I think I would include
Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)
291–300 of 407 posts
Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)
#292The server side image map. True story. I am the worlds worst web programmer, that is I am not a web programmer, I am a sys-admin that occasionally makes web based tooling. And as such my web skills are stuck in the early 2000's. On top of that I have this terrible aversion to javascript(I am already writing a code generator in one language to create a second language, now you want me to throw a third language on top…
Back in 2015 I fixed Chromium's support for server side image maps. It was almost totally broken at the time--any zoom/scale level other than 100% would throw it off, nonzero padding would throw it off, several issues like that. Nobody had noticed because image maps aren't used any more in general, and server-side image maps REALLY aren't used, but I was in the same boat as you: I wanted an easy way out without JavaScript, and I remembered my 90s HTML.
Sadly, after I fixed the Chromium bug, I decided the server-side image map sucked and I wrote the JavaScript anyway. The JavaScript version is better :(
Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)
#293Missing 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 inte…
>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.
Do you happen to remember more details about this. In particular, what method worked for the IE 5.0 that was broken?
I develop a framework that aims for universal browser support, and I'd like to account for this.
Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)
#294I 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 -…
Man, thanks for the rabbit hole. I spent a while there, both trying to find my old site (I don't recall which directory under Area51 it was in, and it may never have been archived) and just reliving it.
Memory is weird. Somehow viewing Geocities made me recall the smell of the old internet. Probably just the smell of the family room where the computer was.
Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)
#295> 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, i remember when that was all the rage. So much time spent on freaking corners...
On *rounded* corners. :)
Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)
#296The server side image map. True story. I am the worlds worst web programmer, that is I am not a web programmer, I am a sys-admin that occasionally makes web based tooling. And as such my web skills are stuck in the early 2000's. On top of that I have this terrible aversion to javascript(I am already writing a code generator in one language to create a second language, now you want me to throw a third language on top…
The worst part about server side image maps is that it completely breaks archiving. So many times I've tracked down an old website address on archive.org's Wayback Machine, only to find that the homepage is one big server side image map. Without the original server, there's no way to discover the destination URLs for the rest of the site. It's a complete dead end.
Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)
#297Honestly, in some ways, borderless tables for layout was nicer than grids and flex boxes.
Yeah, but is not responsive
I still use tables for layout, partially. In order to make it responsive, I combine multiple tables with inline-block to allow the tables to reflow on the page.
There are more "modern" ways of doing this, but I haven't found any that are also compatible with my goals of maintaining backwards compatibility.
Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)
#298DHTML stands for dynamic HTML, right? Never understood the name though, it was just JavaScript animating DOM elements. Maybe i was too young to understand the difference, but i remember using text inputs for animated contet, like a clock or a scrolling message.
Anyways, I was about 10 or 11 when visiting a "big" city i saw this book about DHTML and I had my dad buying it for me.
Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)
#299I used to serve the 1x1 gif from an asp page that at the same time would gather visitor information.
It was the tracking pixel.
Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)
#300Let'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...
A comically large proportion of “AJAX”-type use of JavaScript could just be frames and probably perform better, if frames had evolved a bit rather than remaining stagnant.
Fix that and give us HTML tables with basic features built-in and datasource-backed tables + list views back in the mid ‘00s and mind-boggling amounts of time and money could have been saved.
Instead, none of that happened, and it still hasn’t.
Don’t even get me started on how much money could have been saved if the Web had adopted payment standards so that the browser itself could handle payment input.