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Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

zachholman.com

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

#131

Post by conradfr »

Vespasian wrote: post #113
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…

(2014) so while "technically" flex was available at the time it wasn't really widespread yet.

I missed the (2014), not sure it was there initially (but it was in the article anyway).

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

#132

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

arkh wrote: post #32
trojan13 wrote: post #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!

And now we get some more semantically correct way to do it.

Hang on. Those don’t look like auto-generated React classes!

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

#133

Post by mmcgaha »

toyg wrote: post #69
cyberax wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still love tables. They are so awesome for dynamic design. The support column and row spans, alignment, weights. And CSS is still way more complicated than good old tables.

That's because Tables actually map to how digital imaging works: dividing an area into little squares and deciding what to show in it. The screen does it, the driver does it, the window manager does it, the desktop primitives do it... and then you get to the browser screen, and suddenly you have to figure out a byzantine system of self-mutating shapes. I was an early CSS supporter but man, didn't the boffins screw up…

Exactly and this is why CSS grid has changed my life. CSS grid is tables on Wheaties.

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

#134

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

CM30 wrote: post #44
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 remember using FrontPage quite a bit too. It had some... interesting quirks when it came to outputting HTML, but it seemed fine enough for me at the time. Which also reminds me; did anyone actually use the FrontPage Server Extensions they had for it? I remember the tool having a bunch of dynamic features like counters and guestbooks that relied on them being installed, and web hosts sometimes having these extension…

I was thinking this exact thing just the other day, as in, within the last week.

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

#135

Post by padjo »

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 right at the time we got border radius the design trend changed and nobody wanted round corners anymore

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

#136

Post by Gabrys1 »

> Have you ever shoved a into a tag? Pixar gets all the accolades today, but in the 90s this was a serious feat of computer animation

Wrong. Marquee only worked in IE, but blink only worked in non-IE, so by embedding one in the other you simply had an attention grabbing element that either blinked or slides.

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

#137

Post by autoexec »

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…

Frontpage was notoriously horrible. It'd make pages that usually looked the way people wanted them to, but the source was a total mess. It was full of redundant and unnecessary tags. You could spend ages cleaning up HTML written in frontpage but if you put in the work you could decrease pageload times and file sizes significantly. Personally, I avoided it at all costs and stuck to text editors. Frontpage was so terrible that it made me resist using Dreamweaver at first out of fear that it'd be just as bad.

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

#138

Post by throwaway0032 »

FriedrichN wrote: post #54

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.

I remember 2 brief glorious moments of time when everything just worked, and internet and computer speeds was ahead of web designers.

1. When I switched from modem to ADSL I was amazed how fast the web could be. I think I spent most of the first day just clicking around and watching how everything loaded instantly

Then the web designers and product managers caught up and started slowing down the web with larger ads and autoplaying (Flash) videos.

2. When I switched from ADSL to fiber, both my computer and internet was fast enough to counter the crappy parts of a web site and I experienced joy again.

Then SPA became the default web site and things started loading slowly again with placeholders and loading indicators.

Now that we are moving back to SSR I see a slow return to a more snappy web, all though web designers and product managers will surely find ways to counter this too.

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

#139

Post by lmm »

> Internet Explorer 4.0 was perfection incarnate in a browser. It had Active Desktop. It had Channels. It had motherfucking Channels, the coolest technology that never reached market adoption ever not even a little bit.

Are you sure? There's some pretty stiff competition even in IE4: VRML was incredible, as were Tclets.

Seriously web technology has mostly gone backwards since then. CSS has needed multiple revisions to reach the point where on a good day it can barely match what you could do in HTML3. is a worse . Chrome remembers and syncs my passwords if I type them into the input of a HTML form, but not if I use the actual native HTTP authentication, and forget trying to use proper public key certificates like worked perfectly in 1996...

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