201–210 of 407 posts
Um excuse me? This kills the credibility of the article for me. It's "dynamic html" and as a card carrying member of the dhtmlcentral forums we are the authority on the DHTML subject and lifestyle.
If you yearn for “the good old days,” consider that we’re living through “the good old days” of AI. In 30 years a blog post like this will poke fun at prompts, chatGPT, chat-with-docs apps, dealing with hallucinations, and what else?
I still use when writing headlines, to avoid breaking apart 2 key words that should stay together. I also use the non-breaking hyphen for this, which is a different char than the regular hyphen or the em/en dash. > 1x1.gif let you push elements all around the page effortlessly. To this day it is the only way to vertically center elements If you can think of another way to vertically center, I’d like to hear it…
Flex box row inside a flex box column, justify: and align: center.
> DHTML, which stands for “distributed HTML”, Um excuse me? This kills the credibility of the article for me. It's "dynamic html" and as a card carrying member of the dhtmlcentral forums we are the authority on the DHTML subject and lifestyle.
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.
People used to jut throw tables everywhere for no reason, like a superstition or something. I remember one day a colleague was stuck because the page he was working on would take over a minute to render in Netscape but about two seconds to render in Internet Explorer. I took a look at the page and somehow he had tables nested twelve levels deep doing absolutely nothing. I deleted all but two of the tables, the layout looked the same but now both browsers rendered the page in under a second.
> 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…
> The agony of designing and splicing them in Photoshop and putting them in table cells... Wasn't there a Photoshop-adjacent tool that did the slicing for you? I remember a print designer on my first job feeding what was, essentially, a full-bleed leaflet design through it, and producing a "landing page" with hundreds of table cells.
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...
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…
At the time, IE has a "view source" button, but it's not very platform aware. You get a Notepad doc. The server is running Unix with files where lines break on "\n" and I'm on Windows, which needs "\r", so the source is one single long line of html.
I look through the source thoroughly: what is in their html that I don't know about that lets them make things move around? All the html tags are ones I know. All the content is text I can see on the page.
The only mysterious bit is these " "s. I've never seen those before and don't know what they are. They appear on sites with moving menus. They must be related.
(For six months, I believed the effect of dhtml was achieved through magic incantations of what turned out to be html entities. A bit later I found WebMonkey tutorials and this turned into a whole career.)