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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)

#193

Post by rezonant »

Franzeus wrote: post #120
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 used FrontPage to teach myself how to create websites (if you could call it that). I placed elements in the WYSIWYG editor and then looked at the code which elements etc were produced. Such an amazing time.

Nowadays you can just get half correct tutorials from W3 schools written in an extremely authoritative tone.

Or have ChatGPT give you the same quality of learning, and with the same authoritative tone.

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

#197

Post by throwaway0032 »

jakub_g wrote: post #117
throwaway0032 wrote: post #108

One thing I miss from the 90s are the built in user/password dialog that enabled me to easily remember passwords. 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 ge…

Do you mean the one which popped up from the browser UI before anything on the page has loaded? (aka "HTTP authentication") Wasn't this abysmal? You navigate to some page, and out of nowhere it asks you for login, before you even see any content of the page. (Kind of like logging via terminal)

It wasn't an optimal solution, but it also didn't change much from the first implementation.

I think that if it had been given a bit more attention and made it more customizable, it could have evolved into something good enough to replace today's login form.

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

#198

Post by moron4hire »

denton-scratch wrote: post #144

> DHTML, which stands for “distributed HTML” "Dynamic", I think; not "distributed".

It's amazing how many people get this wrong while claiming they were big into web development "in the 90s".

DHTML was the beginning of the Document Object Model API. It was about changing things on the page through JS and not anything to do with the `alert()` function as the OP claims.

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

#200

Post by rezonant »

susam wrote: post #179
rezonant wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We've come so far. Using a language from the 60s to write markup in a language from the 90s all so we can feel good by avoiding writing imperative code in another language from the 90s.

Seriously though, why can HTML not have a client side include?

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