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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)

#271

Post by tracker1 »

flir wrote: post #151
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…

> 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.

I worked with a PS wizard around 98 that was able to do that... Had to do a complicated rollover trail with a 15x9 grid of category images.

She was great to work with.

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

#272

Post by tracker1 »

rezonant wrote: post #162
cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I saw something about being able to directly center block elements just come down the pike.

Yeah, it turns out vertical align works differently in tables, so you can just make a one cell table and vertical center all day. I think there was a Chrome developers blog post about it recently.

Until you had a few hundred tables in a complex page and IE6 just renders a blank screen.

Don't miss those days.

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

#273

Post by pmontra »

ogogmad wrote: post #229
lofties wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Gradients look boss.

Gradients as decoration look boss today. They looked cheap 30 to at least 20 years ago. Then they were forgotten and that made their return possible. They'll become unfashionable again. It's an eternal cycle.

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

#274

Post by smoe »

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.

From vague memory, images of buttons were indeed used, but tables or other tricks were necessary to dynamically adjust container size to its contents, e.g., for internationalization.

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

#275

Post by tracker1 »

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...

LoL... I used 1px frames to post to for sending data to/from the server..

window.top.callbacks[number]("serializedData™)

In the latter 90s. Would also client render navigation frames at the time. Wicked fast compared to most web apps at the time.

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

#276

Post by logicprog »

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.

In modern CSS I'd try this: make a super element around the header and content, set the min-height of that to 100vh, and the display to flexbox, with flex-flow: column nowrap; and then align-items: center;

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

#277

Post by tracker1 »

steve1977 wrote: post #129
ReleaseCandidat wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, actually, there was only a short time, when more than one had been widely used. Something like Mosaic - Netscape - IE - Mozilla/Firefox/The Browser Now Known As Vivaldi/... - Chrome

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.

They did, even worse, there was a time when both Netscape and IE were common. But also multiple versions with incompatible rendering and features.

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

#279

Post by tracker1 »

asolove wrote: post #210

The year is 1996. Microsoft's homepage has a menu bar that expands when you move your mouse over it. I am determined to figure out how this works. 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 sour…

Similar experience wanting to replace images on mouse over. Bought "JavaScript Bible" at Barnes & Noble, read it that weekend and never stopped learning.

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

#280

Post by tracker1 »

enobrev wrote: post #242
asolove wrote: post #210

The year is 1996. Microsoft's homepage has a menu bar that expands when you move your mouse over it. I am determined to figure out how this works. 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 sour…

View source was my launchpad. Minimizers and compilers are great, but I so miss reading through the well manicured and maintained source of a well-designed site. I wish we could have gone with a type of compression that allowed us to keep the original source formatting for perusing production code, and ideally keep the expectation that others from around the world will be reading our code. I imagine it had a lot to d…

When Adobe bought Macromedia, my hope was for the flash format to largely become a Zip file with SVG, JS and other assets as a package.

MS Silverlight was close, but too late as flash died and people stopped installing browser plugins.

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