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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)

#371

Post by WorldMaker »

logicprog wrote: post #276
plagiarist wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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;

These modern days I'd personally skip over flexbox and use CSS Grid. I find grid-template-areas such a nicer to read map than trying to decipher complex nests of flexbox and I'm finding more every day that I prefer CSS Grid even in places that don't seem to be 2D layouts yet and could just be 1D flexbox.

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

#372

Post by enobrev »

tracker1 wrote: post #280
enobrev wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right there with you. I was a huge fan of AS3 and build some great client projects with it. When using types, it very closely resemble Typescript in a lot of ways. I was hoping for open standards and eventual direct browser integration.

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

#373

Post by WorldMaker »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #332
blibble wrote: post #308

I think the most obscure thing I used was , which would generate a client key/cert pair, store the key locally in your browser certificate store and send the cert to the server with the form submission I saw exactly one website use it and remember being very confused as to how it achieved that https://web.archive.org/web/20160409081411/https://lists.wha...

I sure wish had had a good UI. We could be living in a world where two factor authentication based on PKI and personal HSMs would have been a thing. (I'm sure I'm thinking of it thru nostalgia-colored glasses...)

Passkeys are getting close. Might be any day now.

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

#374

Post by emayljames »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #177
Sharlin wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not stupid, it's just redundancy to make sure it works on all browsers!

Oh wait, we better make it work in IE6! How much we were held back by backward compatibility before useful standards for things came ... But nowadays I just ignore non-standard styling. Just use the standard, because support is sufficient and browsers not supporting the standard sufficiently to make the website unusable are rare. By using the standard one also gives their developers a set target to get implemented.

iOS Safari has so many odd bugs in layout and CSS that trips up its touch based scrolling, it is so much like the IE days where other browsers worked and the site looked good, then you load in IE (Safari now) and something is broken.

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

#375

Post by WorldMaker »

pmontra wrote: post #273
ogogmad wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Windows 98/ME and the Office versions of the same time are often blamed for making gradients seem boring and uncool. (Windows put a Gradient in every title bar and Office over-used them in all sort of other ways.) Microsoft was definitely an interesting contributor to both the fad at the time and the "gradients are boring" rejection a few years later because they seemed boring and uptight like an Office program.

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

#376

Post by emayljames »

Sharlin wrote: post #311
curtisblaine wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure of sarcastic or not, but prefixed rules (per-browser prefixes) are a thing of the past in modern evergreen browsers.

Ironic. But I was not really talking per-browser prefixes, those are newfangled 2010s stuff. I'm talking way back in the day, when different browsers (well, mostly IE) sometimes had completely different ways of achieving something, in some cases requiring ~~unthinkable hacks~~clever and elegant solutions to avoid interference.

OMG the nightmares. I still had to deal with legacy IE CSS until a few years ago. The obscure and endless vendor prefixs to fix something it was never intended for.

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

#377

Post by [deleted] »

MalcolmDwyer wrote: post #339
logicprog wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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;

But watch out for 100vh on mobile. It doesn't account for the sometimes there, sometimes not there address bar. To solve that, there's svh (small), lvh (large), and dvh (dynamic). If you want to make a div stretch to the height of the window, so that something can appear exactly at the bottom before scrolling, { height: 100vh; height: 100svh; } works best... the first line is there as a fallback for the few browsers…

[deleted]

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

#379

Post by icedchai »

trojan13 wrote: post #12

Ah, the 90s - a time when was the answer to every web layout question. Miss aligning your text? . Need a fancy menu? . Creating a full website? Nested s! Who needed CSS when you had rows and cells to hack your way through design? Good old days of -ing everything!

Sadly, I still find using table-based layouts easier to understand than most CSS today. I grew up with the 90's internet...

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

#380

Post by ssharp »

donkeybeer wrote: post #362
ssharp wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In some ways. There was at least a logical organization around a table, as long as you could wrap your head around all the markup and maintain it. Nested divs with CSS felt like you sometimes be halfway down a road that will never lead to where you want to go.
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