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Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

zachholman.com

351–360 of 407 posts

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

#352

> 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...

Only to find a browser that somehow didn't render cell spacing and padding correctly and now your corners looked like wandering tiles

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

#353
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...

Don't forget hidden frames/iframes used to move data around before AJAX.

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

#354

Don't forget that tables could be used for rounded corners. Or maybe I'm an early 00s web developer with that? The trick is that we created 3×3 tables, and aside of the middle cell, it would contain s, so that the creation was a website element with rounded edges, the pinnacle of human expressiveness. Since HTML emails were also the rage, and email clients updated much slower than browsers, this technique was used we…

I think several things in this article were more from the early 00's than the 90's.

Before using tables for rounded corners, I remember playing with a multi-chat app called Trillian (which handled yahoo chat as well as ICQ and others). It could be skinned to your liking in much the same way you were dealing with rounded corners. The top and side cells were repeating images so resizing the window would work well.

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

#357

> 88x31 I polled some coworkers, all of whom are younger than me, asking if the numbers "88x31" had any particular meaning to them. Not a single one has apparently experienced this.

I'm 47 and put many of those buttons on sites in the late 90s, and don't remember those numbers

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

#358
post #283

The 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…

Funny story, but I was at home in late 2019 and needed to interact with a device gui that didin't have any remote desktop software at work. It did have a screenshot tool and a command-line tool that would inject clicks though.

a few dozen lines of lisp later and I had a web server that served up an image map of the screen, and would respond to image-map requests by inserting a click. A nice little one-off to save me the round trip to work.

Then COVID happened and this tool got used by way too many people. For all I know someone is still using it.

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

#359
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays I just ask ChatGPT to write the CSS for me for that, and amusingly, it seems to be able to produce at least a dozen of solutions (often came with redundant rules, too: like having 5+ rules when 2 or 3 of them are enough). It's hilariously stupid.

> It's hilariously stupid. No no, it's going to take our jobs! /s

Meh, anyone who hasn’t been able to multiply their productivity with chatgpt is either is too stubborn to try it or, well, i’m not sure how you can mess this up.

From writing sql boilerplate to copy-pasting my entire pico8 game and going “add repulsion force to enemies so they don’t clump up on one tile” to using it to provide examples instead of synthesizing them from a manpage, it’s insanely good.

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

#360

That’s nothing. The real state of the art was putting a smiley GIF inside a horizontal marquee, inside a vertical marquee, and setting behavior=“alternate” on both marquees. For your pleasure, here’s how to do a marquee in pure CSS: @keyframes marquee { 0% { transform: translateX(100%); } 100% { transform: translateX(-100%); } } .marquee-container { white-space: nowrap; overflow: hidden; position: relative; animation…

Or you put the main table inside a horizontal marquee, and the column that contains your side navigation inside another horizontal marquee that scrolls at twice the speed.

Then the navigation "rows" the entire site across the screen.

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