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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)

#341

Post by sysoleg »

rezonant wrote: post #182
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…

> I'm trying still... Don't worry, you got this. Web development has become a lot simpler since then, after all.

Easier, yes, but not simpler.

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

#342

Post by joefearnley »

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…

Wow, WebMonkey....that brings back memories.

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

#345

Post by hbn »

RedShift1 wrote: post #146
padjo wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And right at the time we got border radius the design trend changed and nobody wanted round corners anymore

I still want round corners! Square corners feel claustrophobic.

They're back now. Hard corners were kind of a big thing in the early 2010s, think Android Holo, Windows 8, etc.

I think Apple popularized the return of rounded corners in software with the iPhone X launch, when rounding the corners of smartphone screens became popular.

macOS rounded the window corners more, I think with Big Sur. And Microsoft followed suit in Windows 11.

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

#346

Post by burningChrome »

I remember at my first developer gig, one of our developers was so proud of the site she built for her local elementary school she was talking non-stop about it for two days.

On the third day she sent out an email with the subject line "FML" with only a few words in the body of the email. Something to the effect of, "It only took them THREE DAYS to ruin their site."

When I opened the link, the school had put a large blinking announcement in bright red letters about the upcoming Christmas break at the top of the page.

Of course, with the scrolling marquee down at the bottom before the footer indicating the dates for the upcoming Christmas vacation.

See this again reminded me of Victoria and her basking in her short lived glory.

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

#347

Post by deaddodo »

ssharp wrote: post #338
deaddodo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tables made much more intuitive sense than something like flexbox now but that came at the expense of being a nightmare to maintain. Trying to hack a table layout together often led to frequent edits and initial attempts to maintain clean layout comments ended. You're left with never ending that you hopefully at least indented to maintain sanity. But god help you if your stumbled into another person's table layout co…

I didn't say the transition was a bad one. I said that there was a decade or so of warts + growing pains as HTML and CSS grew to accommodate freeform block layouts. It wasn't until HTML5 + CSS3 that it was super usable, and until Flexbox that it became somewhat easy.

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

#348

Post by lelandbatey »

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…

I want to know what was actually causing the moving menus! I wasn't around coding at the time, so I'm going to guess that the moving menus were actually caused by a `` tag (maybe one pointing at an external JS file?). Did you ever find out the reason? Is my guess correct?

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

#350

Post by asolove »

lelandbatey wrote: post #348
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…

I want to know what was actually causing the moving menus! I wasn't around coding at the time, so I'm going to guess that the moving menus were actually caused by a ` ` tag (maybe one pointing at an external JS file?). Did you ever find out the reason? Is my guess correct?

Yeah, it was 100% a script tag. At the time, I didn't understand that you could pull in code from another URL and have it impact the current page. I thought "view source" was everything impacting the page.
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