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Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

zachholman.com

211–220 of 407 posts

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

#211
post #114

Not a single use of the word 'webmaster' in the whole article. Was Zach even around in the 90s? ;-)

Still got my “Webmaster” business cards from the late 90s. No one will ever understand how “cool” it was to have that title back then. Now even I cringe when looking at them but so many good memories.

Not only was it full stack, but user/community management, strategy, perhaps sales, all rolled into one.

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

#214
post #186

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 good and all, but you can pry Macromedia Dreamweaver from my cold dead hands.

Dreamweaver 3. It was downhill from 4.

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

#215
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost certainly a joke but not obvious exactly what the joke is. What it actually stood for (in case you don't know) is "Dynamic HTML." My guess is that he's drawing a parallel with "distributed" as a modern day buzzword that's used in so many ways it's almost meaningless, but attracts attention and money almost automatically (other modern-day buzzwords like this include "blockchain," although that's fading, an…

At the time it was more about being able to load more content without having to do a whole-page fetch. This was around when XHR first debuted and devs could stop relying on hacks or Flash to do it.

DHTML was long before XHR; the term was more or less already out of fashion by the time XHR came along.

DHTML was used for situations like when you had hierarchical selects where the contents of the second select depended upon what you picked for the first select. All the code and data was delivered up front with the page load; you didn’t go back to the server for it with XHR.

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

#216

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!

It was all TDD back then. TD-Driven design.

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

#217

> 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…

> > 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.

Even back then (possibly even back in the 90s? I know this existed in the 2000s) we had "VALIGN=MIDDLE" inside table cells.

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

#218
post #186

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 good and all, but you can pry Macromedia Dreamweaver from my cold dead hands.

Dreamweaver was glorious and the tool that introduced me to html.

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

#219
post #217

> 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…

> > 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. Even back then (possibly even back in the 90s? I know this existed in the 2000s) we had "VALIGN=MIDDLE" inside table cells.

Right, people seem to forget that table-based designs ruled the roost in the 90s and early 00s.

All of the vertical align, layering, etc hacks came from people not wanting to use tables anymore and divs (and other block elements) finally becoming more usable. Those hacks were the growing pains of an entire shift in paradigm.

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

#220
post #47
post #2

On the other side we were told that those colorful gradients that will be the fad of the 20s are cheap and we were scolded by professional designers for using them. Not that we had CSS gradients, we were using gifs or jpegs.

I don't understand. I'm interested what this means.

We’d generate a 18x1 GIF with a gradient color change (or from a solid color to a transparent color) and stretched that out over however pixels we wanted to create a gradient-like effect. e.g

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