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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)

#171

Post by rezonant »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #74
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...

If you are being framed by other websites, you deploy your 'frame-buster' script. If your page is orphaned without your own frames, then you summon your 'frame-joiner' script.

And if you mess up the domain detection, it just navigates perpetually between the two.

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

#172

Post by rezonant »

flir wrote: post #161
steve1977 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to remember Netscape and IE having had similar market shares for a while at that time (the infamous first browser war), but my memories might be distorted to be honest.

Netscape was the only game in town at one point. From memory, the three big transitions have been Mosaic > Navigator > IE > Chrome. Here's hoping for another one, just to keep them on their toes.

Just before Chrome, Firefox was quite popular, at least among the terminally online. But it wasn't enough to take the crown iirc.

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

#173

Post by zelphirkalt »

consp wrote: post #164
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…

> Tables were also used to make divs and buttons with rounded corners, but that was true into the 2000s as well. The agony of designing and splicing them in Photoshop and putting them in table cells... Wasn't an image with a click easier? I wasn't old enough to write very complicated html pages so my experience is lacking here.

But a single image does not stretch the correct way, when you have a bigger button to make. Like:

    left-top corner: no stretch
    left: stretch vertically
    top: stretch horizontally
    ...
and so on.

I still remember learning to make the layout of a whole page as a table layout in school, with images in table cells for drawing nice borders around sections of the website. And we did that with GIMP!

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

#174

Post by rezonant »

throwaway744678 wrote: post #100
thriftwy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> and went way into the 2010s. Unfortunately, it is still used for html formatted emails

This continually blows my mind. Even Gmail is this way. If they just put a flex box in there it'd be mostly fine.

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

#175

Post by loneranger_11x »

kqr wrote: post #22

Wait, I still use dotted underlines and   on my blog, and it does get praise for its design. The dotted underlines look nice, but I guess the   is just something I used to add to work around layout quirks in Internet Explorer except I never bothered figuring out in which places they're no longer needed...

I still use   to put more than one space between 2 words in text. this requirement pops up surprisingly often. Too lazy to wrap them in spans and use paddings!

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

#176

Post by dghughes »

That's a blast from the past. I remember image maps and the struggle to put one on my site. It was called DeskNexus.com sometime in the early to mid 1990s. It was so long ago that I forget when it was. My idea was to have a website as your desktop instead of your computer so you could access it anywhere.

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

#177

Post by zelphirkalt »

Sharlin wrote: post #83
thrdbndndn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Oh wait, we better make it work in IE6!

How much we were held back by backward compatibility before useful standards for things came ... But nowadays I just ignore non-standard styling. Just use the standard, because support is sufficient and browsers not supporting the standard sufficiently to make the website unusable are rare. By using the standard one also gives their developers a set target to get implemented.

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

#178

Post by neonnoodle »

spacecadet wrote: post #157
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…

oooh god please no photoshop splices. PTSD.

.ptsd files

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

#179

Post by susam »

rezonant wrote: post #167
europeanNyan wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frames are still used as underlying microfrontend technology with surprising success. Theory available at https://martinfowler.com/articles/micro-frontends.html#Run-t... and an implementation at https://luigi-project.io .

That's iframes. There is an older, even more archaic spell that lets you do iframes, but not inline. Those are, as we all know, superior.

Yes! Those were made with the now obsolete tag. An example here: https://www.quackit.com/html/html_4/tags/html_frameset_tag.c...

In fact, I used them too around 2001 or so for my website when I did not enough programming/scripting to add a common layout to all content pages. That's how I originally implemented a two column layout: a narrow frame on the left for navigation links and a wide one on the right for content. I don't do it anymore, of course. I do know how to program now and generate my HTML website using a tiny Common Lisp program that adds common headers and footers to all my web pages.

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

#180

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Ah... the one-pixel transparent GIF trick (I sometimes, still use it, for iOS stuff -but for different reasons). Brings back memories of my halcyon days...

I pine for the days, when all Web pages looked like so: https://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/

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