Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014) • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by Sharlin » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 9:51 AM UTC

junon wrote: post #60

> 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…

That may be an intentional "mistake" given the article's ironic style. Though "dynamic" does sound much cooler and groundbreaking than "distributed". Like in "dynamic programming"!

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

#82

Post by thriftwy » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 9:52 AM UTC

CM30 wrote: post #48

Let's not forget frames, the original 'solution' to the problem of having to edit the navigation bar on every page. Unfortunately, you then had to figure out what to do if someone accessed the frame page directly, since search engines could still index these parts of the page seperately. And they always felt jarring and awkward too, since the cutoff between sections was always obvious...

That and also tables (with invisible borders), which was the content positioning before CSS tool of choice and went way into the 2010s.

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

#83

Post by Sharlin » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 9:52 AM UTC

thrdbndndn wrote: post #51

conradfr wrote: post #10

> To this day it is the only way to vertically center elements. Not true anymore (edit: didn't see the 2014) but the productivity cost of not being able to just "vertical-align: middle;" inside divs for the last 30 years must be billions of dollars. Also does anyone remember the fade of the overline style on :hover links? It must has been around the IE4 or IE6 era. Tables were also used to make divs and buttons with…

Nowadays I just ask ChatGPT to write the CSS for me for that, and amusingly, it seems to be able to produce at least a dozen of solutions (often came with redundant rules, too: like having 5+ rules when 2 or 3 of them are enough). It's hilariously stupid.

That's not stupid, it's just redundancy to make sure it works on all browsers!

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

#84

Post by Sharlin » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 9:53 AM UTC

npteljes wrote: post #43

Don't forget that tables could be used for rounded corners. Or maybe I'm an early 00s web developer with that? The trick is that we created 3×3 tables, and aside of the middle cell, it would contain s, so that the creation was a website element with rounded edges, the pinnacle of human expressiveness. Since HTML emails were also the rage, and email clients updated much slower than browsers, this technique was used we…

> and aside of the middle cell

No no, the middle cell contained the tiled background image, of course!

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

#85

Post by q7xvh97o2pDhNrh » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 9:54 AM UTC

Speaking of the greatness of the 90s, does anyone have a good version of the classic "Under Construction" GIF?

You know the one — it was in the style of a yellow road sign, and on it was a pixelated silhouette of a construction worker diligently shoveling.

Long before Gmail had the smug audacity to leave "Beta" on their product name, you could use this GIF (or even a whole row of them!) to proudly announce to the world that your site was — like all great works of art — never complete.

I've searched high and low for the classic version of this GIF — the true, original, platonic ideal — but all I've been able to find are poor knockoffs.

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

#86

Post by eps » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 9:56 AM UTC

npteljes wrote: post #43

Don't forget that tables could be used for rounded corners. Or maybe I'm an early 00s web developer with that? The trick is that we created 3×3 tables, and aside of the middle cell, it would contain s, so that the creation was a website element with rounded edges, the pinnacle of human expressiveness. Since HTML emails were also the rage, and email clients updated much slower than browsers, this technique was used we…

> Don't forget that tables could be used for rounded corners.

And drop shadows!

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

#87

Post by Sharlin » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 9:57 AM UTC

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #85

Speaking of the greatness of the 90s, does anyone have a good version of the classic "Under Construction" GIF? You know the one — it was in the style of a yellow road sign, and on it was a pixelated silhouette of a construction worker diligently shoveling. Long before Gmail had the smug audacity to leave "Beta" on their product name, you could use this GIF (or even a whole row of them!) to proudly announce to the wor…

http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/ If it isn't here, it probably can't be found anywhere.

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

#88

Post by ahmedfromtunis » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 9:58 AM UTC

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #34

I miss MS FrontPage! I remember how shocked my friends looked whenever they came by and saw it open on my screen. They never understood why I spend hours on that thing instead of just playing games. The first time I thought about learning to code was when I visited Linkin Park's website. Sure, it took 10 long minutes to load but it was a masterpiece of its own. I'd just open the website and stare at it. And one day I…

I also remember finding out about scripting with either VBScript or JScript (which was different from JavaScript).

Shortly after, I discovered that there's a function capable of listing folders and files from the visitor's hard drive. No permissions needed. The browser just had full access to the hard drive.

Naturally, I wrote a script and loaded it on the homepage of my website. The goal was to save, on a file, the contents of visitors hard drives' contents.

For some reason that never worked. But yeah, the internet back then was a very scary place.

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

#89

Post by nikos3194 » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 9:58 AM UTC

One thing used a lot before CSS and JS was the "usemap" attribute in the img tags to make hyperlinks within images. You had to indicate the coords and whether the shape of the hiperlink was a poly, rect or circle.

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

#90

Post by Galanwe » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 9:59 AM UTC

The article could mention the wave of "semantic web" at the end of the period.

The idea was to create a DTD+XML for your website and publish it with meaningful tags. Then you could distribute XSLT sheets that the browser applied, and have total separation of style and content.