Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014) • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by captaincaveman » Fri, Jan 26, 2024, 11:46 AM UTC

hombre_fatal wrote: post #359

rekoil wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

oh it helps, it doesn't multiply my productivity, I wish it did!

It marginally increases my productivity and reduces some friction, honestly I'm more than happy for it to write as much code as it can on my behalf, it just can't.

I suspect those for whom it is a big game changer, were likely engaged in lots of activity which is cookie cutter.

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

#402

Post by Sharlin » Fri, Jan 26, 2024, 2:07 PM UTC

emayljames wrote: post #374

zelphirkalt wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I once (~10 years ago, wow the time flies) found and reported a bug in iOS Safari where when you enabled touch scrolling on an element inside , it would scroll vertically when you swiped horizontally and vice versa. But only when the page also contained an invisible that we happened to need because reasons (GWT stuff). Apple fixed it eventually, but I'd love to know exactly what the root cause of the bug was…

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

#403

Post by somat » Fri, Jan 26, 2024, 5:45 PM UTC

Gormo wrote: post #391

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…

Any reason you couldn't have used a client-side imagemap and avoided having to write any code for it?

The function was to tag features on a photo, it ended up being this multi state process where you set a feature then click the point on the photo. Because I am an idiot, and the tool was really only for me, rather than infect my pristine, beautiful code(it's not, it is this horrible ball of python) with 5 lines of javascript, in a task that javascript was made specifically for. I spent all day figuring out how to do it with server side image maps.

In conclusion. there is no way to send an arbitrary point using client side image maps. a task server side image maps specifically solves.

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

#404

Post by Cthulhu_ » Fri, Jan 26, 2024, 10:45 PM UTC

deaddodo wrote: post #219

Izkata wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > 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. Even back then (possibly even back in the 90s? I know this existed in the 2000s) we had "VALIGN=MIDDLE" inside table cells.

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.

Honestly it often feels like HTML and CSS evolutions were two steps forward, one step back.

Like, cool that we can now do rounded corners in CSS but why can't I vertically align in a div yet? (this was before flexbox)

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

#405

Post by exikyut » Sat, Jan 27, 2024, 1:43 AM UTC

a1369209993 wrote: post #366

pimlottc wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the problem though.

If the imagemap is serverside, how does the IA archiver know where to click?

:(

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

#406

Post by DoodahMan » Sat, Jan 27, 2024, 2:29 AM UTC

jon-wood wrote: post #245

donatj wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frames lead me to IIS SSI’s which lead me to PHP 3 which kicked off my entire career.

Likewise, I think its under appreciated just how many people got their start in this industry through tinkering with things because they seemed interesting.

i got my start with a copy of Gorillas - a QBasic game - when i was maybe 7 or 8. to play it you had to open the code and execute it. one day i got curious what all of the gibberish text meant, and that was the start of my journey: a damn game of gorillas throwing bananas! now here i am.. 30+ years later and eternally grateful for those pixelated primates. i sometimes wonder what drove me to tinker with that code that day.

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

#407

Post by hhsectech » Sat, Jan 27, 2024, 10:15 AM UTC

Man, I started building sites in the mid to late 90s as a kid, for shits and giggles, then it became trendy to hire a "whizz kid" and people paid me to build garbage...web design business was so easy back then..."Your Dad says you know how to build websites? If I give you £500 will you build me one?"...hell yeah I will, we can have a big fucking banner, some scrolling marquees..."sure kid, whatever just make it look good"...no meetings, no wireframes, no bug trackers just here is £500 build me a site kid...by the way I'm a plumber. Here is my brochure...make it look like that.

Then your work began. First stop, looking for gifs of spinning spanners, cartoon dudes with hard hats on. Then you'd get the domain and hosting, put an "under construction" page up...man good times. I wish I could just "build a website" today...but you can't...you have to have 10 people involved bike shedding the fuck out of the fonts instead of having fun...and fucking soul destroying WordPress.

All of this is nostalgic.