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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)

#261

Post by lelanthran »

rezonant wrote: post #200
susam wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Thankfully you can do it now in a custom elements. I used one, I assumed everybody else would have one by now, too

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

#262

Post by madaxe_again »

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.

You could make a fantastic looking website with use of imagemaps and judicious use of hover image replacement. Glowing buttons, drop shadows, you name it.

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

#263

Post by tracker1 »

Missing mention of Flash/Shockwave.

That said I've missed all the things mentioned. And I don't miss it. Days where IE4, NN4 and a huge margins of stealing browsers existed all at once. Nobody was willing to take the literal hours to download a new browser over dialup. Hell, people rarely ran windows updates.

I still remember IE 5.0 that was on the office 2000 and Windows 2000 disks (not ME). It broke the legacy interface for manipulation of select controls. 5.0.1 fixed that, but it was too late.

I remember when IE8's JSON parsee broke with an error you can't catch if you used the prototype library or similar.

IE4, NN4 and IE5/NN5 had different, largely incompatible interface for dynamic elements. Want a form to show a field based on another field selection, client side and cross browser, omg it was a pain.

Stack diagrams and giant charts, so much fun.

People complain about the packages and how painful it is today... I'll keep what we have.

While I think HTMX does a better job for many things today, I'll still live text more than front end web development in the mood-late 90s.

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

#264

Post by madaxe_again »

_kb wrote: post #186
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 good and all, but you can pry Macromedia Dreamweaver from my cold dead hands.

The PHP code generation it did was hilarious - I remember my designer partner trying to make a dynamic form, and it ended up with 1400 lines of code where 14 would have done.

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

#266

Post by tracker1 »

pkorzeniewski wrote: post #260

I recommend The Geocities Gallery [1] to go back in time and experience the 90s web yourself, there is something beautiful about all these personal web pages. Each one has a distinct look that alone can tell a lot about the author's personality, usually contains some bio info together with several random personal pictures, lists of recommended links with short descriptions, loose talk about their hobbies and so on -…

I remember using the brick background from windows, combined with transparent GIF graffiti in the mid 90s to create a pretty cool effect.

Early efforts from the BBS art groups like ACID, ICE, FIRE etc was also very cool at the time.

Anything more advanced prior to IE5/6s dominance was relegated Flash though. I built a framework similar to React around E4X in the early 00s. ActionScript/Flash/Flex, Mozilla/Netscape supported it and VB.Net's XML literal notation was similar.

MS and Google wouldn't adopt it and then JSON became king.

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

#267

Post by IntelMiner »

trumbitta2 wrote: post #252

I used to greatly enjoy the author's content, before - you know - this: https://www.dailydot.com/business/julie-ann-horvath-names-gi...

Are you sure that's the same person?

The site seems to belong to "Zach Holman" [1]

But the blog post attributes to "Aja Romano" [2]

[1] https://zachholman.com/about

[2] https://www.dailydot.com/author/aja-romano/

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

#268

Post by tracker1 »

plagiarist wrote: post #253
davedx wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still a huge PITA and requires all sorts of subtle understandings. Even in tailwindcss it's not simple, you need to think about what kind of element is it (block or not), is it text or not, what layout is on the parent, yada yada yada.

Here's a puzzle I had from the olden days: how do you do webpages with header and footer such that the footer is always at least as far down as the window height, but if the content is less than enough to push the footer below the fold it should be centered. I remember that being far harder than it needed to be. I was a child though so maybe I just didn't get CSS well enough.

Really wasnt a great experience... You could do similar with tables, everything was tables. But you had to keep your open and close in check across the page. Templating frameworks were less flexible earlier on. Sucked when say a large corporate team did headers and footers separate from your app team.

Flexbox today is better IMO.

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

#269

Post by trumbitta2 »

IntelMiner wrote: post #267
trumbitta2 wrote: post #252

I used to greatly enjoy the author's content, before - you know - this: https://www.dailydot.com/business/julie-ann-horvath-names-gi...

Are you sure that's the same person? The site seems to belong to "Zach Holman" [1] But the blog post attributes to "Aja Romano" [2] [1] https://zachholman.com/about [2] https://www.dailydot.com/author/aja-romano/

I'll rephrase my comment:

I used to greatly enjoy Zach Holman's content, before - you know - he allegedly (?) did what this story tells us he did: https://www.dailydot.com/business/julie-ann-horvath-names-gi...

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

#270

Post by tracker1 »

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.

Depends. I'm the dialup days,. Cutting up an image and having it in a table could let you optimize each fragment as a gif with more limited pallet. So it would look better and be smaller. Especially with rollover image replacement.

I kind of wish that attention to detail for payload size was more common today.

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