101–110 of 407 posts
Ah yes, transparent images to get equal-width spacing on terrible browser engines like Opera and IE. Tracking pixels. Mixed HTTP and HTTPS content warnings. Java Applets. Perl scripts. cgi-bin. Uploading files one-by-one through a web portal (not even FTP). Building entire sites out of a mosaic of images. Having multiple versions of your site for 800x600, 1024x768, etc.
Scrolling text was a staple of the demo scene long before it came to the web as ` `. Of course it was not just scrolling lazily from left to right back then. It would hop up and down[1], run backwards sometimes and change its already exuberant colors. If it got really fancy the letters flew along an ever changing lissajous figure or had a faux reflection below, sometimes even with faux water perturbations. Yes, the w…
Unbelievably the website where I learned how to use these tags is still online:
> 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…
> 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…
Why did guestbooks die?
It still exists, but most sites prefer to use their own HTML based logins because it "looks ugly".
Imagine if sites used the built in dialog; We would have a much more secure web. We would not have a need for dedicated password managers and would probably have found a low effort way of integrating auto generated passwords.
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...
HN was launched February 2007 and uses and 1x1 gif to set the indentation level of comments.