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Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

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

#361

Post by unregistereddev »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #13

I still use   when writing headlines, to avoid breaking apart 2 key words that should stay together. I also use the non-breaking hyphen for this, which is a different char than the regular hyphen or the em/en dash. > 1x1.gif let you push elements all around the page effortlessly. To this day it is the only way to vertically center elements If you can think of another way to vertically center, I’d like to hear it…

> avoid breaking apart 2 key words that should stay together

Yes, this is the correct usage of  . That's much saner than using it as a spacing tool.

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

#362

Post by donkeybeer »

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…

Was it any worse than nested div soups?

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

#365

Post by fidelramos »

chasd00 wrote: post #234
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, i remember when that was all the rage. So much time spent on freaking corners...

And when it finally became easy to round corners, designers moved to square corners...

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

#366

Post by a1369209993 »

pimlottc wrote: post #296
somat wrote: 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…

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.

> Without the original server, there's no way to discover the destination URLs for the rest of the site.

Try

  $ wget http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=http://example.com/*
for a list of every archived page from the site. It won't include pages archive.org doesn't have, but without the original server, there's no way to get those anyway.

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

#367

Post by graemep »

somat wrote: post #302
Magodo wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> only 5 lines of javascript in the whole infernal thing. No thanks, I won't be having any of that in my program I feel exactly the same way. HTMX is a godsend. That and a Tailwind UI purchase can make anybody very dangerous at frontend. I'm curious for other viewpoints though: what exactly about js gives that icky feeling. For me it's just the inconsistent syntax. With TS, on the other hand just seeing a node module…

Sure the language is a little iffy, but as someone who enjoys shell scripting I have used worse. I think what I don't like is managing the logic two steps removed from where it is used. I tend to write my web apps in what is referred to today as server side rendered(Which sounds stupid to me, I am not rendering anything, I am outputting html for the html terminal to render) as such, all my logic is on one end, and mi…

> I tend to write my web apps in what is referred to today as server side rendered(Which sounds stupid to me, I am not rendering anything, I am outputting html for the html terminal to render) as such, all my logic is on one end, and mixing in logic, in a different language, for the other end feels really ugly.

And you often end up with server side rendering as well (hopefully provided by your framework) to make initial page loads faster.

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

#369

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#370

Post by Sateeshm »

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.

Assuming body has header, main, and footer...

body {

display: grid;

grid-template-rows: auto 1fr auto;

min-height: 100dvh;

}

main {

display: grid;

align-content: center;

}

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