually not that hard to implement on the front end going back to the original days of XHR, via "long polling" (basically starting a new XHR request that you held open until the next piece of info comes in) though it took until well into the Web 2.0 era for that to be common. The problem was actually on the server side; to cope with long polling, the server would have to keep a long-running thread (and in the case of CGI, a whole process!) for each of those open requests and the servers would get overloaded. Nowadays of course servers have much better hardware, and we have technologies like nginx that can handle huge amounts of connections in one thread.

In principle you could build almost everything in the modern day front page of Facebook or Google results page with the tools we had in 2001, front-end wise, but the servers couldn't handle long polling for the streaming updated needed for things like the Facebook chat. Also the pages are so complex that it would be easy to get yourself tied in knots without modern conveniences like CSS frameworks (or even resets!)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_HTML

> DHTML, which stands for “distributed HTML”, was the final feather in our cap of web development tools.

Dynamic*

Anyway, there's also tables for layout, including Photoshop and Dreamweaver having a slice tool to generate those tables.

Also most of the coolest early adopter sites using CSS were anime artist portfolios, because it allowed them to do much cooler stuff.

Webpage view counters.

Midi files playing when you came to the site.

The tag. Oh and was spelled and was spelled . We also had .

XHTML, with very long doctype tags I used to know by heart.

Diagonal stripped images that tiled for backgrounds were all the rage.

> Pixel fonts

Ohh yes. "Visitor" was the most popular one and was everywhere.

Not really dev-related but Windows used to make a noise when you would click links. For some reason, when you'd trigger a pop-up or an activeX control the multiple redirects or whatever would cause the click sound to happen over and over again. You knew a site was really turning its gears when there were three or more clicks.

Every site wanted you to install a toolbar. I collected them like pokemon, to obvious detriment (spyware galore). You bet I also had Bonzai Buddy or whatever his name was installed. Being 12 was fun.

DHTML was wild, alert was like magic. prompt() was also a favorite, haven't seen that one used in ages and it's likely now removed.

Downloads had a popup every single time you clicked on it - no download menus.

Flash. Shockwave. The other one from Microsoft that was cool for a bit but super convoluted and buggy... oh right, Silverlight I think.

PhpBB and vBulletin and Conforums. You were cool if you had a forum signature that was large and commissioned by an artist that likely used PlanetRenders. Bonus points if it was coordinated with your profile picture.

X.com still said "coming soon" or something, for decades I swear (everyone wanted x.com and I was always jealous of someone having a domain name with less than three letters).

Java applets (RuneScape was a good one).

"Sign the guestbook".

Overline styles were great fun.

Once flash hit, entire sites were made in it. No, text couldn't be selected for the longest time (ever?). Accessibility ("a11y") was but a hilarious concept. Text flying everywhere, blinking, even on fire in some cases.

Gifs with their boolean alpha channel making everything so delightfully crispy.

Bitmaps were used often since they were the defacto format for MS Paint. Most 1x1's I made were in paint. They had to match the background color you were using since MS Paint didn't support transparency (does it even do that today?)

Rounded corners were done using a 3x3 table and images for the corners. No, border radius was not yet conjured up. No, you couldn't rotate the images, you needed 4 different ones.

Emojis were not emojis but emoticons and were images, or we had a long dictionary of cool text ones people had dreamed up. Here's chef boyardee, one of my favorites: @=:{D

Clipart was exported from Microsoft Word 2003 and used everywhere. Curvey rainbow text images were rampant.

Speaking of, text as images when operating systems didn't have the latest cool font or you needed some gradient or something.

Oh yeah, gradients in general. Images!

bgcolor on the tag.

Yahoo's genuinely great articles on website optimization.

#anchors in the URL didn't work with the id attribute, you needed an actual tag. Bonus points for putting content in it and it linking you to your browser's homepage.

Ask Jeeves (which then turned into Ask.com). Babelfish translator. The speech to text software that was either parrot or turtle branded.

TortoiseSVN to download the sources for your favorite private server source code.

Filezilla deploy your site over FTP. It was the web developer's version of the "compiling!" meme, thing took forever.

Web rings, where people would link to the next site in the ring.

Lists of IP addresses you supposedly weren't supposed to ping. Got those from HellboundHackers and hackthissite forums.

BBCode. You were really cool if you implemented that.

Comet frames to implement live chat (before XMLHttpRequest or "AJAX", now simply fetch(), was a thing). Iframes before any of that.

PHP errors being dumped to the webpage, inline. You always knew someone's mysql server was down.

HTML comments that were actually if statements to switch out tags for IE.

"Created by Microsoft FrontPage"

Macromedia Coldfusion

Waiting 8 hours to download a 200MiB game client.

for (var k in obj) if (obj.hasOwnProperty(k)) ... being burned into memory.

On that note, actually using .prototype or I think .__proto__

Custom HTML headers had to be prefixed with X-

Java Server Pages (JSP) and ASP being the tabs vs spaces of backend development.

Low Orbit Ion Cannon

... alright I'm done :D I miss the old web.

EDIT: okay okay I'm really done now.